Car decals as a new data source for self-drive tourists

This study looks at the practice of displaying customized commercially made decals on car windows, titled "My Family", with cartoon representations of family members equipped for their preferred recreational activities. It considers these car decals a source of data on self-drive domestic tourism. For this study, 180 vehicles bearing the "My Family" decals, recorded at two main highways of the Gold Coast region of southern Queensland, were analysed. The results indicate that these decals do indeed provide a new valuable source of data on people's self perception and self representations of leisure and recreational activities for the self-drive tourist market. They are displayed by families of all sizes, including single individuals. If car value is an indicator of socio-economic status, they cross every stratum of Australian society.Griffith Sciences, Griffith School of EnvironmentFull Tex

Which farmers turn to tourism? A continental-scale analysis

Many urban tourists like to visit farms, but only some farm landholders offer tourism accommodation and activities. Their motivations have been explored previously in several countries, using stated-preference approaches. Here we report the first continental-scale revealed preference analysis, which yields significant additional information and insights. Using multiple data sources, we inventoried, mapped and characterised all known Australian farm tourism enterprises, and examined patterns using both size-based and multi-criterion classifications. There are clusters of farm tourism enterprises close to cities and gateways, and isolated operations in more remote areas. We identified four groups: full-time, part-time, retirement and lifestyle operators. Characteristics of the farm property and business, the farming family, and the farm tourism business differ significantly between groups. The groups appear to reflect the joint dynamics of farm succession and rural amenity migration. Keywords: motivations, family-business, rural, Australia, cockies, blockiesFull Tex

Tacit knowledge transfer:Cross-cultural adventure

Griffith Sciences, Griffith School of EnvironmentFull Tex

Trends and lags in the use of ecotourism terminology in the scholarly and popular press

Griffith Sciences, Griffith School of EnvironmentFull Tex

Cattle Ranchers and Agritourism in Oregon, USA:Motivations, Challenges and Opportunities from the Landowner's Perspective

Cattle ranches are cultural icons in many countries. Still, high costs to maintain ranches may force some ranchers to sell their operation. One income alternative is to diversify into agritourism. Empirical research on ranch agritourism is scarce. This study provides an overview of, and assesses the motivations for, and challenges to diversifying into agritourism from the ranchers' perspective. A survey of 400 Oregon ranchers in 2003 found that 21% of 177 respondents promoted agritourism and that it contributed 8% to their annual household income compared to an 84% contribution from livestock production. Working on the ranch and hunting / fishing were the most popular agritourism activities. Main motivations to diversify were to utilize ranch resources, capture additional income, and offset fluctuations in income. Key barriers were insurance and liability, lack of time, regulations, and lack of financial assistance and resources. Agritourism was a success for 79% of those involved; 73% of guests were repeat customers and 38% learned about the operation from friends and family. Most guests (82%) were from Oregon. Findings suggest that agritourism can be compatible with ranching and can help ranches to remain viable. Despite low adoption numbers at the time of this study, agritourism initiatives are likely to increase.Griffith Business School, Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel ManagementNo Full Tex

Generation Y:Perspectives of quality in youth adventure travel experiences in an Australian backpacker context

Generation Y (Gen Y), Echo Boomers, Nexters, dot-coms, Net Gen, N.Gen, Millennium, Thumb or Paradoxical Generation, as noted elsewhere in this book, are variously classified by developed nations around the world. Given that this chapter is contextualized within an Australian setting, and specifically focuses on the youth adventure travel market within a popular Australian east coast tourism destination, Queensland's Gold Coast; we shall adopt the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS, 2002) and Cooke's (2006) definition based on the following years of birth: 1980-1994 in order to distinguish Generation Y-ers. In this chapter, the terms Generation Y and Gen Y refer to the generation as a collective, while Generation Y-ers and Gen Y-ers refer to individuals in Generation Y. At the time of writing, Gen Y-ers' ages were distributed between 14 and 28 years. Given this chronological age categorization, there is some complementarity with young tourists, youth tourism segments and Gen-Y tourists. Young tourists have been described as people under 26 years of age (Bywater, 1993), 18-35 years (Kale et al., 1987), and 15-25 years of age (Aramberri, 1991). More recently, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2006) found that youth tourists tended to be categorized in two ways: 15 to 24-26 and 15-30, although in 1991, the World Tourism Organization, as a consequence of the New Delhi Declaration of Youth Tourism, framed the age as between 15 and 29 years (WTO, 1991b). Obviously, there is some ambiguity between what age categories constitute 'young' and 'youth' tourists as well as the extant interchangeable use of the terms. In addition to age ambiguity, a number of earlier writers have criticized the use of age as the only classifier for young and youth (Roberts, 1983; Aramberri, 1991; Clarke, 1992). Other considerations include sociological and psychological factors.Griffith Business School, Department of Tourism, Sport and Hotel ManagementNo Full Tex