Ouverture de 'Global Tourism in Global Markets'

Abstract

For a long time, tourism has been to many scholars of management a less than optimal choice in their academic and research strategies. Some of them would have probably even denied to tourism the status of “industry”. Even economists, including scholars of development, looked at tourism with skepticism. Low-tech, seasonal, knowledge-unintensive tourism was the worst of the possible post-industrial outcomes and no serious economic policy could be based on it. This scenario has changed very rapidly in recent years. Both internationally and in Italy, the number of scholars, institutes, journals, publications and teaching programs dealing with tourism has increased, involving several disciplines. Globalisation has also established new horizons in terms of tourism variety and development, encouraging the emergence of new tourist profiles. The traditional mass tourism model. has greatly changed, generating tourism supply and demand systems characterized by flexible production, organization and consumption models (dominated by the internet, the sharing economy, low-cost travel, B&Bs, etc.).