The Visitor Economy

Tourism has become a popular concept and a word we use quite frequently in our everyday lives. We have all been tourists in one form or another, even if we do not realise it straight away. An interesting fact is that even students can be considered tourists as long as they spend no more than one consecutive year in their education destination of choice. With the advances in the global transport, the world is becoming smaller and more accessible than ever. Tourism is a reflection of escapism – that dream experience most people at work or university are constantly thinking of.

Although often unnoticed, tourism has a profound impact on economic, environmental and social aspects of destinations and their host communities. In this sense, a new concept, with a particular focus on the economic impacts of tourists and visitors within a destination has emerged - the visitor economy! It appears that despite it has been widely used by governmental bodies, businesses and non-for-profit organisations, the concept of the visitor economy is relatively unexplored - it lacks clarity and understanding. And I had not realised that until I started working on a journal article discussing the dimensions of both concepts.

Some tourism gurus representing the academia believe that tourism and the visitor economy is the same thing. They are not, however, interchangeable words, and I will try to explain why. Tourism may be seen as a driver of opportunities and threats brought by tourists in a destination. Such tourism-related impacts contribute to organisations being directly involved with the sector (e.g. the hospitality industry, tourist attractions). The wider visitor economy in contrast, is focusing solely on economic impacts of tourism and importantly, visitor activity – revenue brought by day visitors in destinations. Why is it wider then?

In addition to visitors, the visitor economy also takes into consideration the broader set of organisations having an impact on/being impacted by tourism, both directly and indirectly thus involving stakeholders further in the tourism supply chain. In other words, the visitor economy aims to capture tourism and visitor impacts over communities, businesses, and organisations, which are not directly involved in the delivery of tourism products and services. They, however, have been having an important tourism-supporting role - although, often being overlooked by destination managers and industry policymakers. Clearly these indirect, supportive agents can be linked to local economic development and thus, the emerging visitor economy concept.   

In regional frameworks, the visitor economy is of particular importance to some of England’s nine regions. An example here is Northwest, where day visits make up 90 per cent of the regional visitor economy and Cheshire East, where day visitors account for 84 per cent of all tourism and visitor receipts. In this sense, we can argue that the visitor economy is fundamental to destinations where day visitors dominate as opposed to tourists staying overnight. Visitors are to offer many far-flowing, multi-scale benefits and contribute to the broader economy - in this case creating employment opportunities, attracting inward investment, infrastructure development, community regeneration and wellbeing, urban renewal alike.

Meanwhile, the forthcoming VisitEngland’s Visitor Economy Conference 2013 in December goal is to emphasise on the raising importance of this evolving concept on a regional scale. Industry champions, businesses and organisations across the public and private sector are thus encouraged to provide input into the debate of what constitutes the visitor economy and ways of effectively capturing related opportunities. If visitors are to provide many, far-flowing benefits, the next step would imply local authorities and enterprise partnerships take on-board the wider concept and align their agendas with it, and this is expected to happen in the not-too-distant future. 

About the Author: Deyan Hristov

Deyan is a Graduate Academic Assistant at the University of Bedfordshire Business School, where he has been engaged in various research projects. He joined the Business School in January 2013 and has also been working towards completing his PhD in organisational change since then.