Tourism Place has a New Home

The Tourism Place Blog has a new home. It is now on the website for my journal, Tourism Geographies. 

Click Here to go directly to the new Tourism Place Blog's home.


You may find that the content of the Tourism Place blog has changed. It is now more of a support site for the journal.

I have a couple of other tourism-related blogs that are more research, thought and experience related, which might be more of interest. These are:

• Collaborative for Sustainable Tourism and Resilience Communities​​ Blog - this is what most of my more recent research has been about
   
• Travelography - Experiencing The World - I used to post here a lot, but not so much anymore
   

The Challenge of Benchmarking Tourism's Global Economic Value

In 2008, I posted on this blog: "Tourism is Not the World's Largest Industry" -- which actually came from my book: Understanding and Managing Tourism Impacts: An Integrated Approach (with C.Michael Hall, 2009, Routledge, UK).  That post has been one of the most visited on my blog.


I see today that the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has recently commissioned a study to, yet again, prove to policy makers that tourism is a really big deal (see their press release here: Travel and tourism larger industry than automotive manufacturing; and on more on the wttc.org website here - they have a couple of ppt files on their site that details their findings, though as usual, the methodology is fuzzy, at best).

The problem is that the co-called "tourism industry" is so diverse that almost any activity remotely related to travel and hospitality can be considered all or part of it.  The WTTC tends to use the Tourism Satellite Accounting System to "guestimate" how much each sector of an economy contributes to tourism -- and this really is just a guess!  In addition, the Tourism Satellite Accounting System is inherently unsuitable for comparison across political boundaries (beyond a single country) and across different industries.  Each of those transgressions involves exponentially greater guesswork.  Also, comparing service industries to manufacturing is wrought with challenges and is not recommended by the WTO (World Trade Organization), which compiles most of the international trade data for the world.  (I know, I did make this last transgression myself in my original blog post on the topic, but at least I admit that it is a fundamental flaw in my analysis.) 


Anyway ... yes, I fully agree that tourism is a huge global economic activity that just continues to grow despite economic upheavals across the globe.  However, I caution everyone to be careful in accepting the illusion of hard number results from any study that tries to compare tourism economic activities with other industries at a global or even regional scale. 


(Cross-posted at BlogNotions.com)

Emerging Research Themes for Tourism: Insights from Geography

The annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) is held every Spring. In 2011 in was held in Seattle, April 12-16. In the previous fall there are a plethora of CFPs (Call for Papers) from people who are organizing paper sessions. I am personally on several geography email lists, including UrbGeog (urban geography), EconomicGeography, CulturalGeog, and LeftGeog, in addition to the email list of the Recreation, Tourism and Sport (RTS) Specialty Group in the AAG.  

As an avid academic geographer, I find many of these CFPs (certainly not all of them) to be very thoughtfully written and informative in themselves.  And, more importantly, they are often (certainly not always) at the cutting edge of research thought in my home discipline of geography.

In fact, I often find the geography CFPs more compelling that those that are written for tourism sessions at the AAG.  Because of that, I collected some 100 CFPs for last year’s meeting and culled through them to find the most interesting topics that academic tourism geographers should be studying (IMHO of course).  I grouped the 100 CFPs into the three topic areas below. Here is a selection of some of the more compelling research topics that I came up with:

TOPIC AREA 1 – Economic and Urban Geography

1.       City Image – This is an old theme in tourism research that seems to be re-emerging in the geographic literature. Some of the key concepts being discussed include: global cities, sustainable cities, declining cities, postcolonial cities, spatial inequality, urban political economy, nature in the city, urban boosterism, cities in film and new or social media, city landscape, place identities as commodities, and comparing neoliberal  and conventional  forms of place marketing, including architectural, social, textual, and sensual  branding.

2.       City Hubs and Networks – This is also a concept that has been around for awhile in travel and tourism studies, though not a major part of the field. Emerging geography research is still looking at the idea of transportation hubs (air and sea), but also extending that into “brainports” (aka “centers of competence”), the influence of municipalities on regional policies related to theorizing policy networks, sustainability and environmental governance, transnational networking and sociotechnical regimes related to global civil society and NGOs, and the new geographies of global production networks focusing on the relationships between small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and international corporations.

3.       Mobile Technologies and Place – This is, of course, a major new area of emerging activity and research. As such we are still evolving ways to study it. Geographers are interested in: how mobile devices change the spatial and temporal flexibility of individuals and organizations; how they change the ways in which material places are used and perceived; how technology transforms social and spatial relations, affects social identification, and transforms state-society and nature-society relations; and how information, communication and telecommunication technologies are becoming (or not) integrated into the everyday practices of businesses and households -- and with what socioeconomic consequences.

TOPIC AREA 2 – Cultural and Political Geography

4.       Everyday Culture and Experiences – This has long been a topic of interest among cultural geographers, but has been addressed much less by tourism researchers. It includes tangible or artistic aspect of culture; folk and popular culture; visual and performing arts; uses of space and place in music lyrics, television plot lines, movies and film, contemporary novels, graphic novels and short fiction; social space and resistance on the internet. Overall it is the everyday practice of making the world habitable and providing for our needs, which are based on relationships among subjectivity, identity and place.

5.       Multicultural Peoples – This is a popular topic in the broader social sciences that tourism researchers have touched upon to some degree. Topics include multicultural people's sense of place and the various belongings they have to where they grew up, where they live, where they travel, and where their ancestors were from. Also of interest are the intersections of race with gender, class, religion, and space; spatialities of post-racial thinking; and the growing diversity in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas the developed world.

6.       People Mobilities - The multicultural peoples topic is related to the growing mobility of people worldwide. This topic presents many geographic research themes, including: the search for alternative mobility futures; slow movements; borders and their surveillance and securitization; embodied performances and affective mobility; friction, turbulence and rhythms of movement; mobile and locative social media and electronic gaming; and imaginary and virtual travel. Also of related interest are how class, gender, sexuality, are ethnicity are enacted, (re)produced and potentially transformed in mobile practices by individuals and their social relations, experiences, mobile strategies, and identities. At another level are issues of freedom of movement, challenges and changes in the global system of migration controls, and “no borders” politics in an era of rising anti-immigrant sentiment.

TOPIC AREA 3 – Planning and Sustainable Places

      7.       Green Economies – Sustainable tourism is a very popular topic for tourism research, but the broader geography research on the green economy still brings some new ideas, including: new forms of green commodification and the rapidly expanding markets on which these are traded; developing spaces of the green economy; the work of creating ‘sustainable’ cities, transportation networks, waste management systems, and alternative/renewable energy; how ‘green jobs’ differ from traditional jobs; green urbanism; Foucault's apparatus (dispositive; institutions that support power structures); and the political economy and material processes of the green economy.

      8.       Ethical Practice – This is a topic that is very new among tourism researchers, and has probably been better addressed by geographers. Major themes include: issues of civil, political and social rights, what might be called "place rights" or a "right to place" as an entitlement of citizenship, and what constitutes these place-based rights, theoretically and in practice; policy implications that arise from normative scholarship and practice; caring approaches to social theory; human rights and geographic place; defining hegemonies and counter-hegemonies; accommodation and subversion within social movements; meaning and materiality in societal mobilization; similarities between red and green social movements – and, of course, their relationship to tourism development.

As you might guess, there were many other topics among the AAG Call for Papers. Each of the topics above is based on three to four different CFPs. I am sure other academic disciplines have a lot that they can inform our tourism research. For me, I am glad to be a geographer as I find the entire discipline to be immensely stimulating and informative for my personal tourism research.

The Sustainable Tourism Conundrum: Would you Stop Traveling to Save the Planet?

Would you stop traveling to save the planet? That is the challenge of sustainable tourism! #aag2011


I posted that on Twitter on April 13, 2011 while listening to a presentation at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers.  It was my most re-tweeted post at the conference, and one of the most re-tweeted of all of the #AAG2011 tagged posts.
The comment was written in response to a presentation by Antti Honkanen (University of Eastern Finland), titled Sustainability and the democratization of tourism - The limits of growth in travelling abroad.

Antti presented the essential conundrum for all of us who love to travel, but are also concerned about the major negative impacts that humans are having on the environment. That it was re-tweeted by several other people indicates, to me, that many of us are troubled by this issue.
Here is a edited and shortened version of Antti's presentation abstract (from the online AAG 2011 program) -

• Does everyone, if wealthy enough, need to be a tourist? Or are we starting to reach some limits of growth for tourism?
  
  This paper asks whether the propensity to spend a holiday abroad has reached its limit for growth in some social or geographical groups, based on age, income, socioeconomic status, education, gender and country of residence. The study is based on survey data from Eurobarometer 25 (1985), Eurobarometer 48.0 (1997) and Flash Eurobarometer 258 (2008).
  
  According to the results, while differences exist, travelling abroad has become more common among all groups over the years 1985-2008. The democratization of tourism appears to be continuing, even if some lower societal groups are left out due to increasing social inequality. The propensity to travel abroad for their main vacation holiday has increased in almost all countries. Some limits of growth, however, may be seen among the upper classes.

Basically, her study of Europe found that more and more people are traveling internationally (at least through 2008), except maybe at the very bottom of the economic ladder (where they cannot afford it), and at the very top of society (maybe because they have already been everywhere?).  And this data was for Europe, which is generally far more environmentally conscious than most of the rest of the world!

The apparent answer to my Twitter post is "No" - we (including myself) are not willing to stop traveling to save the planet.

We are willing to tweak how we travel (using hybrid cars or developing alternative airplane fuels), and we are willing to pay a little more to try and compensate for our impacts (staying in ecolodges or paying to plant trees), but we are not willing to stop traveling -- which would have the biggest impact on reducing CO2 levels.

Of course, if we stopped traveling we would also have a huge impact on the livelihood of all the workers and businesses that are involved, to varying degrees, in the the fifth or sixth largest industry worldwide (which is what I have estimated the size of the tourism industry to be).

And that is the Sustainable Tourism Conundrum -- how to balance the Economics impacts of tourism (usually considered good) with its Environmental impacts (mostly considered bad). There are a lot of other cultural ans social issues related to sustainability and tourism, but I believe that the economic-environment tension is its most fundamental challenge.

Publishing Tourism Geography Research

Author: Deborah Che

Published in: Tourism Geographies, Volume 12, Issue 2, May 2010, pages 324 - 328

At the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers held in Las Vegas, Nevada (22-27 March), geographers shared their experiences as participants in a stimulating and thought-provoking panel on 'Publishing Tourism Geography Research'. I organized this session in order to elicit recommendations from geographers with extensive publication records and with experience editing, reviewing, developing book projects, founding journals and experience with department and university administration where institutional research standards for tenure and promotion decisions are developed and put into effect. ...

Access the full article for free at InformaWorld

To cite this Article: Che, Deborah (2010) 'Publishing Tourism Geography Research', Tourism Geographies, 12:2, 324 - 328  

On the Use and Abuse of Tourism Satellite Accounts

I posted a link to my blog post on Tourism is Not the World's Largest Industry! to the TRINET email discussion list, which is the largest email list for tourism academics worldwide. It generated a fair amount of discussion. One of the arguments used to support the importance of tourism as an industry was the Tourism Satellite Accounting system, which estimates the total economic and employment impact of tourism, taking into account the proportions of other industries that rely on tourism and travel in some way. (A satellite industry is any industry that is no part of the traditional core industries that comprise the System of National Accounts, which is the economic data commonly collected by all countries.)

An example of the statements that people made based on the TSA is seen in this post, which was also emailed to, and reposted on, eTurboNews:

• May 05, 2008: eTN Mailbox: Tourism is NOT the world's largest Industry, so stop saying it is!
  
  "Tourism is not an industry in the definition of "industry" as per the System of National Accounts (SNA) the measure of contribution to an economy (GDP). Tourism is a consumption group (all tourists, domestic & international) and hence the set up of the TSA, (Tourism Satellite Account) which is apart from SNA but draws data from SNA.
  
  So when one says one should exclude transport for example when comparing Tourism to say Transport, one of the worlds biggest industries, one is denying the contribution towards transport made by Tourism (consumption group) By definition Tourism overlaps a number of industries and is a combination of partial outputs of many industries. most only partially associated with tourism. Put another way, if Tourism consumption were to cease, this will result in a reduction of the output of a number of industries, the biggest of which is probably the transport industry.
  
  The development of the TSA has been very important in understanding the economic impact of an "industry" defined by tourists and their consumption for the 'industry' in getting recognition by the community and public sector, for planning purposes.
  
  At the end of the day, it might not be the biggest industry in the world, but it is one of the biggest both as an employer and economically speaking. We could not say this with confidence prior to the TSA."
  
  (Click Here to see the original article on eTurboNews.)

Well, I think we could easily say that tourism is one of the largest industries in the world prior to the TSA system. The World Trade Organization data clearly shows this, and their data is based on the System of National Accounts (SNA), which is the core economic data collected by each country. In addition, I am not sure who wants to exclude passenger transportation from tourism, though I would argue for excluding cargo transportation, as I did in my previous post.

Anyway, in response, I posted my own assessment of the Tourism Satellite Accounting System.

• "Well, of course I have my issues with how people use the TSA, as well...
  
  The TSA approach provides alternatives to traditional GDP and employment calculations, and which is probably more accurate in estimating the economic role of passenger travel and tourism in an economy. The best source [that I have seen] for understanding how this is done is this publication from the WTTC:
  
  http://wttc.travel/download.php?file=http://www.wttc.travel/bin/pdf/original_pdf_file/2008_methodology.pdf
  
  There are a couple of caveats to this approach. First, while it is based on the best available data, there are holes in that data and assumptions must be made on how to fill those holes. These assumptions may or may not be valid in reality.
  
  Second, the data only looks at travel and tourism. It does not provide a comprehensive input-output model that compares travel and tourism (however it is defined as a partial industry) to other industries. Given the fuzzy nature of the partial-industries that the satellite accounting system is designed to address, I am not sure how this could ever be done. But more importantly, it means that you can not say that travel and tourism is the largest industry, or that it is second or third etc., based on the satellite accounting system. You can not compare the results of a TSA exercise with the results of GDP exercise based on traditional national accounts. They are related, but different beasts.
  
  What you would need to do is to run a satellite accounting exercise on other industries, some of which may claim large parts of the core of passenger transportation and tourism -- which I think would decrease the totals that people are currently coming up with in the TSAs. Short of that, you can only say that t+t makes a certain contribution to a certain economy based on certain assumptions.
  
  A quick review on Google found that Tourism appears to be the only partial-industry that has whole heartedly adopted the satellite accounting approach. The only other hits that come up are suggestions to use the satellite accounting approach to develop a green accounting model.
  
  As I said before, please let me know what I am getting wrong here.
  
  Cheers, Alan"

To further clarify the limits of the TSA, let's say you want to compare Tourism with Food and Entertainment and Education. All of these are what Neil Leiper (2008) refers to as "partial industries" because they all overlap (see reference below). You can come up with a total economic impact for tourism, using the TSA, but that number includes portions of Food (e.g., restaurants), Entertainment (e.g., amusement parks), and Education (e.g., museums). But a Satellite Accounting System for each of those industries would also include profits and employees that are in the tourism economy. This is why adding up the total profits and employees of all possible industries would probably 10 to 100 time larger than the real economy - depending on how the different industries are identified and defined.

Furthermore, I would guess that a satellite accounting system for Food would result in economic and employment impacts at least as large as tourism, if not larger. It all depends on definitions. Food could include all agricultural production, investments and transportation, along with all places and ways that food is sold and served, and portions of all other businesses that support the production, selling, transport and disposal of food in the world. Also included would be research and development of food, dietitians and other medical and quasi-medical diet clinics, food related television shows and books, and everyone employed in all of these roles. This is a huge economy and has a huge overlap with tourism.

My conclusion is that a satellite accounting system should NEVER be used to compare one industry with another because: (1) defining the boundaries of a satellite industries is subjective, flexible and easily changed; (2) anything can be defined as a satellite industry; and (3) the overlap between satellite industries varies and is not taken into account when comparisons are made.

TSA numbers can be used to benchmark industry changes over time, if definitions are fixed and not changed. They can also be used to see the degree to which tourism overlaps with different sectors of the economy. These are valuable planning tools. But, the TSA can not be used to claim that tourism is larger than any other specific industry, because under the satellite accounting system approach, each industry has a different definition.

One respondent in the "NOT Largest Industry" discussion on TRINET stated:

• "TSA provide insights into where tourists spend, the extent to which different sectors gain from tourist spending, and the extent to which individual sectors are dependent upon tourism.TSA can serve as a medium for public information helping to raise awareness of tourism and its contribution to national economies. They help tourism stakeholders to better understand the economic importance of this activity; and by extension its role in all the industries involved in the production of goods and services demanded by visitors. TSA thus help to legitimize or give credibility to the tourism industry as a main economic sector in the minds of politicians and the general public."

And another person stated that:

• "The technique is good but without the data it comes back to the rubbish in rubbish out syndrome. Also TSAs may show the significance of tourism they do not show the economic impact of tourism - for this you need the input-output model or CGE. But more fundamental to whatever model is used, the data collected relating to tourist expenditure globally is generally poor and without that the estimation of the size of the industry is impossible."

But I am still puzzled as to why passenger travel and tourism is the only industry that is using the satellite accounting approach to measure its impact...


PS: the following two related readings was posted in the TRINET discussion list:

• Neil Leiper, Why ‘the tourism industry’ is misleading as a generic expression: The case for the plural variation, ‘tourism industries’ - Tourism Management 29 (2008) 237–251
• UNWTO's "2008 Tourism Satellite Account: Recommended Methodological Framework" at: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/doc08/BG-TSA.pdf
• WTTC's Methodology for producing the 2008 WTTC/OE Travel & Tourism Simulated Satellite Accounts, World Travel and Tourism Council and Oxford Economics, March 2008: http://wttc.travel/download.php?file=http://www.wttc.travel/bin/pdf/original_pdf_file/2008_methodology.pdf

UPDATE (6May08):

The following list was sent to me today. These are a sampling of items that are included in the WTTC's calculation of the Global Tourism Satellite Account, collected from the WTTC document cited above. They demonstrate the subjectivity and arbitrary nature of the satellite accounting approach, and what the sender called "the WTTC-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink method of estimating the contribution of travel and tourism to the global economy."

• 100% of boats with motor (even though the boat owner may never travel beyond the 50 mile distance perimeter, which is the criterion for being classified a 'traveler.')
• More than 29% of all towing charges
• More than 35% of all VCR and video disk players
• Almost a third (29%) of all vehicle purchases and vehicle insurance
• More than 38% of all treadmills (sports, recreation and exercise equip)

From the document: "Because the Federal Railroad Administration runs Amtrak, its entire budget was also counted as 100% Travel & Tourism."

• US Federal Aviation Administration 89.70%
• US Federal Highway Administration 22.47%
• US Federal Railroad Administration 100.00%
• US National Park Service 100.00%
• US Fish & Wildlife Service 100.00%

-------
[All of the above was also posted on the New Economics of Tourism (N.E.T.) Blog]

Tourism is NOT the World's Largest Industry - So Stop Saying It Is!

It is the end of the semester and I am marking term papers. Few things drive me more crazy in doing this than coming across quoted and cited claims that tourism is the world's largest industry. Tourism is NOT the world's largest industry.


Tourism actually ranks about 6th in international trade, after trade in fossil fuels, telecommunications and computer equipment, automotive products, and agriculture (based on World Trade Organization data). It is just slightly smaller than agriculture, and given the fuzziness of all numbers of this kind, tourism at best might be 5th, just ahead of agriculture.


Tourism is the world's largest Service Sector Industry, in terms of international trade, as all of the other industries listed above are merchandise product industries. Note that this is for international trade and does not include domestic trade -- data for which is extremely variable from one country to the next. Also, there is no Tourism Industry in the World Trade Organization's data. Instead, I came up with an estimate of the Tourism Industry (see below) based on data for the (1) Travel Services, (2) Transportation Services, and (3) Personal-Cultural-Recreation Services.


For details, I provide the following from a draft version of a textbook that I am working on related to tourism impacts and tourism planning (should be out in late Summer/early Fall 2008). If someone can conclusively demonstrate that the analysis below is not correct, I will be grateful. ...


The travel and tourism industry is the world’s largest commercial service sector industry. The World Trade Organization (WTO, not to be confused with the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO)) is the leading international body that monitors international macroeconomic data. The data follows the value of imports and exports between countries and across major economic sectors that are grouped into either Merchandise or Commercial Services.
Travel and tourism are part of the WTO’s Commercial Services group, but is not encompassed under a single category. Intead, the WTO includes a Transportation category and a Travel category. The WTO defines these categories as:

• Transportation covers all transportation services that are performed by residents of one economy for those of another and that involve the carriage of passengers, the movement of goods (freight), rentals (charters) of carriers with crew, and related supporting and auxiliary services. (United Nations et al. 2002: 36)
  
• Travel covers primarily the goods and services acquired from an economy by travellers during visits of less than one year to that economy. The goods and services are purchased by, or on behalf of, the traveler or provided, without a quid pro quo (that is, are provided as a gift), for the traveller to use or give away. In addition, a traveller is an individual staying for less than one year in an economy of which he or she is not a resident for any purpose other than (a) being stationed on a military base or being an employee (including diplomats and other embassy and consulate personnel) of an agency of his or her government, (b) being an accompanying dependent of an individual mentioned under (a), or (c) undertaking a productive activity directly for an entity that is a resident of that economy. (United Nations et al. 2002: 38-39)

Although the WTO data includes both imports and exports, this discussion focused on exports as, from a destination community perspective, they have a more direct visible impact on a destination’s economy although in macroeconomic terms they are of equal importance. For tourism, exports are the receipts that a country received from the money that tourists spend at the destination (as discussed above), while imports are the expenditures that residents make when they travel outside of their home country. The difference between the two is called the tourism balance of trade or tourism balance of payments. In the case of the EU for example in 2005, tourism expenditure and receipts were nearly in balance with expenditure of €235.6bn, and receipts from tourism of €232.6bn. About two-thirds of EU Member States were in surplus. A measure of the economic significance of tourism to the countries concerned is that receipts exceeded expenditure by a factor of two or more in Greece (4.5), Spain (3.2), Malta (2.8), Portugal (2.6) and Cyprus (2.5) (European Communities 2007).
In 2006 Transportation Services (not all of them carrying tourists) accounted for 22.9% of international exports in commercial services, while Travel Services (mostly the hospitality industry, and excluding transportation) made up 27.1%. Compared to other commercial service sectors, the Travel Services sector has steadily declined in its relative importance since 2000 when it accounted for 32.1% of international exports in services. Transportation Services have remained roughly stable over that time period. All other Commercial Services (including communications, construction, finance, insurance, recreation, and computer services) comprised the balance of service sector trade (see also Coles and Hall 2008).

There were 704 million air passenger trips taken in 2006, and air and sea passengers together accounted for about 25% of the Transportation Services sector, though regionally it ranged from 20.1% in the EU to 33.3% in the US (WTO 2007b). The rest of this sector is mostly freight transportation. In addition, a record 842 million international travelers spent a record US$745 billion in 2006 (WTO 2007a, 2007b). International tourist receipts grew 9% in 2006 over 2005, and while not the fastest growing sector in international trade, its steady growth and relatively low entry costs make tourism an attractive option for countries and communities seeking to develop the service sector of their economies to expand job opportunities.

A Tourism Sector can be estimated from the WTO data for Travel Services, passenger Transportation Services (excluding freight), and the recreation portion of the Other Commercial Services sector. Together, this Tourism Sector makes up a third of all commercial services, and about 6.4% of all international exports, including merchandise products. The Tourism Sector is the sixth largest sector of the global economy based on the WTO’s categories, following trade in fossil fuels, telecommunications and computer equipment, automotive products, and agriculture (WTO 2007a, 2007b).

(This is also posted on the New Economics of Tourism, N.E.T. blog)

UPDATE (3May08):

I recently got my hands on some financial projections for 2008 from the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC, an international lobbying group mostly for airlines and hotels -- at least that is how I define them). They estimate that travel and tourism will comprise:
US$2,008 billion in 2008, which would be 3.4% of total global GDP
- This is about twice the total of US$916 billion for 2006 that I came up with above, though only about half the global percentage.
My number of $916 billion in 2006 is only for international trade, not for GDP, and not for domestic tourism and travel. So a doubling of my number to include domestic travel makes a fairly rough estimate of the total global size of the travel and tourism economy in dollars (or any other currency). (The World Tourism Organization, UNWTO, estimated that 15.8% of all overnight trips in 2005 were international, while the remaining 84.2% were domestic. Domestic trips typically involve lower per/person/day expenditures.)

However, the WTTC also uses what is known as the Satellite Accounting approach, which tries to estimate the degree to which other economic sectors contribute to and benefit from tourism and passenger transportation. Based on that approach, they estimate that in 2008, travel and tourism will comprise US$5,890 billion, or 9.9% of total world GDP.

A couple of caveats need to be considered here. First, the WTTC never clearly shows how it comes up with its numbers. I have been trying to find this, and have even emailed them requesting it. So I am not convinced that their numbers are anything more than very rough estimates. [UPDATE 6May08: I did find information on this, which is linked to a separate blog post on Tourism Satellite Accounts. However, I did not change my opinion of TSAs, which you can find more information on in that other post.]

In addition, my sense is that when an industry adopts a satellite accounting system (which originated in France as an attempt to show the size on non-traditional industries), that they approach this by basically keeping all their original core data, and then grabbing portions of sectors that are near them. As a result they all end up with larger numbers and larger percentages. Other economic sectors do the same, grabbing part of the core travel and tourism industry that might be better placed in financial services or advertising industries. In the end, of course, this all adds up to well over 100%, which can be addressed in an all-encompassing input-output model. But it is unclear to me that the WTTC, and others who use the satellite accounting system, take that broader perspective.

Now I could be totally wrong on this, but I have yet to see someone explain it with real numbers in any other way. So, I suggest that you take the $6 billion and 10% GDP numbers with a huge rock of salt -- and be wary of using it in any term papers that you submit in my classes.

UPDATE (4May08):

Sat, May 3, 2008 at 9:03 PM, Neil Leiper wrote (reposted here with permission):

G'day Alan

Tonight I read your item entitled "tourism is NOT the 'world's largest industry' ". Well Done! Tourism academe would be improved if there were more professors like yourself who can not only see thru the feeble-minded nonsense put about by WTO & its acolytes (in academe - notably dim-witted textbook writers, in government, in consulting, in the media) but are willing and able to challenge them in this manner!

I urge you to go further, please.

Tourism is not "an industry". Attempts to pin it down in that way are doomed to failure and every attempt I've seen is pathetically weak. Tourism is like all the other "isms". It's a form of human behaviour and the theories and ideologies that shape it. C/F idealism, communism, heroism etc.

As such, tourism is supported, partly, by distinctive industries - we can reasonable and realistically call them 'tourism industries'. They do not sum to one distinctive industry. See my article on plural industries which is in press at "Tourism Management". It dissects all known theories that might support the concept on one giant tourism industry and concludes that they are all defective, but various concludes that many tourism industries exist; each a collection of business organisations, some large and complex, most small and simple, some overlapping.

In fact you (anyone) can listen to my conference presentation on that topic. It's on the internet, recorded at CAUTHE 2006 by Martin Fluker in Melbourne. I don't have the site on hand, but I recall it's titled "Professor Leiper expounds ...".

I note above that tourism (the beahviour of tourists) is supported PARTLY by distinctive industries. It's always like that. It's a partially industrialised phenomenon. Like sex. Like sport. Like education, etc.

See a paper in press at Current Issues in Tourism ("Partial Industrialisation in Tourism: A New Model", by Neil Leiper, Lloyd Stear, Nerilee Hing and Tracey Firth. As you will see, it has detailed theoretical discussion, plus empirical evidence, from three researchers who have tested my theory of PIIT.

I put a note about these papers on the tourism strategic management discussion site set up by Fevzi. In the few months since, there has not been a single comment!! Is this more evidence of intellectual decadence in tourism academe? Or is it too soon to tell?

regards
Neil Leiper
Southern Cross University

==========

...And separately, Click Here for a recent news article that also states the world's largest industry claim.

==========

Update: 30 April 2012
The WTTC recently commissioned a study to, yet again, prove to policy makers that tourism is a really big deal (see their press release here: Travel and tourism larger industry than automotive manufacturing); and on more on the wttc.org website here). 


The problem is that the tourism "industry" is so diverse that almost any activity remotely related to travel and hospitality can be considered all or part of it.  In addition, comparing service industries to manufacturing is wrought with challenges (even though I do that myself, above), and is not recommended by the WTO (World Trade Organization), which compiles most of the international trade data for the world.  In addition, the Tourism Satellite Accounting System, which the WTTC often relies very heavily on, is inherently unsuitable for comparison across political boundaries and across industries.


Anyway ... yes, I fully agree that tourism is a huge economic activity that just continues to grow despite economic upheavals across the globe.  However, I caution everyone to be cautious in accepting the results of any study that tries to compare tourism economic activities with other industries at a global or even regional scale. 


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ReVista -- Tourism in the Americas

From the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (Harvard University)

Published in 2002, this free (donations requested) online publication contains some 30 short articles written by well known names among tourism academics. It is sort of a mini-online book. Worth checking out, especially if you are interested in Latin America.