Tourism Systems, Destinations, Products and Resources: An introduction

Tourism Systems, Destinations, Products and Resources: An introduction

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Defining Tourism & Tourist

• Core concepts:• the voluntary movement of people; • a sector of the economy or an industry; and

• a broad system of interacting relationships of people (including their need to travel outside their communities/home environment) [consumption] and services that attempt to respond to these needs by supplying products [production] and their associated effects

Scales of analysis of tourism

(Table 3.1 in Cooper & Hall 2013)

Thinking systematically

Generating / source region

Destination

Environment

Travel to destination

Travel from destination

Main elements of tourism production at different points of the tourism system

(Table 1.1, Cooper & Hall 2013)

Key elements of consumer psychology at different points of the tourism system

(Figures, 1.1, 1.4, Cooper & Hall 2013)

Multilayered product nature• The trip product This is the overall trip that a

tourism consumer experiences including all firms, organizations, and service moments from the initial decision to purchase to the return home.

• The destination product This is the sum of all experiences the tourist has at the destination as a result of encounters with firms, people, communities and the destination environment.

• The tourism business product This is the set of experiences provided by an individual firm or agency over different stages of the trip.

• The service product These are the various sets of formal and informal service and other encounters that the consumer experiences through their trip and at the destination.

Trip product

DESTINATION

Can be understood in both an experiential and a more formal sense• Experiential sense in what the tourist sees as the ‘product’ can be significant for satisfaction• Formal sense includes package tours and horizontal and vertical integration of tourism production.• Tourism value chain

The Tourism Value Chain

Destination ProductThe Destination• What most people think of when they think of tourism!• The destination is the amalgam of a) from a marketing perspective all the

products and attributes that are packaged and promoted to visitors within an identified destination brand;

b) from an experiential perspective all business, service encounters and experiences that a tourist has within a destination. (Note these are different things with consequent implications for satisfaction and individual firms)

Tourism Business Product• All encounters with a business over time

[time constitutes an interesting element here]

• Whether at destination or not.• However, the various elements of the business may operate relatively independently of each other. From a consumer perspective it may be possible to distinguish between the destination and non-destination elements. These in turn may be broken up into service products – But many service products are not under the control of firms or destination management and marketing bodies.

The Destination Concept• Highly complex – operating at different scales

• Metelka (1990: 46) defined a destination as the ‘geographic location to which a person is traveling’

• Vukonic (1997) equated the term to that of a ‘resort’

• (1994: 107) saw a destination as being a ‘travel market area’ and referred to destination zones that are geographic areas ‘containing a critical mass of development that satisfies traveller objectives’ (Gunn 1994: 27).

Problematic?• Destination is by nature a problematic concept. It refers to a varying range of spatial scales (i.e. levels of representation) in tourism: continents, states, provinces, municipalities and other administrative units, tourist resorts or even single tourist products. Spatial scales and definitions of destinations based on administrative or other such units … tend to approach tourism as a spatial and geographical phenomenon from a technical and static viewpoint (Saarinen 2004: 164).

Destinations are therefore…

• described at different scales ranging from the country level to regions, towns or resorts, specific sites and even specific attractions that are visited by tourists.

• A destination is a spatial or geographical concept that is primarily defined by visitors from outside the location, although many places seek to make themselves destinations for visitors in order to be able to benefit economically from tourism.

• A destination, by definition, comes to exist by virtue of the people that visit it. If people from outside a location do not visit a place it is not a destination.

From Places to Destinations

• Three principle meanings of the idea of place can be distinguished:– Location– Locale– Sense of Place

Place as Location• In locational terms, a place is a specific point on the earth’s surface.

• You are here!

• Shows relationality

Place as Locale• Place as a physical setting for people’s daily social relations, actions and interactions.

• The physical aspects of places are important in terms of the capacity to manage visitors as well as providing resources and attractions for tourists.

• Place in this sense not only refers to urban settings, such as ethnic neighbourhoods and arts and heritage precincts, but also to various kinds of ‘scapes’ (views), including landscapes, servicescapes, streetscapes and experiencescapes

Elements of place as locale

Scapes• Landscapes are a visual idea and refer to how a portion of the earth’s surface is socially constructed and perceived.

• in most ideas of landscape it is something the viewer is outside of whereas place tends to be something that one is inside of.

• Important for image and experiences

Landscapes

Servicescapes• Refers to the physical facility in which a service is delivered and in which the service provider (firm or other organization) and the customer interact, and to any material or tangible commodities that facilitate the service (Bitner 1992).

• The idea of servicescapes was originally primarily applied to the immediate physical environment provided by firms in which they sought to use design principles to reinforce brand as well as provide positive service encounters.

Extension of servicescape concept• to include the external built environment, concepts of

place experience, and the social environment created in spaces of consumption - the social-servicescape (Tombs and McColl-Kennedy 2003).

• The concept of the brandscape, the ‘material and symbolic environment that consumers build with marketplace products, images, and messages, that they invest with local meaning, and whose totemic significance largely shapes the adaptation consumers make to the modern world’ (Sherry 1998: 112).

• Brandscapes are utilized by transnational leisure and hospitality companies such as Disney, Starbuck, Hyatt and Marriot to provide a symbolic retail space that is familiar and comfortable for consumers no matter where they are in the world, and which also enables them to physically inhabit and experience brandspace (Thompson & Arsel 2004). Thereby, experiencing what Guliz and Belk (1996) refer to as a consumptionscape.

Social-servicescape

Experiencescapes• landscapes of deliberately produced experience. • They are physical spaces of market production and consumption in which experiences are staged and consumed and are, in effect, in effect, stylized landscapes that are strategically planned and designed with market imperatives as the key design goal.

• experiencescapes ‘are not only organized by producers (from place marketers and city planners to local private enterprises) but are also actively sought after by consumers. They are spaces of pleasure, enjoyment and entertainment…’ (O’Dell 2005: 16).

• Can connect different firms and businesses – and are often part of urban redevelopment and regeneration schemes.

Ethnic districts• Many previously existing distinct communities may become transformed into packaged experiencescapes as a result of destination development and promotion processes.

• The thematic development of parts of a city for tourism and leisure purposes is an extremely common urban tourism strategy.

• Many cities, for example, have Chinatowns or other ethnic districts such as a ‘Little Italy’ or ‘Little India’ even though the social, political and economic processes that originally led to the creation of such ethnically distinct locations have long past.

Sense of place• Refers to the subjective, personal and emotional attachments and relationships people have to a place.

• The notion of sense of place is usually applied in the context of people who live in a location on a permanent basis and reflects how they feel about the physical and social dimensions of their community.

• People might only consciously notice the unique qualities of their place when they are away from it, when it is being rapidly altered, or when it is being represented or marketed and promoted in a way they do not relate to.

• People can have multiple senses of place

Christchurch Anglican CathedralThe demolition of the severely damaged Christchurch cathedral which is in the city’s central square has been immensely divisive. The Anglican church has decided to demolish the cathedral while experts maintain that the iconic structure could be rebuilt.The building is one of the key landscape icons for the city and has long been central to the city’s identity and imaging.• over 60,000 people took the opportunity to ‘farewell’ the cathedral over two weekends in March 2012

The Resource Base of Tourism

• A tourist resource is that component of the environment (physical or social) which either attracts the tourist and/or provides the infrastructure necessary for the tourist experience (Hall 2007: 34).

• Tourism resources can be categorized as scarce (e.g. capital, labour, land) or free (e.g. climate, culture).

• Yet resources are an entirely subjective, relative and functional concept.

Context• What constitutes a tourism resource depends on the motivations, desires and interests of the consumer, and the cultural, economic and technological context.

• ‘resources are not, they become; they are not static but expand and contract in response to human wants and human actions’ (Zimmermann 1951: 15).

• A tourism resource therefore becomes a resource only if it is seen as having utility value, and different cultures and nationalities can have different perceptions of the tourism value of the same object.

• What may be a resource in one culture may be ‘neutral stuff’ in another - what may be a tourist attraction in one culture or location may not be recognized as an attraction in another.

Tourism resources are dynamic

• New technologies or cultural appraisals can lead to the recognition of new tourism resources. E.g., the development of new recreational technologies such as mountain bikes or sailboards meant that the tourism capacities of existing natural resources were considerably expanded and allowed some resort locations to overcome seasonal limitations (natural tourism resources are often seasonal in nature) – although this can also create conflicts between users.

• Some destinations (e.g., beach, mountain, skiing, hunting, or fishing destinations) are especially seasonal because of either the nature of the main resource used by visitors or the environment in which the resource is located

• As consumer preferences change, so does the perceived utility of particular tourism resources.

Beach swimming• Relatively recent leisure development• Often highly clothed and highly segregated• only became legal to swim during the day at Manly Beach, now one of Sydney’s main tourist attractions, in 1903– I think promiscuous surf-bathing is offensive in general to propriety, and a particular feature of that offensiveness is the attraction it has for idle onlookers...There is no border-line between vice and virtue. Our worst passions are but the abuse of our good ones. And I believe that the promiscuous intermingling of sexes in surf-bathing makes for the deterioration of our standard of morality...Woe betide Australia if she is going to encourage immodesty in her women (Archbishop Kelly, The Sun, Sydney, 14 August 1911).

Changes in beach fashion

Changes in beach fashion

Suntan• 1920s change – related to issues of status and health

• In the northern summer of 1929 Vogue featured models with a sun tan for the first time as the models and the film stars of the then new Hollywood film industry had been holidaying in the South of France (Coco Chanel).

• Art deco movement – large windowed houses

• Shift in destinations and activities (and clothing!)

• Significance of fashion

Commodification

Technological “advances”

Commercialisation (and regulation?)

Re-fashioning the tan?

Landscape preferences• Until the late 18th and early 19th C, mountains or wild rural landscapes were seen in Western culture as being not worthy of places to visit

• Ideal landscape was regarded as being urban areas or well managed and highly designed gardens.

• With the arrival of the Romantic movement in art, literature and design in the late Eighteenth Century, and the consequent reaction to the rapidly industrializing towns, all began to change.– Painting started to feature wild seas and mountain ranges often shrouded in mist.

– Poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, also started to write of waterfalls, lakes and hill country.

• Influence on the popular taste of the upper-class and the emerging and increasingly literate middle classes.

• Implications for leisure travel in the 19th C. were staggering. wild and alpine areas suddenly became desirable landscapes to visit – implications as well for national parks, wilderness and appreciation of nature – cult of the picturesque

Artistic change

Implications• Different cultures will have different understandings of what is a tourism resource and therefore what constitutes a tourist attraction.

• We must recognize that even within cultures, changes occur and therefore perceptions of resources will also change.

• Perceptions of resources change as a result in shifts in cultural taste.

• Role of media – in the broadest sense – is vital

Resources and destination attraction1 Resources in the form of physical and cultural

attractions to encourage people to visit.2 Resources in the form of facilities and

services, including human resources, that enable tourists to stay at the destination.

3 Resources in the form of infrastructure and services that makes the destination accessible as well as the various attractions, facilities and services within the destinations accessible.

4 Information provision so that the consumer actually knows about the destination and its resource. - information is also a tourism resource and a gateway resource, in that it creates awareness of the other types of resources that a destination has.

Tourism generating region

Tourism Destination

Region

- Emissions / use of energy

+ Conservation of some species + Justification for reserves and national parks, some heritage- Transfer of biota & disease- Loss of habitat in high amenity locations (coast, lake, alpine)- Habitat occupied by transport and tourism infrastructure- Competition for water, food & other resources

Tourism’s role in GEC

- Transfer of biota- Transfer of disease- Habitat occupied by transport and tourism infrastructure

- Transfer of biota- Transfer of disease- Habitat occupied by transport and tourism infrastructure-pollution

Transit Route

Change matrix of consequences of tourism. Shading indicates relative change as a consequence of the consumption and production of tourism. The darker the shading the more

apparent the consequences. Note this focuses on perceptions.