TABLE OF CONTENTS Tourism has grown significantly since the creation of the commercial airline industry and the advent of the jet airplane in the 1950 s. By 1992, it had become the largest industry and largest employer in the world. Together with this growth there have emerged a number of extremely critical issues facing the industry in terms of the impacts it has already had on destination areas and its residents, and the future prospects for people and places into the coming decades.
One of the major issues in gauging tourism s total economic impact is the diversity and fragmentation of the industry itself. Theobald (Chapter 1) suggests that this problem is compounded by the lack of comparable tourism data since there has been no valid or reliable means of gathering comparable statistics. He proposes that the varying definitions of tourism terms internationally, and the complex and amorphous nature of tourism itself have led to difficulty in developing a valid, reliable, and credible information system or database about tourism and its contribution to local, regional, national and global economies.
The author provides an introduction to the context, meaning and scope of tourism beginning not simply with basic definitions, but also a discussion on the derivation...
