This is another of those books intended as an overview of an academic area, with commissioned articles across a wide range of topics within the field designated in the title. I am not criticising the concept, having contributed to a few myself in my time, but the form does raise questions as to why another one, what is special about this one, and how do you review such things (without invoking the clichéd “curate's egg”)?
The bare facts first: the book is over 900 pages and has 38 articles after an introductory overview. It has sections on:
the demand for touring (five articles);
the supply of tourist services (five articles);
studies of particular segments of the tourist industry (six articles);
cost-benefit analysis, public economics and tourism (three articles);
inter-industry features of tourism, tourism satellite accounts (four articles);
international economic issues and tourism (three articles);
studies of the contribution of tourism to economic development (five articles); and
environmental and conservation matters involving tourism (seven articles).
The authors range from (hopefully without offending anyone) leading established scholars like Stephen Wanhill, James Mak, Clement Tisdell and Larry Dwyer, to emerging and new authors.
The editor positions the book in the context of the, relatively recent, massive expansion of knowledge of tourism economics and advances in techniques used. So a prime purpose is to make accessible a reasonably comprehensively overview of this knowledge in tourism economics.
The subtitle – “analysis, new applications and case studies” – gives a clearer idea of the scope and interest of the book than perhaps the main title does. The book is certainly not a text book, nor a unified guide to the state of the art of developments across the field of tourism economics. Each article stands alone with its own theory development and notation. More than a third of the articles are case studies or destination specific applications. There is nothing (except if it comes up in a case study) on forecasting, pricing, special events or specifically devoted to taxing tourism. The two articles on hotels look at the particular aspects of internationalisation and China. On the other hand there are more general overview articles on topics such as CGE models, cost-benefit analysis, visitor attractions, air transport and trade globalisation. Some chapters are solid, useful reviews of an area that could be read as chapters in an advanced text book.
With so many articles on such a variety of topics, they vary in interest and quality. Each reader will have their own interests reflected more in some sections and chapters than others: for me, the sections on tourism satellite accounts and international economic issues were particularly readable overviews of key areas of analysis.
Looking more closely at my own main area of interest, tourism demand modelling, provides an interesting example of the strengths and weaknesses of this book. The two articles on tourism demand note that most tourism demand studies have involved single equation models (for an origin-destination pair), but dismiss this strand of studies as suffering “limitations” and concentrate on systems models, in particular the almost ideal demand system (AIDS). This I think gives a flavour of the style and contribution of the Handbook, which is to say that it does not provide a full coverage that might be wanted of a reference book, but does give current research articles on the topics chosen. As such, it often appears as to be a very large edition of a journal on the topic of tourism economics.
