About Tourists

A question may be appearing in my readers mind which is “Who are tourists?” and it is natural. Tourists are one of the principal research issues for tourism research. Let’s know who the tourist in tourism sectors is.

   According to the World Tourism Organization(WTO)  “The temporary visitors staying in a place outside their usual place of residence, for a continuous period of at least 24 hours but less than one year, for leisure, business or other purposes.” 

(World Tourism Organization, 1993)

Which is the mostly accepted definition even at now.

      

      

In the year or 2005 “Uriely” Identified tourist as four developments emerge: a reconsideration of the distinctiveness of tourism from of everyday life experiences; a shift from homogenizing portrayals of the tourist as a general type to pluralizing depictions that capture the multiplicity of the experience; a shifted focus from the displayed objects provided by the industry to the subjective negotiation of meanings as a determinant of the experience; and a movement from contradictory and decisive academic discourse, which conceptualizes the experience in terms of absolute truths, toward relative and complementary interpretations.

 In the year of 2004 “Hom Cary” does this through an analysis of representations in narratives:

“The tourist moment, which conditions a spontaneous instance of self-discovery and communal belonging. It is a moment that simultaneously produces and erases the tourist-as-subject, for at the very instant one is aware of and represents oneself as ‘tourist,’ one goes beyond ‘being a tourist’.

     One of the earliest attempts to distinguish between different types of tourists was made by Gray (1970) who identified the terms sunlust and wanderlust tourists. Sunlust tourists are resort based and motivated by the desire for rest, relaxation and the 3S’s, whereas wanderlust tourists are based on a desire to travel and to experience different peoples and cultures. As the two terms imply, sunlust and wanderlust are essentially categorizations based upon the purpose of the trip. Since then a number of typologies, concentrating on the tourists themselves, have been developed. Some of these concentrate on tourists’ behavior whilst others adopt a more socio-psychological approach. (Source: Scott McCabe)

According to Poon(1993) we can get differences between old and new tourists.

He have said old tourists “Search for the sun, Follow the masses, Here today but gone tomorrow, Just to show that you had been, Having, Superiority, Like attractions, Precautious, Eat in hotel dining room, Homogeneous.”

On the other hand new tourists “Experience something different, Want to be in charge, See and enjoy but do not destroy, Just for the fun of it, Being, Understanding, Like sports, Adventurous, Try out local fare, Hybrid.”