Geography of Travel & Tourism

Rating:
Summary: Bed and Breakfast (with Cat's Hairs in the Fried Egg)
Review: I recently spent New Year's Eve on top of a gale- and rain-swept volcano in the southern Philippines. Compared to that wet, muddy night, this text comes in a distant second. It never ceases to amaze me that almost any truly fascinating subject, when moulded into a textbook, can be made to appear overwhelming tedious. Many geographers (including the present reviewer way back in 1969) have tried to get their heads round what appears to be the obvious relevance of their discipline to the world's biggest industry - tourism; all have failed - at least to make what they have to say about the connection interesting. This, I regret to say, doesn't make a much better job of the task than its predecessors. I suspect that the reason is that geographers, on the whole, have not taken on board the concept of 'relative geography' - a geography in which distance is measured not in kilometres and miles but in dollars. Once that is accepted then it becomes evident that distances vary depending on the disposable income available to one and the map of the world becomes radically transformed generating quite new insights into how humans use space. To be fair to the authors, this book is probably the best available so far - it is far ranging in its coverage; has a good writing style; is well illustrated; and is as up-to-date as any non-electronic publication can be (though that's not saying a great deal). But exactly who will buy it? Tourism students really don't need to - tourism is not at all about geography but marketing and human/personnel skills. And the general reader isn't going to find too much inspiration here - unless they are stuck on top of a galeswept mountain in Mindanao