The Advance of Film Tourism

Understanding the development of tourism knowledge and research’s contribution is an important process that enables us to see where we are, have been and are going. The articles in this special edition of Tourism and Hospitality Planning and Development come together to present a state-of-the-art outline of knowledge in the relatively recent field of film-induced tourism as well as furthering that knowledge. In Tribe’s commentary on the historic dominance of the business paradigm in tourism research, he notes that it is moving from “the narrow boundaries of an applied business field. . .[towards] a fledgling post-modern field of research” (Tribe, 2005, p. 5). The emerging field of film tourism research invites multi-disciplinary post-modern study, which has moved from simply considering business and marketing aspects towards approaches incorporating multiple disciplinary perspectives. In her paper in this edition, Angelina Karpovich frames this by examining the range of terms used to describe the various approaches to studying the relationship between film and tourism, arguing that such differences are primarily disciplinary based. This situation also reflects a lack of cross-disciplinary fertilization and collaboration—an issue I have also commented on elsewhere. One of the goals of this special edition is to bring together researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds under the banner of “planning and development” and facilitate a more inclusive understanding of what each discipline can bring to this field. Early work into film-induced tourism from the tourism discipline primarily focused on the numbers of people visiting the places featured in movies, aiming to provide evidence of the significance of this new field of study. Riley, Tooke, Baker and van Doren are generally acknowledged as the first to publish in this field (Riley and van Doren, 1992; Riley, 1994; Tooke and Baker, 1996; Riley, Baker and van Doren, 1998), however some speculative work was already being undertaken by researchers in other disciplines. This included an interesting paper by Kindem (1979) discussing the difficulties of predicting a film’s popularity through simply using factors such as economics, proposing that semiotics, ideology and psychology come into play. However, it has taken some time and a great deal of “grounding” work before Kindem’s approach has been realized, but can be seen emerging from this special edition. Tourism and Hospitality Planning & Development Vol. 7, No. 1, 1–6, February 2010