Who chooses where you travel?
It’s me, I’m my own boss! Well, it might be time to think twice about that.
Tourism defined
Even though tourism is hardly a term that causes confusion to the everyday listener, one would be surprised about the multiplicity of different definitions that exist in the scientific community. Neil Leiper, in his work focused precisely on this topic, examined the different ways social scientists have been looking at tourism and then used this to coin his own comprehensive understanding of the term. Combining years of academic thinking, Leiper proposes to look at tourism as a system involving the discretionary travel and temporary stay of persons away from their usual place of residence for one or more nights, excepting tours made for the primary purpose of remuneration from points en route.
He states that there are five elements to the systems that are the tourist, the generating regions, transit routes, destination regions and the tourist industry. These elements are arranged in spatial and functional connections that have the characteristics of an open system. As such, tourism operates within broader environments: physical, cultural, social, economic, political and technological.
Thus, tourism is something separate from remuneration, or any work travel — even though it could be argued that the two can overlap. Still, in…
