The term ‘niche tourism’ is largely borrowed from the term ‘niche marketing’,
which in turn has appropriated the niche concept from the language of the
relatively recent discipline of ecology. Hutchinson (1957) is widely credited with
introducing the concept of ‘niche’ referring, in its widest sense, to a region in a
multidimensional space characterised by environmental factors that affect the
welfare of the species. Thus, in broad terms, niche refers to an optimum location,
which an organism can exploit in terms of resources in the presence of its
competitors. It is easy to see the analogy to the world of business and so we may
talk, for instance, of a company finding its particular or appropriate niche. Indeed,
the use of the term ‘niche’ is part of a wider usage of biological/ecological
metaphors that informs business theory and practice (see for instance, Lambkin
and Day, 1989).