Tourism Marketing in Western Maharashtra and Goa: The Seven A's Strategy

Tourism today, has come to be equated with a worldwide service industry and is ranked as the second-highest revenue-generating industry, next only to the oil industry. Tourism, in its purest sense, is essentially an activity, in which the money earned in one's normal domicile is spent in the places visited. At the same time, it is also an inseparable combination of economic and socio-cultural issues and developmental options. There is no universally accepted definition of tourism and different authors define even today, the term 'tourism' variously. In 1942, the term was technically defined as "the totality of the relationships and phenomena arising from the travel and stay of strangers, provided the stay does not imply the establishment of a permanent residence and is not connected with a remunerated activity".
1) According to this definition, the three essential characteristics of tourism are: (i) non-residents' travel to a particular destination, (ii) non-residents' temporary stay at the destination; and (iii) the stay is not connected with any remunerated activity. In 1952, tourism came to be defined as "a collective term for human movement and its attendant activities caused by the exteriorization and fulfillment of the desire to escape that is more or less latent in everybody".
2) A more workable definition provided by Bernecker reads, "tourism is the sum of the relations and services connected with a temporary and voluntary change of residence for non-commercial or non-professional reasons".
3) On analysis, it is found that the change of residence of a tourist must be (i) voluntary, (ii) of a temporary nature, and (iii) for a non-commercial or non-professional purpose.