Typology, tourist

In general, typology is the study of types; it has been applied to studies in many fields. For example, a typology in anthropology may refer to the division of culture by races, and in archaeology a typology can be a classification of artifacts according to their characteristics. The grouping of individuals has a very long history and dates back to Hippocrates’ typology of people based on physical attributes in the fifth century BC. The development of tourist typology has benefited from the increasing attention paid to the categorization of consumers (market segmentation) within business contexts and, since the middle of the twentieth century, the growing concerns with the economic, environmental, and sociocultural impacts of the rapid development of mass tourism on host communities.

Development

Erik Cohen (1972) is considered as the first tourism scholar to have developed a touristtypology from a sociological and conceptual perspective. He conceptualized a typology of international...