Tourism and Transport

Abstract

The interconnectedness between transport and tourism remains perhaps one of the more important relationships within the wider tourism system. It is a fundamental fact that people travel varying distances by various means for a variety of reasons, with transport provision sitting at the heart of that movement. Transport is important for tourism because it a) facilitates the movement of tourists between their place of origin and their destinations, and b) acts as the means of movement within a destination, thus allowing for wider dispersal of visitor movement and, as a result, maximum exposure of visitor flows to areas perhaps not otherwise possible (Page 2009). Transport, for the purposes of tourism, can be expressed as a series of modes operating across vast networks consisting of points (or nodes) and routes (or vectors). Modes of transport can include air, water and land (road and rail), with various types of transport provision possible within these modes. The networks through which modes of transport operate function as important economic conduits for many destinations (Duval 2007). Networks can, of course, be global, such that the movement of tourists (as passengers, for example, on an international airline) constitutes one of the more common means of international visitor arrivals for any given destination. Networks can also function on a regional level. For example, the European Community offers an excellent example of the removal of political and economic barriers to inter-State, regional travel. Finally, local networks, or those networks of transport which operate within a country, are critical in ensuring that the economics benefits of tourism are not simply concentrated in one particular locality. Critically, it is important that local networks are integrated into regional and international networks in order to maximise visitor flows into a destination. As a result, transport can often be the single most important factor in determining the viability of a destination’s tourism sector (Lohmann and Duval, 2014).