What is a tourist? How do you define the term tourist? Is there a widely accepted tourist definition?
When people are and are not tourists is not always clear. Is someone a tourist when they take a one-hour train journey to London for the afternoon? Are they a tourist when they stay with a grandparent in Scotland for a week? There is no simple answer to these questions.
This article explores the question ‘what is a tourist?’ by looking at definitions of tourism and tourists, the official UN Tourism definition and the debate about tourists and travellers.
What is tourism?
To understand what a tourist is, it is first necessary to understand the concept of tourism.
As explained in the article on the definitions of tourism, tourism is a term that has no universally accepted definition. Tourism is the generic term used to cover both demand and supply that has been adopted in a variety of forms and used throughout the world.
Tourism essentially refers to the activities undertaken by visitors, also known as the visitor economy. The tourism industry encompasses all activity that takes place within the visitor economy.
This includes activities that are directly related to the tourist, such as staying in a hotel, ordering a meal or visiting a tourist attraction. It also includes indirect activities, such as the transport company which delivers the food to the restaurant in which the tourist eats or the laundry company that has a contract with the hotel for cleaning bed sheets.
It is largely because of these indirect contributions that defining and measuring the tourism industry is so difficult.
Tourism comes in many different shapes and sizes and there are many different types of tourism. There is mass tourism, niche tourism and special interest tourism. There is domestic tourism and international tourism. There is inbound tourism and outbound tourism.
Video: What is tourism? A definition of tourism
What is a tourist?
A tourist is a product of tourism. Tourists are the people who take part in tourist activities. Tourists are important stakeholders of tourism.
There are many things that the average person associates with tourists, such as:
- lying on a beach
- drinking cocktails/beer/alcohol
- visiting major tourist attractions
- staying in a hotel
- visiting a place with a different climate
- packing a suitcase
- flying on an aeroplane
- getting a suntan
According to UN Tourism (formerly the UNWTO), a visitor is someone who travels to a main destination outside their usual environment, for less than a year, for any main purpose (business, leisure or other personal purpose) other than to be employed by a resident entity in the place visited. A visitor is classified as a tourist (or overnight visitor) if their trip includes an overnight stay, and as a same-day visitor (or excursionist) if it does not. This is the definition most often cited in the academic literature and used for official statistics, but in practice it is not applied consistently.
The lack of consistency is problematic. For example, when international tourism collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, China reported that its domestic tourism industry was recovering strongly.
The important question here is: what counts as a tourist? How did China, and other countries around the world, measure tourist numbers?
Is the person who lives in Shanghai a tourist when they go to The Bund for the afternoon? Are they a tourist when they take a day trip to Hangzhou? Are they a tourist when they go to stay with their aunty in Sanya?
This is not a uniquely Chinese issue, but a global one. Without consistent rules about who is and isn’t a tourist, comparing tourism numbers between countries is very difficult. Factors such as the definition of ‘usual environment’, minimum distances travelled and whether same-day trips are included all vary.
In practice, there is no universally applied rule about who is a tourist and who is not a tourist. Yes, there are academic debates discussing tourist typologies (e.g. Leiper, Cohen, Urry, Uriely, Wickens), but these don’t answer the basic underlying question of who is a tourist.
McCabe’s paper ‘Who is a tourist? A critical review’ does not provide definitive answers to this problem, but offers a useful critical review underpinned by sociological debates and concepts. The paper can be read here.
Tourist or traveller?
In recent years, the word ‘tourist’ has developed something of a bad reputation. Tourists are often portrayed negatively, for example as lazy, uninformed or disrespectful of local cultures.
This view is not limited to the general public; it also exists within the academic community. In the tourism literature, tourists are represented in an overwhelmingly negative light, and often in critical or sociological studies in deference to more ‘superior’ forms of travel- such as backpacking.
A common view online is that ‘the tourist is bad and the traveller is good’.
Most claims to differentiate between the two state that travellers are good- kinder to the environment, think more, travel slowly (i.e. backpackers), engage in cultural tourism. Tourists, on the other hand, are associated with negative connotations, such as enclave tourism, economic leakage in tourism, lazing around on the beach, being drunk, taking too many photographs.
However, this distinction does not stand up to scrutiny. So-called ‘travellers’ are staying away from home for a period of time, visiting places for leisure or business, and visiting tourist attractions.
By any formal definition, then, self-described ‘travellers’ are also tourists.
What appears to have happened is that people have tried to differentiate between different types of tourists by using the terms ‘traveller’ and ‘tourist’. Yet academics have already developed many typologies to do exactly this.
Within the academic community there have been many differentiations made between types of tourists. From Plog’s allocentric and psychocentric tourist typology to Cohen’s mass tourists, explorers and drifters, alongside many other studies examining tourist behaviours and motivations, clear differentiations between types of tourists have been made.
However, these typologies are not mainstream knowledge and outside of academia, most people will never have heard of this research. As such, tourists themselves have developed their own basic typology. The problem is that both groups are, in reality, tourists.
One way to address this would be to use more neutral terms – for example, ‘explorer’ instead of ‘traveller’ and ‘holidaymaker’ instead of ‘tourist’. This acknowledges that both groups are tourists, but that they experience tourism in different ways.
Tourist definition
The definition of a tourist is clearly contested. This makes comparability and accurate measurement of the scale of the tourism industry difficult. While there have been calls for a universally applied definition, this is unlikely to happen on a global scale any time soon.
A useful working definition that draws together the points above is:
‘A tourist is a person who travels away from where they live to partake in leisure or business [tourism] activities for a specified period of time. Types of tourists vary and tourists can sit anywhere along the spectrum between allocentric explorers and mass organised holidaymakers.’
What is a tourist? To conclude
We are all tourists at some time or another. Whether we take a trip to the seaside in our own country or whether we travel to the other side of the world to be volunteer tourists, there are many different types of tourism and many different types of tourists.
For more on this topic, see the articles on the definition of tourism and Cohen’s tourist typology.
What is a tourist: FAQs
Below are answers to some of the most common questions about tourists.
What is the official definition of a tourist?
According to UN Tourism, a tourist is an overnight visitor: someone who travels outside their usual environment for less than a year, for any main purpose other than being employed in the place visited, and stays at least one night.
What is the difference between a tourist and a same-day visitor?
A tourist stays at least one night at the destination, while a same-day visitor (or excursionist) travels and returns home on the same day.
What is the difference between a tourist and a traveller?
In popular use, ‘traveller’ is often used to describe independent, longer-term or more adventurous tourists, but by formal definitions both travellers and tourists are tourists.
Why is it hard to define a tourist?
Countries use different criteria for usual environment, distance travelled, length of stay and purpose of trip, which makes tourism statistics hard to compare.
Do business travellers count as tourists?
Yes. Under the UN Tourism definition, business trips count as tourism, provided the traveller is not employed by an entity in the place they visit.
Further reading
If you found this article helpful, the following posts may also be of interest:
- A definition of tourism
- Types of tourists
- Cohen’s tourist typology
- Plog’s model of allocentricity and psychocentricity
- Types of tourism glossary
- Stakeholders in tourism
