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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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.

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?

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…

Further Reading Typologies Cohen, E. (1972). Toward a sociology of International Tourism. Social Research. 39: pp164-89. Cohen, E. (1979). A Phenomonology of Tourist Experiences. Sociology. 13: 179-201. McCabe, S (2005). Who is A Tourist? Tourist Studies. Vol 5 (1) pp85-106. 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. pp834-851. Wickens, E. (2000). Rethinking Tourists’ Experience. In Robinson etal (Eds) Reflections on International Tourism – Motivations Behaviours and Tourist Types. Business Education Publications Ltd: Sunderland.