refugee arrivals and travel by diplomats and consular representatives. The latter exclusion is related to the fact that embassies and consulates are technically considered to be part of the sovereign territory of the country they represent. The purposes that do qualify as tourism are dominated by three major categories:
1 leisure and recreation 2 visiting friends and relatives 3 business.
Leisure and recreation
Leisure and recreation are just two components within a constellation of related pur- poses that also includes terms such as ‘vacation’, ‘rest and relaxation’, ‘pleasure’ and
‘holiday’. This is the category that usually comes to mind when the stereotypical tourism experience is imagined. Leisure and recreation account for the largest single share of tourist activity at a global level. As depicted in table 2.1, this also pertains to Australia, where ‘holiday’ (the Australian version of the category) constitutes the main single purpose of visits for both domestic and inbound tourists.
Visiting friends and relatives (VFr)
The intent to visit friends and relatives (i.e. VFR tourism) is the second most impor- tant purpose for domestic and inbound tourists in Australia (table 2.1). Backer (2012), however, maintains that the actual magnitude of VFR is underestimated because many tourists staying with friends or family list ‘holiday’ as their purpose. An important management implication of VFR tourism is that, unlike pleasure travel, the destination decision is normally predetermined by the destination of residence of the person who is to be visited. Thus, while the tourism literature emphasises destination choice and the various factors that influence that choice (see chapter 6), the reality is that genuinely
‘free’ choice only exists for pleasure-oriented tourists. Another interesting observation is the affiliation of VFR-dominated tourism systems with migration systems. About one-half of all inbound visitors to Australia from the United Kingdom, for example, list VFR as their primary purpose (as opposed to about one-fifth of inbound tourists in total), and this over-representation is due largely to the continuing importance of the United Kingdom as a source of migrants.
TABLE 2.1 Main reason for trip by inbound and domestic visitors, Australia, 2011–121 Purpose of trip
Domestic tourists Inbound tourists
Number2 % Number2 %
Holiday 7 045 40 2 458 44
Visiting friends and relatives 5 777 32 1 403 25
Business-related 3 866 22 908 16
Other purposes3 1 040 6 830 15
Total 17 728 100 5 599 100
Notes:
1 All visitors 15 years of age and older 2 In thousands
3 Other inbound purposes = education, employment
Source: TRA (2012a, 2012b)
Business
Business is roughly equal to VFR as a reason for tourism-related travel at a global level. Even more so than with the VFR category, business tourists are constrained in their travel decisions by the nature of the business that they are required to undertake.
Assuming that the appropriate spatial and temporal criteria are met, business travel is
a form of tourism only if the traveller is not paid by a source based in the destination.
For example, a consultant who travels from Sydney to Melbourne, and is paid by a company based in Melbourne, would not be considered a tourist. However, if payment is made by a Sydney-based company, then the consultant is classified as a tourist. This stipulation prevents longer commutes to work from being incorporated into tourism statistics, and once again reflects the principle that tourism involves the input of new money from external sources.
There are numerous subcategories associated with business tourism, including consulting, sales, operations, management and maintenance. However, the largest category involves meetings, incentive travel, conventions and exhibitions, all of which are combined in the acronym MICE. Most, but not all, of MICE tourism is related to business. Many meetings and conventions, for example, involve such non-business social activities as school and military reunions. Similarly, exhibitions can be divided into trade and consumer subtypes, with the latter involving participants who attend such events for pleasure/leisure purposes. Incentive tourists are travellers whose trips are paid for all or in part by their employer as a way of rewarding excellent employee performance. In the period from 1 November 2011 to 31 October 2012, 188 400 inbound visitors arrived in Australia to attend conferences or conventions, or about 4 per cent of the total intake (Business Events Australia 2012).
sport
Several additional purposes that qualify a traveller as a tourist are less numerically important than the three largest categories outlined previously, though more impor- tant in certain destinations or regions. Sport-related tourism involves the travel and activities of athletes, trainers and others associated with competitions and training, as well as the tourist spectators attending sporting events and other sport-related venues.
High-profile sporting mega-events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup of football not only confer a large amount of visibility on the host destination and par- ticipating teams, but also involve many participants and generate substantial tourist expenditure and other ‘spin-off’ effects. Sporting competitions in some cases have also been used to promote cross-cultural understanding and peaceful relations between countries and cultures (see chapters 9 and 11).
spirituality
Spiritual motivation includes travel for religious purposes. Pilgrimage activity con- stitutes by far the largest form of tourism travel in Saudi Arabia due to the annual pilgrimage or Hajj to Mecca by several million Muslims from around the world.
Religious travel is also extremely important in India’s domestic tourism sector, accounting for about 170 million visits per year or at least 70 per cent of all domestic tourism (Shinde 2010, 2012). One festival alone, the six-week Maha Kumbh Mela, drew an estimated 100 million Hindu pilgrims to the city of Allahabad in 2013. It is commonly regarded as the world’s biggest event of any type.
More ambiguous is the secular pilgrimage, which blurs the boundary between the sacred and the profane (Digance 2003). The term has been applied to diverse tourist experiences, including commemorative ANZAC events at the Gallipoli battle site in Turkey (Hyde & Harman 2011), as well as visits to Olympic sites (Norman & Cusack, 2012).
Secular pilgrimage is often associated with the New Age movement, which is variably described as a legitimate or pseudoreligious phenomenon. Digance (2003) describes how the central Australian Uluru monolith has become a contested sacred site, in part because of conflicts between Aboriginal and New Age pilgrims seeking privileged access to the site.
health
Tourism for health purposes includes visits to spas, although such travel is often merged with pleasure/leisure motivations (see chapter 3). More explicitly health related is travel undertaken to receive medical treatment that is unavailable or too expensive in the par- ticipant’s home country or region. Such travel is often described as medical tourism (Chambers & McIntosh 2008). Cuba, for example, has developed a specialty in providing low-cost surgery for foreign clients. In Australia, the Gold Coast of Queensland is building a reputation as a centre for cosmetic surgery and other elective medical procedures, in many cases for patients from the Middle East. Many Americans travel to Mexico to gain access to unconventional treatments that are unavailable in the United States.
study
Study, and formal education more broadly, is a category that most people do not intuitively associate with tourism, even though it is a qualifying UNWTO criterion.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom are especially active in attracting foreign students. Although participant numbers may not appear large in relation to the three main categories of purpose, students have a sub- stantial relative impact on host countries because of the prolonged nature of their stay and the large expenditures (including tuition) that they make during these periods of study. For example, international students accounted for about 6 per cent of all inbound arrivals to Australia in 2011–12 but 25 per cent of all visitor-nights, due to an average length of stay of 142 nights. Accordingly, the average expenditure in Australia by international students was $16 027, compared with $3341 for inbound tourists overall (TRA 2012b). Foreign students also benefit Australia by attracting visi- tors from their home country during their period of study, spending money in regional cities such as Ballarat and Albury that otherwise attract few international tourists. They also often return to their country of study as leisure tourists or permanent migrants.
multipurpose tourism
If every tourist had only a single reason for travelling, the classification of tourists by purpose would be a simple task. However, many if not most tourist trips involve multipurpose travel, which can be confusing for data classification and analysis. The current Australian situation illustrates the problem. Departing visitors are asked to state their subsidiary travel purposes as well as their primary purpose for travelling to Australia. It is on the basis of the primary purpose alone that table 2.1 is derived, and policy and management decisions subsequently made. These data, however, may not accurately reflect the actual experiences of the tourists.
Take, for example, a hypothetical inbound tourist who, at the conclusion of a two- week visit, states ‘business’ as the primary trip purpose, and pleasure/holiday and VFR as other purposes. The actual trip of that business tourist may have consisted of con- ference attendance in Sydney over a three-day period, a three-day visit with friends in the nearby town of Bathurst and the remaining eight days at a resort in Port Douglas.
While the primary purpose was business, this is clearly not reflected in the amount of time (and probably expenditure) that the tourist spent on each category of purpose. Yet without the conference, the tourist probably would not have visited Australia at all. On the other hand, if the delegate had no friends in Australia, the country might not have been as attractive as a destination, and the tourist might have decided not to attend the conference in the first place. Thus, there is interplay among the various travel purposes, and it is difficult to establish a meaningful ‘main’ purpose. Backer (2012) argues that
there is a VFR component in 48 per cent of Australian domestic tourism if more broadly conceived, and by this same logic the ‘holiday’ percentage would be much higher again.
A further complication is that people in the same travel group may have different pur- poses for their trip. Our hypothetical conference delegate, for example, may be accom- panied by a spouse who engages solely in pleasure/holiday activities. However, most surveys do not facilitate such multipurpose responses from different members of the same party. Rather, they assume that a single main purpose applies to all members of that group.