Codes of Conduct in Tourism

Recent years have seen a rising tide of codes of conduct for use in the tourist industry. These have been produced by a variety of organisations having different roles in the industry, and are aimed at the tourists themselves, operators within the industry, host governments and host communities. The core of this paper is a discussion, with examples, of codes aimed at, respectively, the tourist, the industry and the hosts. A number of issues raised by the analysis are discussed. Specifically, these issues are the monitoring and evaluation of codes of conduct (or lack of these), the use of codes as a form of marketing, the regulation or voluntary self-regulation of the use of codes and the variability between codes and the resulting need for coordination. On all of these issues the need for future research is clear.