Tourism in Perspective - Tourism: Principles, Practices, Philosophies - page 16

people who are engaged in buying and selling it, how it is financed, how it is advertised, and so on.
Repeating this procedure for rental cars, hotel rooms, meals, and other tourist services gives a full
picture of the field. Unfortunately, the product approach tends to be too time-consuming; it does
not allow the student to grasp the fundamentals of tourism quickly. However, it is an excellent
source of examples.

Historical Approach

The historical approach is not widely used. It involves an analysis of tourism activities and institutions
from an evolutionary angle. It searches for the cause of innovations, their growth or decline, and shifts
in interest. Even though tourism has been practiced for centuries, real growth did not start until after
World War II. In the 1960s and 1970s, places such as Mallorca and Southern Spain were destinations
that realized a massive in ux of tourists arriving on package tours. Thus, mass tourism was born,
creating the need to study the effects that large numbers of people have on a destination. Because
mass tourism is a fairly recent phenomenon, this approach has limited usefulness.

Managerial Approach

The managerial approach is firm-oriented (microeconomic), focusing on the management activities
necessary to operate a tourist enterprise, such as planning, research, pricing, marketing, control, and
the like. It is a popular approach, using insights gleaned from other approaches and disciplines.
Although a major focus of this topic is managerial, readers will recognize that other perspectives are
also being used. Regardless of which approach is used to study tourism, it is important to know the
managerial approach. Products change, institutions change, and society changes; this means that
managerial objectives and procedures must be geared to change to meet shifts in the tourism
environment. The Journal of Travel Research and Tourism Management, leading journals in the field,
both feature this approach.

Economic Approach

Because of its importance to both domestic and world economies, tourism has been examined closely
by economists, who focus on supply, demand, balance of payments, foreign exchange, employment,
expenditures, development, multipliers, and other economic factors. This approach is useful

in

providing a framework for analyzing tourism and its contributions to a country s economy. The

disadvantage of the economic approach is that, whereas tourism is an important economic
phenomenon, it has noneconomic impacts as well. The economic approach does not usually pay
adequate attention to the environmental, cultural, psychological, sociological, and anthropological
approaches. Tourism Economics is a journal utilizing the economic approach.

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Sociological Approach

Tourism tends to be a social activity. Consequently, it has attracted the attention of sociologists, who
have studied the tourism behavior of individuals and groups of people and the impact of tourism on
society. This approach examines social classes, habits, and customs of both hosts and guests. The
sociology of leisure is a relatively undeveloped field, but it shows promise of progressing rapidly and
becoming more widely used. As tourism continues to make a massive impact on society, it will be
studied more and more from a sociological perspective.