Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
are chosen, and in the time taken visiting each place, and even in the route taken
between places. However, in the end there is cast iron constraint in that the sum of
the travel time plus the sum of the visits en route has to equate to the time lapse
between starting the day and ending it. Equally, the travel time between places can
not be less than the fastest possible travel available. Different people may drive at
different speeds, but there is a practical maximum.
The concept of space-time within time-geography allows us to conceptualize
and measure the limited locational and temporal flexibility of a particular activity,
and to quantify a person's freedom in choosing where and when to perform the
further activities. The individual tourist cannot be in more than one place at the
same time, and the tourist movement must be continuous, so eventually there must
be a unique and continuous travel path between any two sequential stops but other
zones in which movement could have taken place.
Figure
2
also helps illustrate that space and time are two critical resources for
tourists which they normally treat carefully to optimise their opportunities during
the journey. Cooper (
1981
) studied and concluded that tourists' drives, goals and
motivations differ from other searchers (e.g. retail consumers) especially in the
way that tourists have a very limited time to complete their explorations. As an
ephemeral and dynamic resource the value of time quickly enters the conscious-
ness of the tourist as a motivating factor in planning the best possible experience.
Time acts as an independent variable against which tourists can measure their
progress in terms of sites visited and enjoyment derived (Ullman
1974
). Lacking
the structure of everyday life, and given priority by the scale of financial invest-
ment involved, the tourists themselves have to structure the time by their own
ongoing decision and actions.
The availability of time during periods of holiday movement influences how
deeply tourists explore specific destinations as well as the number of places visited
and frequency of visitation. Truong and Henscher (
1985
) remarked that time is one
of the few absolutes tourists must face, for it cannot be stored for use at a future
date. Those who have much time available behave differently from those whose
time is limited. Constantly time is present as a factor that argues for speedy
transport and stops of limited duration, but a factor is always conditioned by the
interest and the value of the landscape traversed and the stop that is visited.
Figure
2
provides a demonstration of a possible day in a FIT's life. Examining
it we can hypothesise what happened and why, and with the records of many
tourists we could assess the impacts of tourism. There is a gap between the pure
example of a tourist timeline in that figure, and the information revealed by the
WCTFS about the real movement of individuals in the summers of 1999-2001.
The diagram provides pure timelines, the survey provides a series of points and
slightly incomplete records.
The next section describes the way in which the WCTFS data was transformed
from a series of isolated points into timelines that could be visualized and analyzed
in terms of error and uncertainty.
