De toerist op het spoor : onderzoek naar de tijd-ruimtelijke samenhang in toeristisch gedrag als expressie van een zoektocht naar betekenisvolle ervaringen

Tourist behaviour is increasingly considered to be both erratic and unpredictable. This is due to, among other things, an enormous increase of leisure products and an expanding range in both the temporal-spatial reach and financial power of consumers. Traditional classifications of tourist types, based on demographic or socio-economic characteristics, are less and less able to explain actual holiday behaviour. Moreover, preferences of tourists seem to be changing at an ever greater speed. This unpredictability makes it increasingly difficult for tourist entrepreneurs to make product adjustments based on the market. In terms of product life cycle, a constant renewing of the product is necessary to keep it attractive and innovations need to follow one another more and more quickly. Eventually, due to this development products will be outdated as soon as they appear on the market. This is especially true when taking into account those physical elements of the tourist product that are relatively fixed (such as the landscape, roads, hotels). There is a need to find more stable or permanent elements in tourist preferences for them to be useful as a base for product development. These elements may serve as a point of departure for the development of a physically and economically sustainable tourist product.