Conceptualizing tourist typologies: traditional approaches versus advanced tracking technologies

Abstract

Essentially, there is an attempt to categorize populations into broad behavioral groupings derived mainly from quantitative data which highlighted the causes and effects specifically factors encouraging one to take a trip. These causes and effects are the predictions of expressed tourist behavior such as ‘what’ and ‘why’. Why people choose to visit a certain tourism attraction and what impact result from this visit. Recently, there is an increasing recognition amongst both academics and marketers that an understanding of tourism as a social phenomenon requires the construction of tourist typologies. These typologies are important in order to represent an attempt to increase the knowledge of tourist behavior. Thus, it is essential to analyze the role of tourist behavior and tourist typologies in order to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of the marketing activities especially in the urban area which seems to be more complex to be defined and understood. However, tourist typologies have also been claimed as too simplified in details about how the tourist actually behave (Hall, 2005). Thus, there is a need to develop the tourist typologies in a more complex manner in order to understand more clearly how the tourist behave and how they incline to use the space in an urban destination. This including moving beyond simplistic typologies from traditional methodology towards a more analytically flexible conceptualization that allows exploration of the assumptions implicit in the ‘tourist gaze’, the tourist ‘destination’, the marketing ‘image’, the ‘visit’ (Wearing and Wearing, 2001). Therefore, a suggested new model in terms of new methodological approached may provide better account for the significant range and diversity of tourist experiences. At this point of view, tourism is mainly a geographic activity. Most of the information needed in tourism planning is spatial, indicating where and how extensive the tourism resources are, how intensively the resources are used and so on. Hence, the advancement of tracking technologies development offers an opportunity to further and expand the nature of understanding the tourist particularly in urban destination. Apart from that, deeper understanding of tourists’ behavior may also help the researcher the ability to create typologies of tourists based on their spatial behavior and enhance non-spatial typologies by characterizing types of tourists’ spatial activity.