Tourism Definitions
Introduction
The seven core tourism terms below are an edited version of definitions agreed in 2011 through a working group and consultation process set up under the auspices of the English Tourism Research and Intelligence Partnership (ETRIP) established by VisitEngland.
You cannot manage what you cannot measure…. (oft-quoted truism to stress the importance of measurement). Equally, you cannot measure what you have not first adequately defined.
Any use of tourism and visitor related terms has to recognise that tourism is, in essence, a technical concept measured by the available statistics of visitor movements and expenditure (demand) and estimates of the number of a wide range of visitor facilities (supply). As a concept, tourism is inevitably open to different interpretations but it is now widely agreed that there is an urgent need to tighten or achieve greater precision in the way that key tourism terms are used nationally, regionally and locally. Planning and managing tourism when the various stakeholders involved have different conceptions of what tourism means can only ever be partially successful.
Tourism
Tourism is the generic term to cover both demand and supply that has been adopted in various forms and used throughout the World. Tourism is defined as the activities of persons identified as visitors. A visitor is someone who is making a visit to a main destination outside his/her usual environment for less than a year for any main purpose [including] holidays, leisure and recreation, business, health, education or other purposes….This scope is much wider than the traditional perception of tourists, which included only those travelling for leisure. [UNWTO statistics Guidelines: 2010]
Visitors
Visitor is the common denominator that covers all the forms of tourism defined above for the same range of purposes. The term embraces three separate categories.
(1) Tourists who are visitors staying away from home for one or more nights for any of the purposes noted above (domestic, or from abroad).
(2) Same Day visitors, also known as tourist day visitors spending at least 3 hours away from home outside their usual environment for general leisure, recreational and social purposes. Many are local residents of an area.
(3) Leisure day visitors spending less than 3 hours away from home but outside their usual environment, for general leisure, recreational or social purposes. Not included (in the published volume and value of tourism statistics in England), these short stay leisure day visitors contribute directly to the local visitor economy and should also be formally recognized in destination management decisions. Most of this third group of visitors are also residents of destinations and their local catchment areas.
Tourism Industries
The term ‘tourism industries’ is the internationally accepted UNWTO/OECD definition of twelve standard industrial classifications of the sectors of the economy that provide products/services consumed by visitors. The turnover due to tourism in each of these sectors is measured by surveys of visitor expenditure, ie., from the demand side, mostly in the private sector but including some public sector products/services. Although convenient and in common usage by professionals, the media and politicians, there is no accepted international or national definition of the term ‘tourism industry.’
Visitor Economy
A term now widely used throughout the UK, although not yet officially defined, visitor economy refers to overall demand and supply in all the sectors within which visitor activity and its direct and indirect consequences upon the economy take place. The term visitor economy is wider than the definition of tourism industries, which it includes, and it encompasses all staying and non-staying visitors (including categories such as business day visits and leisure day visits not currently measured as part of tourism industries). The term embraces the activities and expenditure involved in supplying products and services for visitors by both the private and public sectors. It also includes the primarily public sector activities and substantial expenditure on the creation, maintenance and development of the public realm and the infrastructure within which, and through which, visitor activities take place. Visitor economy can be used in relation to international, national and sub-national geographical destinations or areas and need not necessarily be confined by existing historical boundaries. ‘Tourism industries’ are, therefore, a sub-set of the visitor economy.
Visitor destination/tourism destination
Visitor destinations are places that are recognised as visitor destinations and for which it is possible to measure aspects of the demand for and supply of tourism services within defined boundaries. Visitor destination is preferred to ‘tourism destination’ because by definition it includes all