Tourism Concepts I: Tourist, Visitor, Traveller and Excursionist, the Forms and Nature of Tourism, the History of Travel from the Ancient World to Mass Tourism, and the Models of Leiper, Mill-Morrison, Mathieson & Wall, Butler, Doxey, Crompton, Plog and Gunn

Tourism statistics begin with a hierarchy of terms. A traveller is anyone who moves between different geographic locations for any purpose and any duration. A visitor is a traveller taking a trip to a main destination outside his or her usual environment, for less than a year, for any main purpose (business, leisure or other personal purpose) other than to be employed by a resident entity in the place visited. Visitors are then divided by whether they stay overnight: a tourist (an overnight visitor) spends at least one night in the place visited, and an excursionist (a same-day visitor) does not. Tourism, in the definition the UN World Tourism Organization and the UN Statistical Commission use (the International Recommendations for Tourism Statistics, 2008), comprises the activities of visitors. Commuters, migrants taking up residence, nomads, refugees, diplomats and members of the armed forces on duty are travellers but not visitors.

Tourism is best understood as an amalgam rather than a single product. Its characteristics follow from that. It is a service experience that is intangible and cannot be tried before purchase; it is perishable, since an unsold room-night or airline seat cannot be stored; production and consumption are inseparable, so the customer must travel to the product rather than the product to the customer; it is heterogeneous, varying with the people who deliver it; demand is highly elastic to price and income, sensitive to fashion, safety and seasons; and the product is a composite of attractions, transport, accommodation, amenities and access supplied by many independent firms and public bodies. Its scope is correspondingly wide: economic (income, foreign exchange, employment), social and cultural (contact between hosts and guests, heritage), environmental (resource use and conservation), political (image and soft power) and educational.

Tourism has to be measured because it is not an industry in the national accounts: no single classification code captures it, and its output is spread across hotels, restaurants, transport, retail and many other sectors. Measurement serves planning (how many rooms, flights and guides a destination will need), marketing (which markets are growing), the case for public investment, and the comparison of destinations. The main tools are arrivals and departures counted at frontiers, accommodation statistics, household and visitor surveys, and the Tourism Satellite Account (TSA), a framework adopted by the UN Statistical Commission that isolates the tourism share of each industry's output to estimate tourism's direct contribution to GDP and employment. India's TSAs have been compiled for the Ministry of Tourism by the National Council of Applied Economic Research. Tourism is studied by many disciplines at once, economics, geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, management, law and ecology among them, which is why Jafari's well-known diagram places tourism at the centre of a wheel of disciplines.

Early travel was driven by trade, conquest, religion and learning. The Phoenicians and Greeks traded by sea; Herodotus travelled and wrote in the fifth century BCE; the Romans built roads, inns and seaside villas and visited Greece and Egypt as sightseers; the ancient Olympic Games drew spectators to Olympia. In India pilgrimage (tirtha yatra) to rivers, temples and later to Buddhist sites was the oldest mass movement, and scholars came to its universities: the Chinese pilgrims Faxian (Fa-Hien, early fifth century CE) and Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang, seventh century) left accounts of their journeys. Medieval travel was largely pilgrimage and trade, the Christian pilgrimage to Canterbury, Rome, Santiago de Compostela and Jerusalem, the Hajj to Mecca and the caravans of the Silk Road; Marco Polo in the late thirteenth century, Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth and Al-Biruni in the eleventh left the best-known accounts, the last two of India.

The Renaissance turned travel towards curiosity and education. From the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century young men of the British and European upper classes made the Grand Tour, a journey of months or years through France and Italy to study classical art, languages and manners; the term is usually traced to Richard Lassels' The Voyage of Italy (1670). Spas such as Bath, and later seaside resorts such as Brighton, grew as health and social resorts in the eighteenth century. Mass tourism was born of the Industrial Revolution: railways and steamships made travel cheap and fast, and on 5 July 1841 Thomas Cook organised a railway excursion for about 500 temperance campaigners from Leicester to Loughborough, usually taken as the first organised package tour; by 1855 he was running tours to the Paris Exhibition, and he later introduced hotel coupons and circular notes. In the twentieth century paid holidays, the motor car, the jet airliner (the Boeing 707 entered service in 1958) and the air-inclusive package holiday, pioneered by Vladimir Raitz's Horizon Holidays in 1950, turned travel into a mass consumer product.

The contrast between "old" and "new" tourism is Auliana Poon's (Tourism, Technology and Competitive Strategies, 1993), who argued that information technology, a more experienced consumer and environmental limits were moving the industry from mass, standardised tourism to flexible, segmented and sustainable tourism.

Richard Butler's Tourism Area Life Cycle (1980) adapts the product life cycle to a destination and plots the number of visitors against time as an S-shaped curve. In exploration a few adventurous visitors arrive and there are no specific facilities; in involvement local people begin to provide facilities and a season emerges; in development outside investment, heavy advertising and rapid growth take over and control passes from locals; in consolidation growth slows though numbers still rise, and the economy depends on tourism; in stagnation capacity limits are reached and the destination is no longer fashionable. The curve then branches: rejuvenation (through new attractions or markets), reduced growth, stabilisation, decline, or immediate decline. The model's lesson is that destinations are not permanent resources and must be managed before they stagnate.

George Doxey's irritation index (1975) records how residents' feelings change as a destination grows: at first euphoria, as visitors are welcomed and investment arrives; then apathy, as tourists are taken for granted and contacts become commercial; then annoyance, as saturation approaches and residents have misgivings; and finally antagonism, when irritation is openly expressed and tourists are blamed for the destination's ills. The demonstration effect is the tendency of residents, especially the young, to imitate the consumption, dress and behaviour of visitors, raising aspirations but also resentment and the erosion of local values. Stanley Plog's model (1974) places travellers on a normal curve from the psychocentric, who prefer familiar, safe, packaged destinations, through the mid-centric majority, to the allocentric, who seek new, remote and unstructured experiences. Because allocentrics discover a place and psychocentrics arrive only when it is familiar and crowded, the model predicts that a destination rises and falls as it moves from one end of the curve to the other, which is why it is read alongside Butler's cycle. The term "push and pull" goes back to Dann (1977); Crompton's 1979 study named the nine motives.