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many tourism businesses may be better classified as
secondary attractions or supporting businesses.
Often, it is an area's culture and/or natural
resource that form the true attraction supply
component of tourism. In some cases, it can even
be the ephemeral quality of faith that supplies the
attraction in places such as Medugorje, Croatia or
Lourdes, France.
Similar to business clustering described above,
attraction clustering might serve to draw tourists
thereby creating demand. Las Vegas �USA) is an
example of this type of phenomenon. In this case,
supply of the physical components merges to create
demand for a product that is part gambling and
part fantasy. This phenomenon, where supply
creates demand, is known as Say's Law.
Businesses that offer services including nonprofits
�including tourism associations) and educational
institutions are also part of the supply
picture. However, classifying a business as part of
the tourism industry or some other sector is
problematic. Tourism-dependent businesses often
serve residents, and vice versa. There is no
standard industrial classification code for tourism
as there is for almost all other business pursuits.
That is one reason that when tourism supply is
discussed, it is its component parts rather than the
supply of a particular product which are examined.
However, attempts to account for the value of
tourism to an area, related to the purchase of the
component parts, is an active area of study.
Different accounting systems using existing
frameworks have shown promise not only for
identifying tourism-dependent businesses but for
determining their combined economic impact.
These satellite accounts, as they have become
known, are at the forefront of research in this area.
Other areas of research pursuit dealing with the
supply of tourism product components include
locational analysis for new businesses. This is again
a microeconomic perspective, and although numerous
models exist for retail firm location, very
few of these models are applicable for tourismdependent
firms where the market base may be a
wide geographic area, even the world. However,
certain methods have been used to determine the
relative supply of certain tourism resources within a
sub-unit of a much larger geographical area. This
supply side analysis �Smith 1987) is useful for
formulating development policy with respect to
the type of tourism most likely to succeed within a
defined development zone.
Defining supply as it relates to tourism is not an
easy task. What analysts are comfortable with is
describing the supply of the physical components of
the product provided by businesses and the
attractions which draw people to the area. The
combination of these form a tourism product
which is individually distinct.
References
Smith, S. �1987) `Regional analysis of tourism
resources', Annals of Tourism Research 14�2): 254±
73. �Describes a procedure for defining tourism
regions on the basis of resource patterns.)
Further reading
Gartner, W.C. �1996) Tourism Development:Principles,
Processes, Policies, New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold. �Part IV of this book deals with
tourism demand/supply.)
Smith, S. �1995) Tourism Analysis, 2nd edn, Essex:
Longman. �Examines the more important quantitative
methods utilised by planners, researchers
and consultants.)
survey
survey 565
WILLIAMC.GARTNER,USA
Surveying is a method of gathering information
directly from a sample of residents or tourists, with
the objective of inferring certain trip and personal
information about a larger host or guest population.
It is an extremely cost-effective way of
determining the characteristics and behaviour of
a larger population, such as the residents of a
nation or their visitors. It is widely used to gather
statistics for marketing research, planning,
programme evaluation and impact assessment in
tourism.
The conduct of a valid survey is a complex task,
and certain elements are key to its success. First,
the target population, the larger group the survey
should represent, must be carefully defined. This is