Activities

There is cur­rently no widely accepted def­i­n­i­tion of the term tourist des­ti­na­tion. From the tourism indus­try sup­ply per­spec­tive a des­ti­na­tion is usu­ally defined by a geo-polit­i­cal bound­ary, given des­ti­na­tion mar­ket­ing is most com­monly funded by gov­ern­ments. From the trav­eler per­spec­tive, a des­ti­na­tion might be per­ceived quite differently.

A tourist des­ti­na­tion is a city, town, or other area that is depen­dent to a sig­nif­i­cant extent on the rev­enues accru­ing from tourism, or “a coun­try, state, region, city, or town which is mar­keted or mar­kets itself as a place for tourists to visit”. It may con­tain one or more tourist attrac­tions and pos­si­bly some “tourist traps.” Siem Reap town for exam­ple is a pop­u­lar tourist des­ti­na­tion in Cam­bo­dia, mainly owed to its prox­im­ity to Angkor temples.

A trop­i­cal island resort is an island or arch­i­pel­ago that also depends on tourism as its source of rev­enue. The Bahamas in Caribbean arch­i­pel­ago, Bali in Indone­sia, Phuket in Thai­land, Hawaii in the United States, Palawan in the Philip­pines, and Fiji in the Pacific, Vamizi Island, San­torini and Ibiza in Mediter­ranean are exam­ples of pop­u­lar island resorts.