The role of transport in tourism development: nodal functions and management practices

Abstract

OUTLINE OF THE RESEARCHAlthough most of the tourism literatureacknowledges transport as one of the most significant factors to have contributed to the development of tourism world-wide(steamships and the steam trains in the nine-teenth century, cars and coaches in the 1950sand wide-bodied jets after the 1970s), there hasbeen little research undertaken on the preciserelationship between transport and tourism.Analysing the existing tourism transport lit-erature, it is possible to highlight some trends,such as:(1) most of the existing research has been con-ducted from a single discipline perspective(economics, geography, management, psy-chology or sociology), without a multidis-ciplinary approach;(2) studies usually concentrate on only onemode of transport, predominantly airtransport — in addition, apart from rareexceptions such as Owen (1991) and Stubbsand Jegede (1998), intermodalism amongthe different modes of transports is seldomconsidered;(3) some types of partnership (marketing, promotion, alliances, loyalty programmes,CRS) between transport and tourism com-panies are still to be considered, principallysuppliers other than airlines and hotelchains (Lafferty and Fossen, 2001);(4) although many studies about transportnetworks focus on hubs, Bowen (2000) isone of the few researchers to illustrate how international hubs, such as Bangkokand Singapore, took advantage of transit-ing traffic concentration to develop theirtourism markets — other nodal functionssuch as gateways and their impacts ontourism are still to be considered.This PhD research seeks to fill this literaturegap through taking a multidisciplinary andintermodal perspective, and by consideringdifferent types of partnerships between thetourism and transport sectors and the contri-bution of gateways to tourism development.