ABSTRACT
Tourism is an industry with substantial geographic content. Its very nature involves travel and a sense of place. Tourists leave ‘here’ and visit ‘there’. That may sound trivial, but the ability to describe precisely the difference between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is not trivial and often not easy. This task of defining places is a prerequisite for much data collection, planning and marketing effort in tourism. We examine in this chapter some tools used for describing the geographic structure of tourism. These tools are generically labelled as regionalization methods because a common product of their application is the definition of tourism regions. We will begin our review by defining regionalization more fully We then turn to some of the basic uses of regionalization, different types of regions, regionalization logic, basic principles of regionalization, and some applications of regionalization in tourism. Finally, we examine five methods in detail.
