Tourists and Tourism

At the start of the new millennium, tourism is firmly established as the number one industry in many countries and the fastest growing economic sector in terms of foreign exchange earnings and job creation. Also, tourism is a powerful force for improving intercultural understanding and contributing to peace among the nations of the world. In today’s highly competitive business environment, understanding travel behavior is crucial to achieving excellence. Tourists and Tourism mostly contains research perspective that try to grapple tourism from the standpoint of the tourist. Containing original theoretical and empirical studies in a single volume, Tourists and Tourism will give professionals, academics, and researchers in the field essential information and insight on some of the trends, happening, and findings on tourism consumption. Though the area of consumer behavior in general has been highly researched, tourism researchers have traditionally been overly biased towards the supply side. While it is generally accepted that conspicuous consumption is at the core of tourism, lack of fundamental understanding about how tourists make consumption decisions is but strange. Consumption related ideas like ego involvement, customer satisfaction, loyalty, family decision-making, influence of friends and relatives, novelty seeking, etc. have yet to receive to tourism-orientation. For instance, how do tourists arrive at trade-offs between work and various types of leisure and recreational opportunities, how do their behaviors follow what they plan, and what are the consequences of touristic consumption are fundamental to any insightful marketing program. In the present volume, some of these issues are addressed in the light of specific research situations. However, the scope of the volume goes yonder to this in that a few of the papers included in it examines the interrelationship between tourists and the other stakeholders and how the phenomenon of tourism is emerged out of this. This book addresses a host of issues in a theoretically informed manner and will be a great source of reference for students, researchers and teachers of tourism and allied fields.