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Tourism in Western Europe: A Collection of Case Histories. Richard Voase (Editor). UK: CABI Publishing, 2002.
Richard Voase provides an interesting collection of case studies regarding Western European tourism development. The case studies are well organized in three thematic areas based on political, economic and sociocultural contexts. The collection of stories communicates changes in tourism development and practices and reflects how tourism development seeks for new ways of tourism thinking. Voase concludes that tourism experiences, on the part of travelers, show signs of active decision making with passive consumption. This point prompts the reader to think that tourists choose "canned" experiences that are creatively constructed, however accessed through extensive information search and decision-making.
The case studies are authored by a variety of authors with strong local ties to the place they write about which enables extraordinary insight into issues the tourism industry faces in Europe and North America (although North America is not the focus of this book). This book can be used in a tourism development course to help students identify current issues in tourism (e.g., environmental challenges, sustainability, conservation approaches) and build upon definitions and theoretical models in tourism.
In his introduction, Voase conveys that the analysis or interpretation of the cases is based on political, economic, socio-cultural and technological environments. The analysis, captures the multidimensionality of the tourism product and the cultural and social factors that relate to current ideologies, which affect how tourism evolves. Such ideologies are relating to prevalent postmodernism approaches that seem to affect those consumer behaviors, which capture experiential consumption rather than production processes of products or services.
The book consists of eleven chapters. The first four chapters are approached under the lenses of a political context analysis. The first chapter, by Meethan, presents the role of tourism marketing and public policy in the counties of Devon and Cornwall, England. Meethan concludes that for these two counties "marketing was one aspect of a wider integrated policy which aims to incorporate tourism more fully into the regional economy" (p. 39) and these programs would not have been possible without the funding from the European Union (EU). "The cases of Devon and Cornwall also demonstrate how new organizational forms emerge as a response to wider structural changes" (p. 39).
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