TRAVEL MEDICINE

Travel Medicine

Travel Medicine

Tourist health and safety have arguably become among the most high profile issues now associated with the individual tourists' concerns with travel. Likewise, tourist destinations are increasingly being assessed in terms of their record on providing safe and healthy environments for tourists, given the central premise of tourism: to enjoy one's leisure time; to partake in a holiday which will involve 'periods of escape for people, and catalysts for change in both individuals and communities' (Ryan, 2007: 4). It is this holiday experience which features prominently in most analyses of the tourist experience (Ryan, 2007), and ensuring that the tourists' safety, health and enjoyment are key issues for the tourism industry. This is because the tourism industry sells dreams, potential experiences and seeks to fulfil our diverse motivation for domestic and international travel. Aside from the growing international growth in litigation and legal action associated with tourism when things go wrong, tour operators and destinations are increasingly realising that holidays need to perform a positive function in the post-modern society linked to reinvigoration of mind, body and soul, enjoyment, entertainment together with a wide range of needs associated with the imagery of holiday-taking.

With the exception of adventure travel and niche forms of tourism which involve a significant degree of risk and challenge (e.g. adventure tourism), the notion of tourist well-being and safety are inherent in much of the popular culture of tour advertising in the western world. This even extends to the notion of tourists travelling in an 'environmental bubble' in countries where health and safety risks are significantly problematic, but where tour operators utilise exploitative modes of production such as resort enclaves, to ensure higher levels of profit but also to control the environment and risk factors. Through limited and managed interaction with the natural environment and local population, operators seek to provide positive tourist experiences of both place and the wider holiday by minimising risk situations. Given these now widely used management tools to seek to manage the tourist experience and to seek to create positive notions of well-being, this current issue's paper debates the issues associated with tourist holiday-taking and its management by the tourism industry, namely:

tourist well-being and how accident, injury and perceived risk may impact upon it;

the notion of a tourist welfare continuum;

current issues and trends affecting the tourist risk and injury;

what steps the tourism industry are taking to minimise the risks and incidence of injury.

However, prior to discussing these issues, it is pertinent to chart the development of this area of study within tourism studies and its evolution as travel medicine, given its interdisciplinary nature and reliance upon a wide range of subject areas.

Tourist health and safety risks on holiday

A number of studies (e.g. [Page, 2002] and [Walker and Page, 2003]) have given credence to the existence of a continuum of tourist health problems. Given the growing volume and scale of the travel medicine literature, there is a need to try and provide some logical order and a rationale framework in which ...