TABLE OF CONTENTS Peter M Burns
As with most business and social enterprises, innovation cannot be separated from the economic and cultural milieu from which it springs. For this reason, the chapter starts by rehearsing some of the arguments that frame the geopolitics of tourism and the impact of terrorism as well as changing attitudes towards consumption and consumerism. This is followed by a brief historic overview of tourism sufficient to act as a reminder of the stages that tourism, tourists and destinations have come through to arrive at the present era. The chapter finishes with some speculation leading to a future vision for tourism. Within the text, three brief case studies are included as being topical and representative of different aspects of tourism. In the past, examples of innovation in tourism would have included customer loyalty schemes, computerized check-out systems for hotels (and check-in systems for airlines), efficient and reliable long-haul airliners, employee empowerment, all-inclusive resorts and, as we should not forget, the very concept of the packaged tour as well as the introduction of traveller's cheques.
At the cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the world and thus tourism was undergoing mixed fortunes. On the one hand there was unprecedented growth fuelled by a potent mixture of technology, deregulation and economic buoyancy, while on the other, global confidence had been knocked by a series of natural and political disasters (for example, strange weather patterns, terrorism, SARS).Against this background, global and regional geopolitics were rapidly changing...
