Urban tourism — an ‘overview’ perspective.

This article an overview of urban tourism. It is somewhat ironic that although people have been travelling to, and visiting cities from time immemorial, it has only been in the last decade or so that anyone really seems to have taken any notice of this in tourism writing and research. This general lack of urban tourism research is perhaps best evidenced by the plethora of somewhat repetitive general texts on tourism in the past 10-15 years. Although it is true that many tourism books have made reference to cities as visitor destinations, this has rarely moved beyond case-study description of trends and activity. In terms of sole authors, one of the first, and most wide ranging text in terms of its discussion of the urban tourism phenomena is Chris Law's book Urban Tourism: Attracting Visitors to Large Cities. Another book with a similar title is Stephen Page's book Urban Tourism. In terms of multi-authored books, two that would seem to stand out as worth a read based simply on their titles alone include: International City Tourism: Analysis and Strategy and The Tourist City. A Couple of other multi-authored texts worth considering include: Urban Tourism: Performance and Strategies in Eight European Cities and Tourism in Major Cities. The books mentioned here are not the only texts on urban tourism currently available, however, many others not reviewed tend to take a specific theme such as tourism in historic cities, or focus on one particular aspect of the tourism phenomena such as marketing or promotion.