Control work

Development of the management system in the tourism industry


Tourism is an economic activity of immense global significance. However, the precise measurement of travel and tourism has not always been easy. This stems in part from different definitions and methods of accounting adopted by different countries. Efforts by the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have helped in this respect, as discussed below. Vellas and Becherel (1995) describe the WTO as the principal source of statistics on international tourism. According to the WTO, tourism is now the largest industry in the world. In 2000 an estimated 35 million UK tourists travelled abroad with expenditure reaching an estimated £15 billion, a 4% increase in expenditure on the previous year (Mintel, 2001). According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), the travel and tourism economy, which includes the industry itself plus indirect activities, contributed 10% to global GDP in 2002 and 7.8% of global employment, amounting to 198,668,000 jobs, or one in every 12.8 jobs. In 2002 there were 702.6 million international tourist arrivals recorded worldwide. In the same year worldwide receipts for international tourism amounted to US$474 billion (¤501 billion). WTO forecasts that international arrivals are expected to reach over 1.56 billion by 2020. Of these, 1.18 billion will be inter-regional and 377 million will be long-haul travellers (www.world-tourism.org/ marketresearch/facts/highlights/Highlights.pdf). Travel and tourism as a whole (international and domestic) is expected to generate US$4,235.5 billion of economic activity; that is, it is a US$4.3 trillion industry according to the WTTC (2002c). Travel and tourism is therefore a major activity by any standard. It is also an activity that impacts on many other areas, as the following discussion illustrates. Demand for travel and tourism has grown at a faster rate than demand for most areas of economic activity. Tourism experienced sustained growth towards the end of the last century and this continues at the start of the new millennium. France et al. (1994) describe the increase in international tourist numbers since the end of the Second World War as dramatic: only 25 million international tourists were recorded worldwide in 1950 as against approximately 476 million tourists by 1992. They describe a pattern of moderately steady growth, with periods of interruption associated with particular events and economic downturns. Tourism education has also been an area of significant development in recent decades. Masters programmes in tourism have been available in the UK since the 1970s and undergraduate degrees have been developing since the 1980s. Tourism has, in recent years, increased greatly in popularity as a subject of study at diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate levels. By the late 1990s some 64 undergraduate courses existed in the UK alone, accounting for an estimated 5,000 students enrolled in 1998. In addition to this were the many students studying tourism as an option on related courses such as geography. A further, more recent, significant development in this field has been the emergence of themed MBAs, such as those offered at Westminster and Bradford universities. At an international level, according to Centre International de Recherches et d’Etudes Touristiques (CIRET), there are currently 543 academic institutions in 86 countries and 2,296 individual researchers in 95 countries specialising in tourism, leisure, outdoor recreation and the hospitality industry. CIRET has created directories of these on its website (http://www.ciret-tourism.com). Along with the growth in the provision of teaching of tourism and research in this area has been a growth of literature, as evidenced by new tourism collections and scientific reviews. CIRET’s website also contains a thesaurus of more than 1,100 key words, a geographical index and access to the analysis of in excess of 116,974 documents of tourism literature, including books, articles and reports. Despite this growth in teaching, research and publications, tourism is still considered relatively immature as an academic discipline. Tourism as an academic subject is offered within and often between a variety of broader fields of study, including economics, business and management, geography and the social sciences. The majority of tourism courses, however, are offered by schools of business and management. Their primary focus is on the scope and significance of tourism as a business. The approach taken by this book is in keeping with such courses. In research terms, tourism is a subject of many separate disciplines but also the subject of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research. While early tourism had always been socially selective, according to several writers, including Urry (1990), it was in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the expansion of the railway, that there was an extensive development of mass travel by train. In the twentieth century the car and the aeroplane further democratised geographic movement. Certain destinations then began to become synonymous with mass tourism. Holloway (1994) details the origins of the mass tourism movement.
Mass tourism is therefore a relatively young phenomenon and, despite exceptional growth rates, is still characterised as immature, or only just reaching maturity, especially as a field of academic study. There have been definitional problems in relation to tourism and these in turn have led to measurement difficulties. Different authors have taken different approaches when proposing definitions, but one thing that most seem to agree on is the difficulty they attach to defining tourism. Further difficulties exist in defining precise forms of tourism. Holloway (1994) describes as problematic establishing clear lines between shoppers and tourists, for example. There is no universally agreed definition of the tourism industry. Indeed, there is no agreement that tourism can be described as an industry. Mill and Morrison (1998), for example, argue that it is hard to describe tourism as an industry given that there is a great deal of complementarity as well as competition between tourism businesses. They place definitions of tourism in context by highlighting the link between travel, tourism, recreation and leisure. However, they go on to describe this link as ‘fuzzy’ and to make the distinction that all tourism involves travel yet all travel is not tourism. Nevertheless, tourism is often described merely as an activity: Tourism is an activity. It is an activity that takes place when, in international terms, people cross borders for leisure or business and stay at least 24 hours but less than one year. (Mill and Morrison, 1998: 2) The WTO’s definition of tourism is now the one that is most widely accepted around the world. The definition, provided at the International Conference on Travel and Tourism Statistics in Ottawa in 1991, is The activities of a person outside his or her usual environment for less than a specified period of time and whose main purpose of travel is other than exercise of an activity remunerated from the place visited. (Chadwick, 1994: 66) In the sixth edition of The Business of Tourism, Holloway (2002: 1) makes it clear that the definitional debates surrounding the concept of tourism are likely to rage on. He contrasts this with technical definitions: ‘While it is relatively easy to agree on technical definitions of particular categories of tourism and tourist, the wider concept is ill-defined.’ He concludes that to define tourism precisely in conceptual terms is an all but impossible task. Finally, according to France (1994: 3): It is now commonly accepted that a tourist, as opposed to a day visitor, is someone who spends at least 24 hours away from home even though both categories of visitor might engage in similar activities. Although there is no generally accepted maximum time-limit for a tourist visit, it is normally accepted that a tourist is away from home for a relatively short period. Debate has surrounded many of the aspects of definitions of tourism. For example, some have argued for the inclusion of day visitors in definitions, while others have argued against this. Similarly, some prefer to include business trips, while others exclude these. Arguments have also surrounded precise distances and purposes of visit to be included in definitions. Cooper et al. (1998) are among those to distinguish between demand-side and supply-side definitions of tourism. Their discussion of each of these is summarised below. Demand-side definitions Both ‘conceptual’ and ‘technical’ demand-side definitions of tourism have evolved. In conceptual terms, tourism can be thought of as: The activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes. (WTO and UNSTAT, 1994, also cited in Cooper et al., 1998: 8) This definition covers the important elements of movement of people to, and their stay in, places or destinations outside their usual environment or normal place of residence or work. This movement is temporary and short-term. Destinations are visited for purposes other than taking up permanent residence or employment. In technical terms, there has been a need to separate tourism from other forms of travel for statistical purposes. To count as tourism it is therefore necessary that an activity consists of a minimum length of stay (one night or they are termed day visitors or excursionists) and maximum length of stay (one year). There are also ‘purpose of visit’ categories, and a distance consideration helps to delineate ‘usual environment’. There are technical problems in defining supply-side tourism as some businesses serve only tourists while others serve local residents and other markets at the same time. It is possible to classify tourism businesses according to whether they can survive without tourism (albeit in a diminished form) or not. This enables tourism to be gauged using standard industrial classifications (SIC). Indeed, the WTO has published a ‘standard industrial classification of tourism activities’ (SICTA) in an attempt to overcome the lack of an agreed definition. Once again, both ‘conceptual’ and ‘technical’ viewpoints can be taken in relation to supply-side definitions of tourism. Conceptually, the industry is made up of all firms, organisations and facilities designed to meet the needs and wants of tourists. The industry is discussed more fully below. Given the heterogeneous nature of tourists, it is important that they too can be classified in a variety of ways. The most obvious distinction is that between domestic and international tourists. This has something in common with the WTO’s distinction between three basic forms of tourism:
domestic – travel by residents within their own country;
inbound – travel by residents from overseas into a country; and
outbound – travel from the generating country to another country.
A number of key aspects to many of the definitions of tourism can therefore be identified. First, day visitors or excursionists are not tourists because, by definition, an overnight stay is required. Secondly, the stay should not be too long (less than a year is often given as a maximum), and finally, tourists should not be earning while at a destination. However, these aspects are not accepted by all. Holloway (1994) suggests that it is all but impossible to define tourism conceptually in precise terms. Technical definitions for statistical purposes are, he believes, less problematic, as long as there is clarity regarding what the data comprise and as long as one compares like with like. It is not only in definitional terms but also as an activity that tourism is misunderstood. Indeed, Cooper et al. (1998) describe a series of myths about tourism and counter these with realities. It is worth noting the following points here: 1. Rather than being predominantly international, the majority of tourism involves people travelling in their own country with journeys mainly by surface transport as opposed to by air. 2. Tourism is not only about leisure holidays but also includes business, conferences and education as purposes of visit. Finally, it is worth noting that, for the purposes of definitions, tourism can be seen as a form of recreation but it is clearly not all recreation. Tourism is often described as merely one aspect of leisure. This does not, of course, account for business travel. The tourism system That tourism spans a variety of fields of business and study has already been discussed. This has clear implications for the provision of organisational frameworks for tourism. 6 Managing the Tourism System Many different frameworks have been developed in relation to particular orientations as well as some which offer a more holistic view. While these approaches are adequately covered elsewhere in the tourism literature, it is important to illustrate one such system here. Leiper’s basic tourism system (see Figure 1.1) has been seleced for both its enduring popularity and its ease of understanding. Leiper first offered this model for consideration in 1979, although it has since been updated. The three basic elements included are the tourists themselves (the actors in the system), geographical elements (traveller-generating regions, tourist destination regions and tourist route regions) and the tourism industry (those businesses and organisations involved in the delivery of the tourism product). Interaction between these elements is in terms of transactions and impacts. It is important to highlight the relationships, especially in academic circles where subject divisions are often created that prevent a full appreciation of relationships and transactions. Leiper suggests that the tourism industry consists of ‘all those firms, organisations and facilities which are intended to serve the specific needs and wants of tourists’ (1979: 400). Similarly, Henderson (1994) argues that the travel and tourism industry exists as a broad network of commercial and non-commercial organisations linked together by the common objective of servicing the needs of travellers and tourists. These descriptions of the industry are consistent with many others. Despite such consensus in general terms, less agreement surrounds exactly which firms, organisations and facilities are included in tourism. Tourism is a complex phenomenon. It is a multi-sectoral, multifaceted business and this in itself creates difficulties when attempting to generalise about the management of tourism businesses. It is multi-sectoral because it encompasses different industrial sectors. According to Lickorish and Jenkins (1997), tourism is an activity which cuts across conventional sectors in the economy, requiring inputs of an economic, social, cultural and environmental nature.