ABSTRACT
As an industry, tourism is highly service driven. Tourism provides products and services for people participating in activities in places other than their residence. According to Leiper (1979), the tourism industry consists of all those firms, organizations and facilities that are intended to serve the specific needs and wants of tourism. A more explicit way of describing tourism is to consider it as ‘… representing the sum of those industrial and commercial activities producing goods and services wholly or mainly consumed by foreign visitors or by domestic tourists’ (Ritchie and Goeldner, 1994, p. 72). However, tourism has unique characteristics that differentiate it from other industries. Unlike other industries, which have their own distinct products or services, tourism usually contains multiple products or services, and these often involve the co-operation of several suppliers. For example, a vacation package may include services provided by travel agents, airlines, hotels, restaurants and other related services. Although each of these individual businesses contributes to developing the tourism product – namely, a vacation – an individual business could not provide the product on its own. As Seaton and Bennett (1996, p. 4) noted: ‘Tourism is not a homogeneous market like that, say, for breakfast cereals, cars or cat food. It is a heterogeneous sector which consists of several product fields, albeit ones which have a degree of linkage’.
