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Air travel is deeply intertwined with tourism, yet the notion of “aviation tourism” remains conceptually fragmented, particularly in relation to General Aviation (GA). Although the study was initially designed as a Systematic Literature Review, the application of the protocol yielded a small and highly heterogeneous corpus hindering surfacing the possibilities associated with aviation tourism. Consequently, the review approach was extended through a problematizing review allowing us to theorize the term “aviation tourism”. Based on an in-depth analysis of how “aviation tourism” has been conceptualized in the relevant literature, we propose a typology of six ideal types of tourism related to GA: (1) GA tourism as a GA-based tourism domain, (2) aviation tourism as scenic or experiential flight, (3) aero-sports and low-altitude recreational aviation, (4) aeronautical heritage and route-based tourism, (5) commercial and academic-field framings of aviation tourism, and (6) GA as infrastructure and airport/system with tourism in the background. The typology links engagement, ontological and epistemological status, degree and logic of integration as well as equipment as elements of conceptualizing aviation tourism. Revealing and juxtaposing these types shows an inconsistent conceptual field, in which “aviation tourism” oscillates between different meanings such as infrastructure, product, sport, heritage and industry label. We contribute to the tourism and air-transport related studies by revisiting the GA aviation literature to unpack this field and set an agenda for more coherent theorization, targeted policy design and future empirical research on GA-related tourism.
Kitsos et al. (Wed,) studied this question.