Understanding a Tourist Destination: A Tourism History Approach

There are highly dynamic and interactive studies on host communities at different tourist destinations. Some studies focus primarily on a particular community as a case to study the implications of tourism development. Many are interested in a more holistic approach, tourist destination development concepts observed in various tourist destinations. However, most of those studies limit their attention only on communities during the period of tourism development. There is a lack of theoretical approaches to guide a researcher to develop an understanding of a tourist destination from an integrated, multiple, different timeframe. To this concern, this paper explores the theoretical foundations of a history by drawing on the aspect of tourism history. The tourism history concept in this paper takes a community in their pre-tourism development into the analysis on the community during its meeting through the tourism processes. Understanding the past will deepen and broaden our understanding of the community’s society through a continuous period of its tourism development.