Fragmenting tourism: niche tourists

Tourism, a global socio-economic phenomenon, is freely used as a broad generic term that covers a broad continuum of tourism and other travel related mobilities, comprising tourist and visitor activities and experiences serviced by a travel and tourism industry as well as host destinations. While always acknowledged as a fragmented industry, increased global tourist arrivals and international tourism expenditure has seen many large commercial and public sector organizations address Western-centric societies through mass undifferentiated marketing; targeting entire marketplaces such as specific countries or regions with ‘one size fits all’ holidays. Broad-brush marketing often announced the existence of a destination or a packaged tourism product and how they are to be performed, often presenting potential tourists with certain kinds of limited knowledge about tourism spaces, peoples and pasts; a process that often did not distribute the benefits of tourism to a large cross section of those societies. Such marketing approaches can create a cluttered, untargeted environment in which tourists become part of indiscernible ‘mass markets’, which may overlook other ‘niche markets’ and ensure that many legitimate businesses fail to meet customer needs in the provision of tourist products and services. While other industries have seen a paradigm shift from ‘mass markets’ to ‘mass niches’, reflecting fragmenting industries and niche consumption, this chapter investigates if a paradigm shift or nudge has occurred within tourism. By focusing on changing supply and demand issues, this chapter asks whether tourism marketing has adapted to more demanding specific interests, when such interests coalesce into coherent niche tourism markets determined to be treated as ‘special’