Travel Reference
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that it will prove as easy to change people's tourism habits. The last great change came in a
positive way in the 1960s with the introduction of jet aircraft and package holidays and since
then we have seen essentially only variations on the same theme. To shift tourism to green
tourism or sustainable tourism, however noble and globally benefi cial this might be, is extremely
unlikely to be achieved without forced coercion and clearly this is not an option.
Tourism is an important subject which impinges on all aspects of our lives and the planet, and
the fact that it involves enjoyment and pleasure for the participants is hardly a reason to ignore it
or deny it academic worth as a subject for research. Our Calvinistic slip is showing when we
prohibit or denigrate the study of something because it involves pleasure, fun or enjoyment, and
critics of tourism research per se should be ashamed for this anti-intellectual stance.
Tourism geography
So, we have two subjects which are both vitally important and yet both of which are rarely
treated with the respect they deserve by academic colleagues and institutions or the public at
large. So if we are tourism geographers, do we have a death wish, or inbred paranoia, or are
we just a bit dumb? Is it our fault?! Why are we not able to make the case for a marriage of
what should be an ideal pairing of subjects? I can think of no subject as appropriate as geog-
raphy from which to study tourism. At the heart of tourism is the relocation of people (on a
temporary basis), which is perhaps the one element of tourism that all people studying it can
agree on (the fact that we all tend to agree that we can't defi ne tourism also says something,
although I am not sure what, but probably the same thing as is implied by the fact that
geography is similarly not defi ned with any great consensus).
Tourism is about economic development, it is about social interaction - although probably
more between tourists than between supposed 'hosts' and 'guests' - it has cultural, economic and
environmental implications, as well as political ones, gender ones and all sorts of other results,
but the key thing is that all of these issues arise because people move from one place to another.
Thus it is about the places from which they come and even more the places to which they go,
their relative locations and the spaces they temporarily consume and change, and as geographers
I would argue it is essential that we focus on these aspects beyond all others. The more we
behave like economists or sociologists, the less respect we will get and the less we deserve.
There is more than enough spatially focused research to be done without us feeling the
need to look elsewhere and the more we do research the spatial components of tourism, the
more likely it is that other tourism researchers will eventually agree that there is something in
what we do that is of value. This is not really what they think to any great degree at present,
although Hall and Page (1999) make a valid point in their excellent book on
The Geography of
Tourism and Recreation
as noted by Lew (2001: 113) when he writes: 'Hall and Page note in the
introduction to their book that many tourism researchers draw upon geographical contribu-
tions to tourism literature without recognising their origins'. He goes on to comment
'conversely, the geography discipline overall has largely failed to recognise the major contribu-
tions that its offspring are making to the rapidly growing fi eld of tourism research'. Tourism
study is multi-faceted like geography, and just as cultural geographers pay scant attention to
the work of geomorphologists, so many tourism anthropologists, for example, pay little or no
regard to geographical research in tourism. Indeed, it has been a well-established practice in
the refereeing of articles submitted to the
Annals of Tourism Research
that articles written by
researchers in one discipline should be refereed by others in that discipline and not by tourism
researchers in general. One can see some reasoning behind this, but it hardly assists in the
promotion of tourism as one subject and accounts for the fact that some unusual articles have
