Entrepreneurship und Tourismus

1. Introduction

For the purposes of this chapter, a trend will be considered as an observable pattern of tourists’ consumer behaviour which diverges from the existing state of established activity. In a more statistical sense, trends are often referred to as probabilistic outcomes with a 90 % likelihood of being detected again. This statistical kind of definition captures some of the flavour of the present interest in that it indicates shifts and directions of some substance rather than a fine grained presentation of every dynamic nuance in the globally complex consumer behaviour market. The scope and scale of the interest in tourist consumer behaviour in this chapter is conceived at a global and cross-continental level rather than confining the interest to local and regional circumstances.

The evidence used for the content of this chapter is built on a layered approach to the available data and sources. At the macro scale of analysis some initial guidance for the discussion is provided by the UNWTO (2015) data concerning global tourist movements. These figures, which describe rather than explain movement patterns, and are useful to highlight shifts of substance which are occurring i...