Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It is also important to note that geography does not have a monopoly on research in these
areas (Lew and Duval, 2008). Geographers, however, have at least been socialised to be theo-
retically sensitive to the relationship between people, places and spaces. The geographic
approach, whether from a pure research or applied research perspective and whether or not
conducted by a trained geographer, has contributed much to our understanding of the
marketing of tourism destinations.
New technologies, including GIS, GPS and the internet provide the cutting edge of
marketing research and are some of the strengths of the geographic perspective. Researchers
have never before had such direct access to the movement and experiences of individual
tourists. Assessing the large datasets that can result from these types of geographic analysis is
challenging, which has resulted in their somewhat limited application to date (Lew and
McKercher, 2006). However, this will change and geographers, based on their disciplinary
training, have an important role to play in applying space and place data to successful tourism
marketing and development applications.
