It is suggested that transport practitioners know little about tourism and understand even less. Yet it is important that they do know and understand a good deal more, because tourism drives a number of key transport issues with which policymakers and planners are grappling today - in the UK and in Europe. Tourism is defined (for statistical and planning purposes) asall non-regular journeys away from home for more than 4 hours. Tourism does not usually feature in urban or regional transport planning models, which tend to focus on regular travel, and urban or regional journeys. Policies, plans and commercial decisions about long distance transport networks potentially affect all long distance travel. It is suggested that the behaviour and response of long distance travellers will differ profoundly whether they are on a tourism trip or an unrelated long distance journey. Typically the travel component in total tourism expenditure is 15-25%, depending on whether the trip is domestic or international. Any tourism visit, however - especially one involving overnight stays - will typically involve an outward and return trip to the destination area, together with trips locally within the destination area. Tourism travel is fundamentally different from day-to-day travel, the preoccupation of transport planners concerned with urban and regional transport. Tourism travel is the most income elastic type of travel, and globally it is the fastest growing. Tourism travel is part of an overall tourism visit and experience, the economic value of which is usually significant for the destination. Tourism travel usually embodies two quite different elements of travel - the GTB (Getting thereand back), and the TAD (Travel around the destination) which exhibit different characteristics, different impact on transport networks, and requiredifferent strategies to address and manage them The impact of tourism travel on networks whether GTB or TAD is highly specific, and very different from that of DTD travel. Decisions about tourism travel are integral to the wider decisions about the whole tourism visit and experience, which are determined by many other factors than those relating to travel and transport. In general, tourism destinations/experiences are relatively substitutable - that is not to say that they are not unique in themselves, but that the potential visitor will bring many factors to bear in making choices. As a result much tourism travel can and does seem very sensitive to price, time and convenience factors - to 'generalised cost' in other words. Tourism travel has been found very difficult to model or forecast at the generic level, which makes it difficult to assess or evaluate policies to manageit, except at the most local level where problem-led approaches can be perfectly effective. Tourism travel - or long distance travel generically - has been successfully analysed and modelled on a modal basis, e.g. for rail in the UK and for aviation, but there is a scarcity of analyses of multi-modal long distance and tourism travel. Tourism is usually benign in its economic impacts and positive for economic sustainability of the communities involved, particularly for rural and poorer areas; there can be both positive and negative impacts on social and community sustainability. However tourism scores negatively for environmental sustainability, as it is thedominant journey purpose in air travel, and therefore the most significant (per head) and fastest growing driver of global carbon emissions. Any measures to address this, especially in aviation, should reflect the high substitutability of tourism product/experiences rather than be based simply on modal taxes. The author's own view is that personal carbon trading, based on universal individual carbon allowances used for 'buying' travel and home energy consumption, is likely to be the most effective way of managing down carbon emissions generated by personal travel, while still enablingwide choices to be made in tourism experiences. For the covering abstractsee ITRD E135582.
Abstract