1. Session 4 Profiling Urban Tourist RDI Management Learning
Urban Tourism
Session 4
Profiling Urban Tourist
RDI Management Learning

2. Urban tourist types – objectives:
To look at different approaches to creating tourist types:
Types in sociological tourism literature
Types in marketing/managerial literature
To look at why different tourists might visit different cities / use different facilities of the same city

3. What Is the Point of Tourism? (motivations)
To escape?
To reconstruct the self (Pilgrimage)?
To find authenticity?
To keep the workforce happy?
Status activity?

4. Daniel Boorstin (1964) Traveller vs Tourist The image & pseudo event
Tourists seek inauthenticity
Tourists are passive

5. Dean MacCannell (1973/1976)
Tourists are alienated in their every day lives
Modern existence is inauthentic
All tourists are seeking authentic experiences – but doomed to failure

6. Boorstin and MacCannell
All tourists are the same
They are interested or indifferent to authentic experience

7. The Tourist Gaze (Urry 2002)
“The tourist gaze is directed to features which separate them off from everyday experience. Such aspects are viewed because they are taken to be in some sense out of the ordinary” (Urry 2002: )
• 3 Key Dichotomies
Authentic/Inauthentic
Historic/Modern
Romantic/Collective

8. Serious Leisure : Stebbins (1996)
A systematic career like purist of a leisure activity
Achievement and involvement
Substantial personal effort and knowledge
Unique ethos and social world
Participants tend to identify strongly with chosen leisure pursuit

9. The Versatile tourist : Ooi, C.S. (2002)
• Experienced at being a tourist
• Experienced at selecting between destinations
• Creating own agendas
• Engagement and interaction with destinations
• Adapt and respond selectively to stimuli and
building cultural capital

10. Cohen’s (1972) Typology Organised (institutionalised) mass tourist
Individual (institutionalised) mass tourist
The explorer
The drifter
Although Wickens’ typology is important as it identifies different types of users of the same resort

11. Cohen’s (1979) Typology Recreational Tourist Diversionary Tourist
Experiential Tourist
Experimental Tourist
Existential Tourist

12. Plog’s (1977) Psycho-graphic Tourist Types
Psychocentric
Midcentric
Allocentric

13. Wickens’ (1994) 5 Types Cultural Heritage Raver Shirley Valentine
Heliolatrous
Lord Byron

14. Consumer Typologies of Tourists (Sharpley 2000)
Consuming as experience
Consuming as play
Consuming as integration
Consuming as classification

15. Managerial / Marketing Typologies
Mainly:
Inductive
Data Based
Building theory from data / observations
“Bottom up” approach

16. The complexity of urban tourists
“The tourist city is a multifunctional area which complicates attempts to identify a definitive classification of users” (Page 1997), However:
Intentional users from outside the city-region;
Intentional users from inside the city-region;
Incidental users from outside the city-region;
Incidental users from inside the city-region
(Ashworth and Tunbridge 1990)

17. What factors inform travel choice? (Demographics)
Age
Lifecycle
Income
Gender

18. What factors inform travel choice? (Demographics)
Education (Cultural Capital)
Occupation

19. Urban Tourism Contexts
Resort cities / tourist urbanisations
Heritage / cultural cities
New destinations/activities
We can see then that different cities and different activities in the same city may appeal to different tourists on a variety of levels.

20. Are typologies irrelevant
Are typologies irrelevant?! The “Post-Tourist” (Fiefer (1985) Urry (1990))
There are no real types of tourists (Fiefer (1985) Urry (1990)), only post- modern lifestyles
Is tourism all around us? various mobilities: migration; television; internet?
Do we need to travel to be tourists?

21. The post tourist – a weekend away?
Drinking German beer (not too many) in a Newcastle pub after a Chinese meal with a Spanish and Irish friend, then driving to the supermarket in an Italian car, which stocks food from all over the world, and has a new Polish section for Eastern European workers. Getting up the next day and having a McMuffin for breakfast before setting off to the match (early kick off so it can be watched worldwide on TV) to watch the local team with only one local playing, then having a meal for lunch at an Italian restaurant with a Greek chef, barman from Leeds and a Slovakian waitress. Afterwards, nipping to the shops to buy a pair of jeans from a German chain that were made in Turkey, and then rushing back to the pub, listening to “Hey Macarena”, downloaded from a file share site on an MP3 player made in Taiwan, to watch England beat France in the rugby with a pint of Fosters and thinking – what a good day to be English…

22. Further Reading Typologies
Cohen, E. (1972). Toward a sociology of International Tourism. Social Research. 39: pp
Cohen, E. (1979). A Phenomonology of Tourist Experiences. Sociology. 13:
McCabe, S (2005). Who is A Tourist? Tourist Studies. Vol 5 (1) pp
Mehmetoglu, M (2004). Tourist or Traveller? A Typological Approach. Tourism Review. Vol 59. No. 3. pp33-39.
Sharpley, R. (1999). Tourists, Tourism and Society. ELM Publications:Huntingdon. (Chapter 4)
Sharpley, R. The Consumption of Tourism Revisited. In Robinson etal (Eds) Reflections on International Tourism – Motivations Behaviours and Tourist Types. Business Education Publications Ltd: Sunderland.
Swarbrooke, J. & Horner, S. (1997) Consumer Behaviour in Tourism. Elsevier: Oxford. (Chapter 7) (there is now a 2nd edition also)
Wickens, E. (2002). The Sacred and The Profane: A Tourist Typology. Annals of Tourism Research. Vol 29. No 3. pp
Wickens, E. (2000). Rethinking Tourists’ Experience. In Robinson etal (Eds) Reflections on International Tourism – Motivations Behaviours and Tourist Types. Business Education Publications Ltd: Sunderland.