Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
predominantly by geographers. This study also documents the dominance of geographical
subject matter in journals indexed by databases such as CABI's Leisure, Recreation and
Tourism Abstracts as well as the database Geography illustrating continuity in the subject's
interest since reviews by Pearce (1979) and more substantive volumes of research outputs that
emerged in the 1980s and 1990s with the development of a number of infl uential texts
by geographers (i.e. Hall and Page, 1999; Mathieson and Wall, 1982; Pearce, 1981, 1987;
Shaw and Williams, 1994) to serve the growing demand for undergraduate education
predominantly within programmes based in geography departments and, to a lesser extent, in
environmental studies and resource management. In educational terms, the subject would
also still appear to be buoyant and still in an expansionist mode, though clearly not of the
same scale as the 1980s, when much of the initial growth occurred globally. Furthermore, as
detailed below, geographers have made a substantial contribution to the fi eld of tourism
overall.
As of 2009, the geography of tourism was taught as a course in over 50 geography depart-
ments in North America while in Europe a number of departments of geography have
expanded to include tourism as an offering, with some even changing names to represent this
shift, e.g. University of Iceland. Indeed many institutions even offer joint degrees where
tourism and geography co-exist side by side. This has particularly been the case in the transi-
tion economies of Eastern Europe, where tourism has been regarded as a way of increasing
the relevance of geographical department offerings. Several geography associations also have
specialist groups with tourism as a focus, often in conjunction with leisure and recreation.
The latter area has been historically important in terms of the development of tourism geog-
raphy (Butler, 2004) but, as a result of increasing mobility in society which has blurred the
distinction between recreation and tourism, is increasingly used virtually interchangeably
with tourism, especially day-tripping (Hall, 2005b). Academic societies with specialty groups
include the Association of American Geographers, the Canadian Association of Geographers
and the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, while strong specialist
groups also exist in French, Spanish and German-speaking geography (see Wilson and Anton
Clavé, forthcoming). At the international level a tourism-oriented group has existed in
various forms since 1972 in the International Geographical Union (IGU), the global associa-
tion of national geography associations. From 1994 to 2000 it was known as the Study Group
of the Geography of Sustainable Tourism, while from 2000 to 2008 it was a Commission for
the Study of Tourism, Leisure and Global Change - name changes that themselves refl ect the
shifting focus of the geographical imagination. The Commission was particularly successful
in attracting participants at conferences and meetings and had some of the largest paper
programmes at the IGU meetings in Durban (2002), Glasgow (2004) and Brisbane (2006).
A specifi c journal,
Tourism Geographies
, edited by Alan Lew and published by Taylor and
Francis, is also available while the publication of a number of tourism geography texts in
multiple editions also indicates ongoing demand for geographically oriented teaching mate-
rial (e.g. Lew
et al.
, 2004; Pigram and Jenkins, 1999; Shaw and Williams, 2002, 2004),
although a number of these are more regionally oriented works that may be used for courses
on travel geography (e.g. Boniface and Cooper, 2005; Davidoff
et al.
, 2002; Hudman and
Jackson, 2003; Lew
et al.
, 2008). Nevertheless, tourism geography usually only gets passing
acknowledgement in some of the disciplinary surveys of geography (e.g. Johnston and
Sidaway, 2004), including reviews in geography journals (Gibson, 2008).
With the institutional grounding of tourism geography it could be assumed that the fi eld
has a fi rm foundation. However, one of the growing trends for geographers with doctorates
in tourism, at least in Anglo-American geography, is for them to migrate to teach and research
