Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
20
Fragmenting tourism
Niche tourists
Michael O'Regan
Introduction
Tourism, a global socio-economic phenomenon, is freely used as a broad generic term that
covers a broad continuum of tourism and other travel related mobilities, comprising tourist
and visitor activities and experiences serviced by a travel and tourism industry as well as host
destinations. While always acknowledged as a fragmented industry, increased global tourist
arrivals and international tourism expenditure has seen many large commercial and public
sector organizations address Western-centric societies through mass undifferentiated marketing;
targeting entire marketplaces such as specifi c countries or regions with 'one size fi ts all' holidays.
Broad-brush marketing often announced the existence of a destination or a packaged tourism
product and how they are to be performed, often presenting potential tourists with certain
kinds of limited knowledge about tourism spaces, peoples and pasts; a process that often did
not distribute the benefi ts of tourism to a large cross section of those societies. Such market-
ing approaches can create a cluttered, untargeted environment in which tourists become part
of indiscernible 'mass markets', which may overlook other 'niche markets' and ensure that
many legitimate businesses fail to meet customer needs in the provision of tourist products
and services. While other industries have seen a paradigm shift from 'mass markets' to 'mass
niches', refl ecting fragmenting industries and niche consumption, this chapter investigates if a
paradigm shift or nudge has occurred within tourism. By focusing on changing supply and
demand issues, this chapter asks whether tourism marketing has adapted to more demanding
specifi c interests, when such interests coalesce into coherent niche tourism markets determined
to be treated as 'special'.
Rigid forms of mass tourism development 'complemented' (Marson 2011) the rigid novelty
and climatic motivational properties of the early 'old tourist' (Poon 1989), 'mass tourism'
marketing primarily seeking to develop and cultivate high volume, low value and mass market
consumptive opportunities. Often, such opportunities are still marketed as normal practice, a
purchase signalling acceptance into membership of society, conformity to social convention and
rising social mobility. The global tourism-industrial complex, made up of an alliance of large
private-public businesses and institutions have, particularly in periods of economic growth,
offered limited choices for means to achieve social, political and economic inclusion based
