ABSTRACT
All events happen somewhere at some time. Therefore, all tourism-related events can have space and time coordinates attached to them (Dietvorst, 1995). In observational social and environmental science, including geography, noting the place and time of individual events and creating a database of observations is integral to research. Such information allows the study of processes in different types of locations, which may provide insights into the interrelationships between structure and process (Goodchild and Janelle, 2004). Spatial data can also be linked to other data sets, thereby potentially increasing explanatory power (Haining, 2003; Goodchild, 2010). As Kim et al. (2005: 273) concluded with respect to their study of amenity-driven economic growth and development, ‘ “place in space” matters’. Nevertheless, different traditions in tourism studies have different understandings of space and how it should be studied. For example, even though Nepal (2009: 138) concludes that a spatial approach is one of the hallmarks of contemporary tourism geography research, he also notes that the full potential of spatial technologies ’in examining form and processes of touristic development, travel fl ows and tourist movement, and tourism impacts, has not been realised yet.’ It is also perhaps signifi cant that while the Blackwell Companion to Tourism (Lew et al. , 2004), which was edited by geographers, included several review chapters with a signifi cant spatial analysis component (Farsari and Prastacos, 2004; McKercher and Lew, 2004), the equivalent Sage Handbook of Tourism Studies ( Jamal and Robinson, 2008) provides no such element, even though the Handbook offers ‘a record of the fi eld’s theoretical and methodological evolutions, emerging cultural critiques, sustainability challenges being addressed, types of tourism that illustrate new theoretical insights and ethical criticisms, and hence a window into the future possibilities awaiting tourism studies’ ( Jamal and Robinson, 2008: 16). A review of the contribution of spatial analysis to tourism therefore potentially offers not only insights into divergences in philosophical, theoretical and methodological emphasis in tourism research but also future possibilities.
