Beyond Destinations—Special Interest Tourism

This paper explores the contention that the next frontier in the tourism development process lies beyond the highly packaged destination-based tourism product within the realms of Special Interest Tourism (SIT). It focuses on the underlying conceptual foundations for this contention and initiates the process of differentiating between ‘general’ and ‘special’ interest tourism and tourists by proposing both a general ‘Tourism Continuum’ and a new typology of special interest tourists. Finally, it also contains the results from an exploratory survey on UK Outbound special interest tourists which was designed to empirically explore many of the basic ideas and propositions developed from the earlier conceptual work.