Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Unit 1 (cont.)
Source: Goeldner, C. R. and Brent Ritchie, J. R. (2009). Tourism: Principles, Practices,
Philosophies. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.
1. Institutional Approach
The institutional approach to the study of tourism considers the various intermediaries and
institutions that perform tourism activities. It emphasizes institutions such as the travel
problems, costs, and economic place of travel agents who act on behalf of the customer,
purchasing services from airlines, rental car companies, hotels, and so on.
2. Product Approach
This involves the study of various tourism products and how they are produced, marketed
and consumed. For example, one might study airline seat---- how it is created, the people
who are engaged in buying and selling it, how it is financed, how it is advertised, and so on.
Repeating this procedure for rental cars, hotel rooms, meals, and other tourist services gives a
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3. Historical Approach
This approach is not widely used. It involves an analysis of tourism activities and institutions
from an evolutionary angle. It searches for the cause of innovations, their growth or decline,
4. Managerial Approach
operate a tourist enterprise, such as planning, research, pricing, advertising, control, and the
like. It is a popular approach, using insights gleaned from other approaches and disciplines.
5. Economic Approach
Because of its importance to both domestic and world economics, tourism has been examined
This approach is useful in providing a framework for analyzing tourism and its contributions
6. Sociological Approach
sociologists, who have studied the tourism behavior of individuals and groups of people and
the impact of tourism on society. This approach examines social classes, habits, and customs
7. Geographical Approach
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Geography is a wide-ranging discipline, so it is natural that geographers should be interested
in tourism and its spatial aspects. The geographer specializes in the study of location,
environment, climate, landscape, and their economic aspects. The geographer’s approach to
tourism sheds light on the location of tourist areas, the movements of people created by
tourism locales, the changes that tourism brings to the landscape in the form of tourism
facilities, dispersion of tourism development, physical planning, and economic, social, and
cultural problems.
8. Interdisciplinary Approach
Tourism embraces virtually all aspects of our society. We have cultural and heritage tourism,
which calls for an anthropological approach. Because people behave in different ways and
travel for different reasons, it is necessary to use psychological approach to determine the
best way to promote and market tourism products. Because tourists cross borders and require
passports and visas from government offices, and because most countries have government-
operated tourism development departments, we find that political institutions are involved
What is really needed to study tourism is a systems approach. A system is a set of interrelated
groups coordinated to form a unified whole and organized to accomplish a set of goals. It
integrates the other approaches into a comprehensive method dealing with both micro and
macro issues. It can examine the tourist firm’s competitive environment, its market, its
results, its linkages with other institutions, the consumer, and the interaction of the firm with
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the consumer. In addition, a system can take a macro-viewpoint and examine the entire
tourism system of a country, state, or area and how it operates within and relates to other