Special Forms of Tourism
For the past few decades other forms of tourism, also known as niche tourism, have been becoming more popular, particularly:
• Adventure tourism: tourism involving travel in rugged regions, or adventurous sports such as mountaineering and hiking (tramping).
• Agritourism: farm based tourism, helping to support the local agricultural economy.
• Ancestry tourism: (also known as genealogy tourism) is the travel with the aim of tracing one's ancestry, visiting the birth places of these ancestors and sometimes getting to know distant family.
• Armchair tourism and virtual tourism: not traveling physically, but exploring the world through internet, books, TV, etc.
• Audio tourism: includes audio walking tours and other audio guided forms of tourism including museum audio guides and audio travel books.
• Backpacker Tourism is a term used to denote a form of low-cost independent international travel, differentiating it from other forms of tourism notably by the following typical attributes: minimal budget use, longer duration traveling, use of public transport and multiple destinations/countries. The origin of the name comes from the backpacks that budget travelers generally carry in the interests of mobility and flexibility.
• Bookstore Tourism is a grassroots effort to support independent bookstores by promoting them as a travel destination.
• Creative Tourism is a new form of tourism that allows visitors to develop their creative potential, and get closer to local people, through informal participation in hands-on workshops that draw on the culture of their holiday destinations.
• Cultural tourism: includes urban tourism, visiting historical or interesting cities, and experiencing their cultural heritages. This type of tourism may also include specialized cultural experiences, such as art museum tourism where the tourist visits many art museums during the tour, or opera tourism where the tourist sees many operas or concerts during the tour.
• Coastal Tourism involves tourist products located along Coastal Environments - due to the limited extent of coastal environments they often are amongst the first places to experience tourist congestion for a region.
• Dark tourism: is the travel to sites associated with death and suffering. The first tourist agency to specialise in this kind of tourism started with trips to Lakehurst, New Jersey, the scene of the Hindenburg airship disaster.
• Disaster tourism: traveling to a disaster scene not primarily for helping, but because it is interesting to see. It can be a problem if it hinders rescue, relief and repair work.
• Drug tourism: travel to a country to obtain or consume drugs, either legally or illegally.
Beard, C., Swarbrooke, J., Leckie, S., & Pomfret, G. (2003). Adventure Tourism: The New Frontier. Routledge.
Tourism impacts can be generally classified into seven categories with each having both positive and negative impacts. These impacts include; economic, environmental, social and cultural, crowding and congestion, taxes, and community attitude. It is essential for a balance on array of impacts that may either positively or negatively affect the resident communities. Different groups are concerned about different tourism impacts that affect them in one way or another. Tourism’s benefits can be increased by use of specific plans and actions. These can also lead to decrease in the gravity of negative impacts. Communities will not experience every impact but instead this will depend on particular natural resources, development, or spatial patterns (Glen 1999).
One in ten (10%) plans to increase their budget for vacations next year. In addition, adventure travel, such as hiking, kayaking, zip-lining or skiing, is one of the fastest growing forms of travel worldwide and particularly important with emerging outbound markets. “Customers want to do something different and have more unique experiences when they travel. They want up-close and personal experiences, whether that is through food, culture, activities, or all of the above,” said Lesley Egbert, owner of Live Longitude, LLC, an independent agency in the Avoya Travel Network, in Helena,
Tarlow, P. 2005. Dark Tourism: The appealing dark side of tourism and more. In M. Novelli (ed.)Niche tourism: contemporary issues, trends, and cases. Elsevier: Oxford, 47-57.
The terms “cultural tourism” is widely used, but also misunderstood. In addition, the definition of cultural tourism remains vague (Aluza, O’Leary, and Morrison, 1998). Academics, practitioners, and policy-makers have been quick to identify cultural tourism as a significant and growing market, but have been hesitant or unable to describe and define the market.
Climate is particularly important in attracting visitors, it is often considered as a constraint to tourist development.
Travel Today will express through brochures, pictures and promotional material through the media the quality of the vacation packages offered. The clientele being targeted are individuals looking for an exceptional and exciting one-of-a-kind vacation experience one filled with luxuries and top notch service. Travel Today listens to the traveler in order to custom tailor your travel requirements to fit your needs.
Adventure Tourism is a part of the tourism industry. It is a kind of leisure activity for a specific group of customers with clarified expectations.
While some forms of tourism follow anthropologic strategies, others focus more on business and leisure. Ethnic and historical tourism are the branches that relate mostly to anthropology. They focus more on the integration of culture and learning more about the society and history. They are much more strict in regards to boundaries and rules as opposed to recreational and cultural tourism. Cultural and recreational tourism differ the most from anthropology, dismissing important rules and can offend the host country’s residents. While many forms of tourism dismiss important rules of anthropology, they both focus on the integration of one society into
There is not really a universally accepted definition of tourism. In 1994 the World Tourism Organization (WTO) revised its definition. It says the tourism comprises of 'the activities of persons travelli...
Joanne Connell & Denny Meyer. (2001). Balamory revisited: An evaluation of the screen tourism destination-tourist nexus. Melbourne, Australia.
Japan is a country with countless attraction and points of interest, whether its heritage, food, popular culture or dark tourism, Japan as a tourism destination can offer many things. Because of the saturation of culture there are many types of tourism which apply (Berger 2010). Cultural tourism, adventure, ecotourism, food and family tourism and even sex tourism to name a few and with the increasing relevance of Otaku1 culture in the western world, Japans popularity as a holiday destination has increased drastically. The popularity of Japanese tourism can largely be attributed to the growing cultural interest displayed by the visitors which means that cultural exploration is one of the more significant reasons of visitation.
The area within a destination where tourism activity occurs – how concentrated is it? Are the tourism activities/sites dispersed? Consider the locations with the greatest opportunities and needs.
In the more economically developed countries (MEDCs), synonymous mainly with the industrialised countries of the northern hemisphere there, has been an explosion in the growth of leisure and tourism industry, which is now believed to be the worlds second largest industry in terms of money generated. In order to differentiate between leisure and tourism it should be recognised that leisure often involves activities enjoyed during an individual’s free time, whereas tourism commonly refers to organised touring undertaken on a commercial basis. Development in the two areas could be attributed to changing patterns in working lives within the last four decades. Generally, people now have more disposable wealth, work shorter hours, receive longer, paid annual leave, retire earlier and have greater personal mobility. In addition, according to Marshall & Wood (1995), the growth of the tourist industry per se can be associated, in part, with the concentration of capital; the emergence of diversified leisure based companies, sometimes within wider corporate conglomerates and often associated with particular airlines. Furthermore, the development of tourism can generate employment both directly, in jobs created in the hotels, restaurants etc, and indirectly, through expenditure on goods and services in the local area. Nevertheless, although the tourist industry is competitive, which essentially keeps down the cost of foreign travel, the success of tourism in any one area can be ‘influenced by weather, changing consumer tastes, demographics, economic cycles, government policy, not to mention international terrorism and other forms of conflict.’(1) Although such factors may have a detrimental affect on the economy of a popular tourist destination (or even tourism in general, in light of September 11th 2001), the consequence of tourism in general is often three fold: environmental, social and cultural, which in turn has prompted a search for new ‘friendly’ approaches that are less destructive.
Generally, infrastructure is divided into two main parts which involves hard and soft infrastructures. According to UNWTO (United Nations World Trade Organisation), (2011), the enlargement of tourist arrivals, went up by approximately 7% in 2010 to 940 million, has led to increase in the number of new and state-of-the-art hotels, restaurants, airports and other tourist apartments. The rising share of amenities illustrates the improvement of hard infrastructure caused by more tourist number. Other contributions of the industry to the former accessibility of electricity and water, better road systems and transport services are also involved in the related expansion of economic activity (cited in Boz, 2011). Besides that, tourism offers numerous positive impacts to the latter, according to OECD, (2014) “soft infrastructure” can be defined as the creation of events and spaces which shows the spirit and unity of that country’s culture. These forms of infrastructure programmes have been applying to both urban and rural areas in order to make the place more well-known and tourists attractive. For example, in Australia, 2007 several events including the Booktown Festival were held to develop marketing strategies and increase tourist numbers. The results were more satisfactory than expected with place-branding advantages, noticeable rural regeneration, growing tourist numbers and