Useful Books and Reports
Book Reviews by Douglas Frechtling
THE ECONOMICS OF TOURISM, second edition
Mike Stabler, Andreas Paptheodorou, and M. Thea Sinclair; Routledge, 2010, ISBN 978-0415-45939-6; xxviii +506 pp.
This is the first revision of a popular text on the economics of tourism originally published twelve years ago. It is twice as large as the original and features a new co-author following the unexpected demise of M. Thea Sinclair in 2006. The aim of the current authors is to "demonstrate the extent to which tourism is susceptible to economic analysis and to provide a review and critical evaluation of the tourism literature emanating from a number of disciplines, also to indicate possible directions for future research" (p.1). The authors explicitly seek to avoid "as far as is possible the excessive use of technical ecnomic terms and the subject's econometric methods."
TOURISM DEMAND MODELLING AND FORECASTING: MODERN
ECONOMETRIC APPROACHES; Haiyan Song and Stephen F. Witt; Pergamon, 2000; ISBN 0-08-043673-0; viii+178 pp.;
Tourism demand is of central interest to businesses serving travelers away from home, destinations, and those who study them. Reducing the infinite number of futures that this demand might assume is the purpose of forecasting. There are a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods that have been applied to this problem (cf. Frechtling 2001). Quantitative methods include those that rely only past values of the tourism demand series to forecast future values (“extrapolative methods”) and those that simulate cause and effect relationships (“causal methods”). The latter are the realm of econometric methods, and the authors propose to present the modern approaches in this book.
S. Horner, J. Swarbrooke, International Cases in Tourism Management, Elsevier, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, ISBN 0-7506-5514-3, 2004 (404pp., £29.99, pbk).
The first business book of cases for instructional use in
higher education was published in 1920 by a marketing
professor at the Harvard Business School (Garvin, 2003, p.
60). Books devoted to cases in various aspects of tourism
and hospitality management appear to date back to
Doswell’s and Nailon’s (1967) book, Case Studies in Hotel
Management, followed by Doswell’s Case Studies in
Tourism (Doswell, 1978) 11 years later. Apparently, case
studies took off in popularity thereafter, for by 1985, Mann
and Doherty had published a 51-page bibliography of the
subject.
The Tourism Industry: An International Analysis. Edited by M. Thea Sinclair and M. J. Stabler, C.A.B. International (Wallingford, Oxford OX10 8DE, United Kingdom) ISBN 0-85198-718-4, 1991, xi + 244 pp
The editors of this book promise "a variety of new, analytical perspectives on the tourism industry" (p. 1), "new methods of analysis" (p. 1), and "to fill key gaps previously identified in the literature." (p. 2) In all, the editors have collected twelve chapters by a dozen scholars and one practitioner. Several of these are quite good, but they fail to redress the sad but true observation at the beginning of this book that, though the serious study of tourism goes back 25 years, it "has not yet established a firm theoretical foundation." (p. 16)
Nigel Morris and Annette Pritchard,
Advertising in Tourism and Leisure,
Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, UK, 2000, xiii+346 pp.
Published in Information Technology and Tourism Journal, 2001.
There are several solid texts on tourism marketing (e.g., Kotler, Bowen and Makens 1999, Middleton 1994, Morrison 1996) to date there has not been a book devoted to tourism advertising. This book is a commendable first effort to expand on the communications element
of the marketing mix.
Tourism, Trade and National Welfare. By Bharat R. Hazari and Pasquale M. Sgro. Elsevier, B.V. (Sara Burgerhartstraat 25, P. O. Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands) ISBN: 0-444-51707-3, 2004, xvii+245 pp.
Two international trade economists at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, have
written this “pioneering attempt” to integrate “tourism into the pure theory of international
trade” (p. 1). While the authors appear to have met their goal, there is little evidence that
this effort is efficacious for the problems tourism managers and policy-makers face.
TOURISM DEMAND MODELLING AND FORECASTING: MODERN ECONOMETRIC APPROACHES; Haiyan Song and Stephen F. Witt; Pergamon, 2000; ISBN 0-08-043673-0; viii+178 pp.;
Tourism demand is of central interest to businesses serving travelers away from home, destinations, and those who study them. Reducing the infinite number of futures that this demand might assume is the purpose of forecasting. There are a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods that have been applied to this problem (cf. Frechtling 2001). Quantitative methods include those that rely only past values of the tourism demand series to forecast future values (“extrapolative methods”) and those that simulate cause and effect relationships (“causal methods”). The latter are the realm of econometric methods, and the authors propose to present the modern approaches in this book.
An Introduction to Travel and Tourism
by Leonard J. Lickorish and Carson L. Jenkins
(Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, UK, 1997, xii+244 pp.,
ISBN 0 7506 1956 2, $24.95)
In this age of globalization, when political, economic and technological barriers to world trade continue to fall, tourism is thriving as never before. Since 1993, vast numbers of North and South Americans, Europeans, Asians, and residents of other areas have established new tourism demand records annually. It is fortunate that there is now a book that offers a global perspective on international and domestic visitor phenomena at an introductory level.