Moscardo, Gianna, Jin, Haipeng, and Murphy, Laurie (2025) The Evolving Tourism Marketplace: Changing Tourist Shopping Markets. In: Timothy, Dallen J., (ed.) Contemporary Perspectives on Shopping, Retail and Tourism. Channel View Publications, Bristol, United Kingdom, pp. 57-77.

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Abstract

Global mass tourism is a relatively recent phenomenon emerging at the start of the twenty first century with the rise of budget airlines, aircraft capable of longer flights with larger capacities, globalization and decreased travel restrictions and the enthusiasm of Chinese consumers to take up opportunities for international travel (Buckley et al., 2015). While tourism has a much longer history the scale and diversity of truly global mass tourism is limited to the last 30 years. Although this is not a long time in any historical context it does mean that at a large proportion of the world’s human population have never lived without global tourism. Not surprisingly then a question asked at a tourism academic conference in 2019 about imagining a world without international tourism resulted in an extensive pause and much consternation. Less than 6 months after this question was posed the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic essentially shut down international travel and much domestic travel. This resulted in an avalanche of academic predictions on the future of tourism, many of which have not yet been subjected to any critical analysis. These discussions fell into two main categories- once the pandemic was under control tourism would/should return to its pre-pandemic levels and quickly grow beyond those, or tourism would/should return but in a much-changed form (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020). While to date neither of these two extremes appear to be correct, on closer inspection with more critical analysis, changing trends and emerging forces for change can be identified.

This chapter seeks to explore these changing trends and emerging forces and their impact on tourist shopping markets. For the purposes of this chapter tourist shopping will be defined “as a recreational activity in which tourists browse, select and purchase goods to take home during their travel” (Jin et al., 2017, p. 121). This definition includes people who take shopping focussed tours/trips as well as tourists who buy personal items and souvenirs as part of a trip. There is considerable overlap between leisure shopping and tourism. Both are hedonic, recreational activities that involve discretionary expenditure (Backstrom, 2011). For some leisure shopping is a prime feature of tourist activities and for others the two phenomena are substitutes for each other. After outlining key trends and forces in both the retail shopping and tourism systems, the chapter will use social practice theory from sociology as the basis for identifying and analysing changing and emerging tourist shopping markets It will conclude the analysis with some initial implications for both research into tourist shopping and for tourism practitioners.

Item ID:	84793
Item Type:	Book Chapter (Research - B1)
ISSN:	9781845418823
Keywords:	Tourist shopping; social practice theory; futures; emerging tourist markets
Related URLs:	https://doi.org/10.21832/TIMOTH8830
Copyright Information:	Copyright© 2025 Dallen J. Timothy and the authors of individual chapters.
Date Deposited:	04 Mar 2025 02:10
FoR Codes:	35 COMMERCE, MANAGEMENT, TOURISM AND SERVICES > 3508 Tourism > 350806 Tourist behaviour and visitor experience @ 100%
SEO Codes:	11 COMMERCIAL SERVICES AND TOURISM > 1104 Tourism services > 110402 Socio-cultural issues in tourism @ 100%
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