Tourism Management 33 (2012) 1288–1291

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Tourism Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ tourman

Book reviews

Drive Tourism. Trends and Emerging Markets, EditedBruce Prideaux, Dean Carson (Eds.). Routledge, London (2011).p. 386, ISBN: 978-0-415-49149-5

Given the significanceof drive tourism inmanyparts of theworld,it isperhaps surprising that this is thefirst academicbook todealwiththis important area of tourism. In this edited book, the term drivetourism is used to describe travel by any form of mechanically-powered, passenger-carrying road transport, with the exclusion ofcoaches and bicycles. Thirty-three authors contribute to 26 chaptersand they use a variety of methodologies to understand the drivetourism phenomenon, ranging from traditional survey research tocognitivemapping. The focus is on drive tourism to and from a desti-nation and on travel between destinations.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part, InternationalTrends, begins with a well-written introductory chapter to drivetourism, where the editors themselves present a drive tourismmodel to help understand the structure and operation of the sector.In the model, the drive experience is shown as occupying a centralposition in the drive tourism system. This experience is influencedby demand and supply factors, the relative importance of pull andpush factors, and by future trends, which include climate change,peak oil, and new technologies. The authors suggest that even ifprivate vehicle ownership rates have peaked in many developednations, the probability is that emerging nations like India andChina have just began their ‘love affairs’ with the car. They arguetherefore that drive tourism needs to be positioned firmly at thecenter of concern for researchers in tourism transport.

The next eight chapters of Part I discuss drive tourism inAustralia, Japan, Brazil, Austria, South Africa and China. Whileperhaps the two chapters pertinent to China could have beencombined into one, they both provide fascinating insights intothe rapid growth of drive tourism in a developing country. WithChina now the third largest motor vehicle market behind the U.S.and Japan, the proliferation of private car ownership has led to anincrease in drive tourism demand. As in China, the drive tourismmarket in Japan is heavily influenced by the preferences for trav-eling in groups, a trend that originated as far back as the tenthcentury. In Chapter 3, Malcolm Cooper puts a spotlight on drivetourism in Japan and profiles the Gold Week holiday period whendriving anywhere in Japan is ‘at best slow and at worst completelyimpossible’!

The second part of the book is labeled Modes of Transport, andincludes chapters on motorcycle riding, rental car fleets, recrea-tional vehicle use, caravanning, and four-wheel-drive tourism. Forme, the twomost interesting chapters in this section perhaps didn’tfit under the label of modes of transport. Chapter 14 by DallenTimothy focuses on drive tourism in the U.S. and could haveappeared in the first part of the book. Timothy points out that drivetourism in the U.S. is both enormous and complex, and forms thebackbone of domestic tourism in the country. Popular with bothdomestic and international tourists, the extensive road and

highway network in the U.S. is conducive to automobile travel,and the number of miles traveled by car has seen a steady growthover the last few decades. Timothy argues that drive tourism shouldnot be discounted as being less important than other forms of travelin the U.S. or elsewhere. He makes the point that drive tourism,more than any other form of travel, is more inclined to spread theeconomic benefits of tourism to more communities and sectors,than all travel undertaken by coach, air, train or sea.

Another important contribution is Chapter 11 by Ali and Carson.The authors discuss the impact of technology on drive tourism.There is no doubt that digital communications and informationtechnology will play a crucial role in the future of drive tourism,and the authors ‘drive’ that point home. Mobile technology, socialmedia platforms and downloadable applications have changedthe way tourists are making decisions, and this will certainlyimpact the drive tourism market. Travelers are increasingly usingapps to create digital itineraries based on their specific interests,and built-in technology in cars continues to evolve.

The third part of this text is called Managing the Drive Market,and focuses mainly on touring routes. Chapter 21 for example, byCarson and Cartan, takes a look at the types, successes and failuresof touring routes. As the authors acknowledge, establishing theconditions under which touring route systems are most likely tosucceed and fail is an important task for self-drive tourismresearchers. Certainly rural and regional areas around the worldare increasingly recognizing self-drive tourism markets as theirmost important markets. But as Carson and Cartan point out, drivetourists are not necessarily an ‘easy’ market to attract, and main-taining effective collaboration among geographically dispersed,small and micro tourism businesses is notoriously difficult.

Chapter25byCarsonandSchmallegger takesanalternative lookattourist routes by providing an ethnographic perspective of the ‘GrandTour’ofCentral andEasternAustralia. Theobjective of this approach isto illustrate the challenges facing destinations and businesses inadjusting to new market dynamics, and to synthesize issues raisedthroughout the book. The authors conclude that destinations needto be aware of the diversity of the global drive tourism markets, andthe nature of emerging trends in how people travel. They found, forexample, that the roles played by destinations along a driving routewere more than often dictated by the ‘rhythm of the trip’, leading toa routine behavior amongst drive tourists that breaks down the illu-sionof ‘independent travel’ and replaces itwith an impression of trav-elers all tied up to the same itinerary and travel pattern.

The last chapter of the book, like thefirst, iswritten by the editorsand provides a good conclusion to the book, recommending themesfor future research in drive tourism. The authors suggest that ourunderstanding of drive tourists as consumers of informationrequires further investigation, particularly as social networkingand mobile technologies continue to expand and evolve. They alsopropose that the economics of drive tourism have not been wellconceptualized, and that beyond expenditure, the economic impli-cations of drive tourism development for destinations are not well

Book reviews / Tourism Management 33 (2012) 1288–1291 1289

understood. The chapter also points to a future characterized bya continued rapid rise in the volume of drive tourism across theglobe – even in the face of rising fuel costs and increasing environ-mental concerns.

If I have to be picky, I would say that the book is not truly globalas is claimed, and has a distinct Australian focus, particularly in thelatter half of the book. But this is understandable given that theeditors both work in that part of the world. Also, as is often thecase with edited books, there is a lack of continuity and inconsis-tency in content. One chapter for example was only three pageslong, and as mentioned earlier, it was unclear why the chapters onU.S. drive tourism and new technologies fell under ‘modes of trans-port’. A stronger introductory chapter could have solved these prob-lems by explaining the structure and flow of the book inmore detail.

Finally, the book could have given some attention to other typesof drive tourism, such as the growing trend of consumers goingoverseas to drive and purchase a new car. Volvo, for example, hasa ‘European Delivery’ program whereby customers from all overthe world can collect their new custom-built Volvo in Sweden,drive it around Europe, and then have it delivered to their homecountry after their return. Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and Audi havesimilar programs across Europe.

But the authors do admit that the book was not meant to be allencompassing –more a starting point for further academic investi-gations of the drive tourism sector in all its forms. So any criticismsor suggestions are minor ones, and the editors should be congratu-lated on putting together a fine compilation of readings.

Simon HudsonUniversity of South Carolina, USA

E-mail address: shudson@hrsm.sc.edu

doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2011.11.015

Events Management, P. Robinson, D. Wale, G. Dickson. CABI,Wallingford (2010). 252 pp., (pbk). £35.00, ISBN-13: 978 1 84593682 2

This title represents a good introductory text to the area ofevents management. It outlines broadly the major concepts relatedto the subject area and introduces the reader to its theoreticalunderpinnings, relating the concepts back to some of the nowclassic sources in this area of study.

The book is structured in 11 chapters and divided into threeparts. The first part of the book serves to contextualize the phenom-enon of events today. To begin with, relevant background informa-tion is provided on the relationship between culture, authenticity,event experience and event impacts, which has not yet beenexplored in such a context. An overview of event developmenttheory is then provided and practicalities of event supply chainsdiscussed. Chapter 3 on supply chains in event management isparticularly useful, as this is an area not often discussed in eventmanagement literature, so it is definitely a strength for this book.

The second part of the book discusses the intricacies of theevents management process from the perspective of events orga-nisers. The different areas and stages of the process are brokendown into manageable parts, thus making it easier to grasp forstudents who are just embarking on their exploration of the subjectarea. Part of the content covered in this part of the book (mostnotably that relating to event delivery, staffing, marketing andquality of the experience) has already been covered to a varyingdegree in a number of other titles published globally. Thus, much

of it feels like repetition of already known facts, with little or noinnovation. However, one particularly strong and beneficial sectionis the chapter on financial management and sponsorship, whichprovides ample examples of financial items specifically applied toevents, as well as a good section on sponsorship. Another inter-esting topic covered in this part is that of sustainability in eventsmanagement, referred to in Chapter 9. This chapter highlights theimpacts events can have and focuses largely on environmentalimpacts of events and as such is a rather one-sided account of theconcept of sustainability. Sustainability covers much more thanjust environmental impacts of events and it would have been usefulto present a more rounded picture centred on the notion of theTriple Bottom Line (Elkington, 1999; Hede, 2007) which is a muchmore current concept that incorporates economic and socio-cultural impacts, in addition to environmental ones. Nonetheless,this chapter represents a much more detailed account of sustain-ability practices related to events than some of the precedingevents-related titles (e.g. Bowdin, Allen, O’Toole, Harris, &McDonnell, 2006; Getz, 2007).

Finally, the third part of the book explores the role of genericconcepts of business strategy and legacies in the context of eventsand briefly outlines the future of events. Chapter 10 discusses busi-ness planning and strategy in the context of events and highlightsa useful point of events being used as strategic tools in destinationdevelopment. However, a large proportion of this chapter reliesheavily on generic theories on business strategy (such as thoseintroduced by Porter and Ansoff) which could have been adaptedmore to the events sector. Chapter 11 is particularly useful, as itdefines the concept of legacy in relation to events and presents itin terms which will be easily understood by the book’s target audi-ence. Whilst most of the work on event legacies has so far beenpublished in academic journals, it is good to see that the term isbeing introduced into mainstream academic literature.

From a pedagogical standpoint, the chapter features throughoutthe book are fairly uniform. All chapters beginwith a set of learningobjectives and proceed to present the relevant topic with the aid ofvisuals, tables, charts and graphs. Each part of the chapter is fol-lowed by a review question, with a more comprehensive list ofreflective questions at the end. Chapters end with a concisesummary and a full list of references, in addition to a list of usefulfurther reading resources. All chapters also benefit from short inter-national case studies which outline specific concepts discussed inthe chapter and help the reader relate the theories discussed inthe chapter to a practical industry example. Baring in mind thesecase studies are rather short and refer only to particular conceptswithin a specific chapter, perhaps it would have been useful tohave a couple of more extensive case studies throughout thebook that would incorporate points raised in multiple chapters,to provide a more rounded picture of how different concepts corre-late in practice.

Speaking as an events educator (and thus a member of thetarget audience for this book), I find this book is suitable as an intro-ductory text into the subject area, providing an outline on a widevariety of topics related to events management. For anyonewishingto get a more detailed account and gain a deeper understanding ofany of the topics covered in this book, theywould be best advised toconsult additional resources covering these topics more in-depth.

References

Bowdin, G., Allen, J., O’Toole, W., Harris, R., & McDonnell, I. (2006). Events manage-ment (2nd ed.). Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Elkington, J. (1999). Cannibals with forks: Triple bottom line of 21st century business.Oxford: Capstone.

Getz, D. (2007). Event Studies: Theory, research and policy for planned events. Oxford:Butterworth-Heinemann.