Basic Approaches To The Study Of Tourism

Tourism commonly is approached through a variety of methods. However, there is little or no agreement on how the study of tourism should be undertaken. The following are several methods that have been used:

1. Institutional Approach:- This approach to the study of tourism considers the various intermediaries and institutions that perform tourism activities. It emphasizes institutions such as the travel agency. This approach requires an investigation of the organization, operating methods, problems, costs and economic place of travel agents who act on behalf of the customer purchasing services from airlines, rental cars company, hotels etc. An advantage of this approach is that the US. Census Bureau conducts a survey every five years on selected services that include travel agents and lodging places, thus providing a database for further study.

2. Product SociThe Approach:-It involves the study of various tourism products and how they are produced, marketed and consumed. For an example: one might study an airline seat- how it is created, the people who are engaged in buying and selling it, how it is financed, how it is advertised and so on. Repeating for rental cars, hotel rooms, meals and other tourist services give a full picture of the field. Unfortunately, the product approach tends to be too time-consuming, it does not allow the student to grasp the fundamentals of tourism quickly.

3. Historical Approach:- It is not widely used. It involves an analysis of tourism activities and institutions from an evolutionary angle. It searches for the cause of innovation, their growth or decline and shifts in interest. Because mass tourism is the fairly recent phenomenon, this approach has limited usefulness.

4. Managerial Approach:- This approach is firm-oriented( micro-economic), focusing on the management activities necessary to operate a tourist enterprise such as planning, research, pricing, advertising, control, and the managerial approach is used to study tourism. Products change, institutions change and society changes; this means that managerial objectives and procedure must be geared to change to meet shifts in the tourism environment. The journal of travel research and tourism management features this approach.

5. Economic Approach:- Because of its importance to both domestic and world economics, tourism has been examined closely by economists, who focus on supply, demand, BOP, foreign exchange, employment, expenditures, development and other economic factors. This approach is useful in providing a framework for analyzing tourism and its contribution to a country’s economy and economic development. The disadvantage of this approach is that whereas tourism is an important economic phenomenon, it has non-economic impacts as well. Tourism economics is a journal utilizing this approach.

6. Sociological Approach:- Tourism tends to be a social activity. It has attracted the attention of sociologists who have studied the tourism behavior of individuals and the group of people and the impacts of tourism on society. These approach economics social classes, habits, and culture of both hosts and guests. Erik Cohen has made many contributions in these areas.

7. Geographical Approach:- This approach shed light on the location of tourist areas, the movement of people created by tourism locals, the changes that tourism brings to the landscape and economic, social and cultural problems. Because tourism touches geography at so many points, geographers have investigated the area more thoroughly than have scholars in many other declines and also because tourism, leisure, and recreation are so closely related. It is necessary to search for literature under all these titles to discover the contribution of various fields.

8. Interdisciplinary approach:- Tourism embraces virtually all aspects of our society. We have cultural and heritage tourism, which calls for an anthropological approach. Because people behave different ways and travel for different reasons, it is necessary to use a psychological approach to determine the best way to promote and market tourism product because tourists cross borders and require passports and visa from government offices and because most countries have a government –operated tourism development departments, we find the political institutions are involved and are calling for a political science approach. And any industries that create the laws, regulations and legal environment in which the tourist industry must operate it, must have or legal approach. The fact simply is that tourism is so vast, so complex and so multifaceted that it is necessary to have a number of approaches to study the field.

9. The system approach:- It helps to form a unified whole and organized to accomplish a set of goals. It integrates the approaches into a comprehensive method dealing with both micro and macro issues. It can examine the tourist firm’s competitive environment, its markets, its result, its linkage with other institutions, the consumer, and the interaction of the firm with the consumer. A system can take a macro viewpoint and examine the entire tourism system of a country, state, or area and how it operates within and relates to another system such as legal, political, economic and social system.

References:

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