There are two main aspects of travel geography:
1. The world’s geographical resource base for tourism and
2. The spatial patterns of world tourist activity. The distribution of tourism in the different regions of the world and geographical explanations of these patterns.
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There are several factors that lead to changes in travel flows and patterns of tourist development. In “order to understand these processes, it is necessary to know tourist’s motivation and other social, political and economic circumstances that both generate tourism and control its spatial expression.
Main Regions of the World:
Geographically four main regions have been identified that function as tourist attractions, the way in which transport networks evolve to link tourist generating regions with potential destinations and their regional expression. These regions are
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1. Europe:
The world’s focus of international tourism generation and the world’s primary destination region.
2. North America:
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An equally significant world tourist region in terms of volume of tourist movement, whose general patterns of tourist development show striking similarities with those of Europe.
3. The Pacific and Australasia:
The world’s most rapidly growing tourist region.
4. South Asia, Subsaharan Africa, the Middle East and Central and South America:
These regions are peripheral in terms of their economic relationships with the developed world and in terms of their tourist linkages with the major western tourist generating regions.
Travel geography is about the geographical distribution of tourism throughout the world. It seeks to describe and explain the spatial patterns of tourist activity and development on regional, national, international and world scales.
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It is about the location of tourist resources and the factors (e.g., economic and political, etc.) that influence when, how and where they are used for tourism. It is about the people who are tourists, where and why they travel and the effect they have on the places they visit.
The tourist travels away from home for a variety of reasons (other than work). The essence of tourism is therefore, that it involves
i. Travel
ii. To a location, that is not the tourist’s home
The simplest spatial model of the tourist system consists of three spatial elements
Travel geography is concerned with the study of all three elements of the system, at ail spatial scales (from the study of domestic tourism with a city or region, through to the world of international travel.