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.1
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.