Tourism Geography Tourism Geography is the study of travel and tourism, as an industry and as a social and cultural activity. Tourism geography covers a wide range of interests including the environmental impact of tourism, the geographies of tourism and leisure economies, answering tourism industry and management concerns and the sociology of tourism and locations of tourism. Tourism geography is that branch of science which deals with the study of travel and its impact on places. Geography is fundamental to the study of tourism, because tourism is geographical in nature. Tourism occurs in places, it involves movement and activities between places and it is an activity in which both place characteristics and personal self-identities are formed, through the relationships that are created among places, landscapes and people. Physical geography provides the essential background, against which tourism places are created and environmental impacts and concerns are major issues, that must be considered in managing the development of tourism places. The approaches to study will differ according to the varying concerns. Much tourism management literature remains quantitative in methodology and considers tourism as consisting of the places of tourist origin (or tourist generating areas), tourist destinations (or places of tourism supply) and the relationship (connections) between origin and destination places, which includes transportation routes, business relationships and traveler motivations. Recent developments in Human geography have resulted in approaches such as those from cultural geography, which take more theoretically diverse approaches to tourism, including a sociology of tourism, which extends beyond tourism as an isolated, exceptional activity and considering how travel fits into the everyday lives and how tourism is not only a consumptive of places, but also produces the sense of place at a destination. A tourism region is a geographical region that has been designated by a governmental organization or tourism bureau as having common cultural or environmental characteristics. These regions are often named after historical or current administrative and geographical regions. Others have names created specifically for tourism purposes. The names often evoke certain positive qualities of the area and suggest a coherent tourism experience to visitors. Countries, states, provinces, and other administrative regions are often carved up into tourism regions. In addition to drawing the attention of potential tourists, these tourism regions often provide tourists who are otherwise unfamiliar with an area with a manageable number of attractive options.
IMPORTANCE OF GEOGRAPHY IN TOURISM:

The importance of geography is very numerous, because it applies to all aspects of life. It enables us study the way of life of other people in other parts of the world. Without geography it would have been very difficult to know about the existence of other communities, cities, states and even countries and continents in the world. The knowledge of geography has helped us more about the physical things around us such as rocks, soils, vegetation, climate, rivers, mountains, etc. And this makes us able to take more care of our environment and improve our living by developing on our natural resources and endowments. Geography also enables us to choose a career from which we can earn a living and contribute to the economic development of our country. Careers like land surveying, Urban and Regional Planning, Estate Management, Aviation, Architecture, etc.

The basic unit of geographic study is the region, an area that displays the internal unity in terms of selected criteria. We are all familiar with regions showing the extent of political power such as nations, provinces, countries or cities, yet there are almost countless ways to define meaningful regions depending on the problems being considered. Regions may be define on the basis of cultural features such as language (German -speaking region, for example), or a complex of features based on culture and environment, such as the Arab regions. In any case regions are used as a basis for helping us understand the world as an integrated system of places that we can comprehend as a planetary ecosystem. Events that occur in the world are located in regions, for example, the present Middle East problem. Regions serve as a means of comprehending events in the world and simplifying a myriad of factual information. They are the basis for education in elementary, high school, and university setting in such diverse areas as history, fine arts, botany, or geology.

The division of the world into regions has been accomplished mostly in accordance with the purpose for the division. To divide the world into tourism regions is somewhat difficult. A central focus of geography is its attempt to provide a logical system for dividing the world into regions and supplying answer to the fundamental questions of science relating to these regions. Doing so for tourism is no simple task.

Distribution of wealth:

One popular way of dividing the world, which affects tourism, is the degree or distribution of wealth in the world. It has been popular to divide the world into three divisions based on economic development. The first world is historically defined as that of the wealthy, technologically industrial nations of the western world. The Second World is defined as the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and others. The Third World consists of the poor countries of the world where the level of living is low, there is a relative lack of industry, and the majority of the people live in perennial conditions of near misery and mass poverty. In these Third world countries, the majority of the employed population is involved in farming or hunting activities and relies on human or animal power for energy. These countries are overpopulated in terms of the numbers of people who must be supported by the available cultivated land. This division is somewhat arbitrary since members of the so-called Second World are defined on the basis of politics (communism), not economic development. With the break-up of the Soviet Union and adoption of democratic governments and in Eastern Europe, the designation of “Second World” is rather meaningless.

Economic Development:

A second method of division is based on the level of economic development without regard to political characteristics. In general, two broad regions are recognized: one rich, one poor. Tourism is an intensely geographic phenomenon. It stimulates large-scale, global movement of people and forges distinctive relationships between people and the places they visit. It shapes processes of physical development and resource exploitation, whilst the presence of visitors exerts a range of economic, social, cultural and environmental impacts that often have important implications for local geographies.

This second edition of Tourism Geography develops a critical understanding of how different geographies of tourism are created and maintained. Drawing on both historical and contemporary perspectives, the discussion – which is in three main parts – connects tourism to key geographical concepts relating to globalization, mobility, new geographies of production and consumption, and post-industrial change. Part one examines how spatial patterns of tourism are formed and evolve through time. Part two offers an extended discussion of how tourism relates to places that are toured, examining physical and economic development, socio-cultural and environmental relations and the role of tourism planning. Part three develops a range of new material for this second edition that considers important contemporary influences upon tourism geographies, including place promotion, new forms of urban tourism, heritage, identity and embodied forms of tourism.

Featuring international case studies and supported by up-to-date statistics, the text offers a concise yet comprehensive review of tourism geography and how geographers can interpret this important contemporary process. Written primarily as a student text, each chapter includes guidance for further study and summary bibliographies that form the basis for independent work.