ABSTRACT
As Crick (1989) argues, ‘human beings’, the tourists themselves, are only infrequently the object of consideration in much tourism research, and yet it is upon tourists that the industry is founded. In part this has resulted from academic prejudices of analysing production rather than consumption (Lash and Urry 1994) and the tendency to focus upon the impacts (economic, environmental, cultural) of tourism where tourists are at best a homogeneous and undifferentiated group and at worst are deemed immaterial.
