This book offers a practical guide for scenario planning to make sense of the future of tourism for practitioners, researchers and students. It provides an overview of the theoretical development of scenario planning, describes the scenario planning method and puts it into the context of strategic foresight. A variety of scenario planning and futures case studies are presented which demonstrate how scenario planning is used and deployed. Each case study is drawn from the European Tourism Futures Institute’s 12 years of practice, emphasising the different stages of the scenario planning method, and includes learning points and discussion questions to help readers understand key concepts, theories and applications.

This book constructs scenarios from Shanghai to Edinburgh, Seoul to California encompassing complex topics such as human trafficking, conferences, transport, food tourism or technological innovation. This is a blue skies thinking book about the future of tourism and a thought provoking analytical commentary.

By 2030, China will be the world’s largest tourism destination, holidays in Outer Space will be the ultimate luxury experience, extreme Swedish ironing will be an Olympic Sport, embedded technologies will be the norm in future tourists and skiing in the Alps will be no more. These are some of the changes that will occur between now and 2030 that will change world tourism. Tomorrows Tourist: Scenarios & Trends enables readers to imagine what a future tourist might be, where they will go and what they will do. This is the most comprehensive analysis of how world tourism is changing and what it means for destinations. Each chapter consists of a scenario about a future tourist, which is then is backed up with evidence and trends plus a number of assumptions about the future. The book is accompanied by its own website at http://www.tomorrowstourist.com which is owned and regularly updated by the author.

There are increasing concerns over the relationship between tourism and sustainable development. Sustainable Tourism Futures re-assesses the sustainability paradigm and outlines the ways in which sustainable tourism is possible, offering key insights into the fundamental shifts in operations, systems and philosophies that need to take place.

This book presents a systematic and pattern-based explanation of food tourism, focusing on how and why change could occur and what the implications could be. In the future will food tourism involve food grown in the laboratory or a more authentic experience associated with place and history? The book’s approach to the future has focused on explanation; the contributors look for the causes, trends and theoretical concepts that explain change, thus attempting to justify and explore the future. Scenarios are used to explore alternative futures and the book examines the implications for the future of food tourism and highlights future research avenues. This book is primarily aimed at postgraduate students and researchers in the field of tourism studies.

A global industry and an important tool for economic development, international tourism is facing an increasingly uncertain future. Global environmental change, including climate change; increasing fuel prices; and growing criticism from environmental and social interest groups are posing substantial challenges to the belief that international tourism can be sustainable at current rates and patterns of growth. This book therefore aims to answer the questions of if and how tourism can be a sustainable industry. The book concludes that sustainable tourism is possible but that it requires fundamental shifts in operations, systems and philosophies. The various contributions identify a number of means by which this can be accomplished but stress that sustainable tourism still has a long way to travel before it can reach its destination.

This book presents a series of possible future scenarios in wildlife and animal tourism by combining critical thinking and imagination to stimulate reflection and ways forward. The future of wildlife tourism faces uncertainties that revolve around many factors, including climate change, mass wildlife extinction, human population growth, deforestation, sustainability and ethical assumptions. For wildlife tourism to meet these challenges, new ways of thinking are necessary. The chapters in this volume focus on future wildlife tourism development and management; the experiential value, educational components and ethical relevance of tourism–animal encounters; and the technology applied to wildlife tourism. They offer critically-imagined futures in order to encourage readers to reflect on the possibility of shaping a better future. The book will appeal to researchers, students and practitioners in wildlife tourism, environmental studies, sustainability and conservation.