Tourism: A Vehicle for Development? - Tourism and Development: Concepts and Issues - page 16

Table 1.4 Technical defi nitions of tourists

To be included in tourism statistics Not to be included in tourism

statistics

Category Purpose Category

Tourists: Holidays Border workers

non-residents Business Transit passengers

nationals resident Health Nomads

abroad Study Refugees

crew members Meetings/missions Members of armed forces

Visiting friends and relatives Diplomats

Excursionists: Religion Temporary immigrants

cruise passengers Sport Permanent immigrants

day visitors Others

crews

Source: Adapted from WTO (1994).

undertaken by 'a person at leisure who also travels' (Nash, 1981: 462). Smith
develops this theme with a more explicit reference to motivation, a tourist
being a 'temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place for the
purpose of experiencing a change' (Smith, 1989: 1). Similarly, Graburn (1983:
11) emphasises tourism's functional role inasmuch as it 'involves for the par-
ticipants a separation from normal “instrumental” life and the business of
making a living, and offers an entry into another kind of moral state in which
mental, expressive, and cultural needs come to the fore'.
These technical and conceptual categories of tourism definitions evi-
dently represent two extremes of a 'definition continuum' (Buck, 1978)
which are constrained by their disciplinary focus. Ideally, therefore, a bal-
anced, holistic definition that embraces both the factual and theoretical per-
spectives of tourism is desirable (Gilbert, 1990). Jafari (1977) goes some way
to achieving this by epistemologically defining tourism as:

The study of man [sic] away from his usual habitat, of the industry which
responds to his needs, and of the impacts that both he and the industry
have on the host's socio-cultural, economic and physical environments.

However, it is important to recognise here that these more traditional
approaches to defining tourism explicitly consider it as a separate, identifiable
sphere of social and economic activity. In other words, many definitions, par-
ticularly from a conceptual perspective, reflect the somewhat outdated notion
that tourism is an activity both temporarily and spatially separated from
normal, day-to-day life, and that it is motivated primarily by the desire to