Tourism Industry
OVERVIEW

Introduction

This tutorial is designed to help you begin researching the Tourism industry. The Tourism industry encompasses many interrelated businesses, including airlines, car rental firms, cruise line operators, lodging establishments, restaurants, theme parks & attractions, tour operators, travel agents, and so on.

However, this tutorial will mainly focus on the strictly travel-related aspects of Tourism, since the Food, Lodging, MICE, and Theme Park industries are covered in separate tutorials.

According to the US Travel Association publication US Travel Answer Sheet, domestic and international travelers spent $704 billion in the U.S. in 2009. This generated 10.1 million jobs, $186 billion in payroll income, and $113 billion in tax revenues.
 

The Tourism industry is studied heavily by academic scholars. A wide variety of information — news, brief articles, statistics, scholarly books and articles — is available to the accomplished researcher. This tutorial will help you unlock some of that valuable information.

Topic Selection

A good topic for an academic project is one that interests you, fulfills the parameters of the assignment, and is researchable.  The following guidelines may assist you in choosing an appropriate Tourism topic:

Try to choose a "manageable" topic that is not too broad or too narrow for the assignment.

For example, marketing cruise vacations is probably too broad of a topic for a ten-page research paper.  You would quickly be overwhelmed with thousands of relevant books and articles on such a topic, way too many to use in a ten-page paper.

On the other hand, Carnival Cruise Lines' use of brochures to establish a brand identity is probably too narrow for such a paper.  You would have difficulty finding information in trade or scholarly books and articles on such a specialized topic.

in this scenario, you might eventually refine your topic to something more manageable, such as brand differentiation among cruise line operators.  A librarian or professor can also help you identify suitable topics in your area of interest.

Identify concepts associated with your topic: these are relevant main keywords and their synonyms and near-synonyms.  For example, for our topic of brand differentiation among cruise line operators , you might identify concepts such as:

• Concept 1: cruise lines... cruise operators...
• Concept 2: brand... branding...
• Concept 3: differentiation... identity...
  

These keywords will be helpful when you search for information on your topic in library catalogs and article databases.  As you do more research, you may add or delete keywords (or even entire concepts) from your search.  Throughout the process, try to remain flexible and be willing to alter the focus of your topic as you learn more about it.