18.1 Air Transport/Tourism Cross-Relationships as a Multifactor, Multilevel Process

Beyond the diversity of topics, scale, and places considered, the series of chapters has shed a new, integrated light on the cross-relationships between air transport and tourism. These relationships have appeared as a function of three key components or families of factors that form a triangle and also interact with each other. First of all, there are place attributes at both ends, namely, departure and arrival areas. More precisely, these attributes are made up of a wide range of characteristics that refer to natural/physical patterns, people, and to the economy. Natural/physical patterns mostly relate to the weather (and thus to the fact that places have to be suitable for tourism and satisfy the tourists’ preferences) and landscapes (notably sea vs. mountains). Key characteristics of people include income, social–occupational group, age, health and well-being, life cycle position, household size, and lifestyle. Economic patterns relate back to the propensity to generate tourism flows, both directly (through shaping needs for travel) and indirectly (through affecting people’s characteristics, especially income and social–occupational group). Economic patterns are also important at the destination in the sense that they define a place’s ability to attract and accommodate tourists.

Second, air transport/tourism interactions are shaped by numerous policies and strategies pursued by a myriad of public authorities, acting right through from the local to global level. This includes regulatory regimes of air services, of course, but also monetary policies (which affect exchange rates and thus the relative attractiveness of destinations regarding purchasing power at the origin) and the degree of free movement of people. At the national and subnational level, strategies include investment in—and promotion of—transport services and/or tourist facilities. In most cases, these policies are part of entrepreneurial strategies, to the point that countries and local places all compete with each other. This directly relates to Harvey (1989)’s statements about the large move from management to entrepreneurialism in somewhat more general terms.

Finally, there are also all the strategies pursued by private stakeholders, which include most of the air transport industry (e.g. private airlines, aircraft manufacturers, privatised airports, the myriad of suppliers and subcontractors) and the tourism industry (e.g. hotels, tourist attractions, leisure parks, resorts, tour operators, travel agents).² These actors shape and transform places, travel practices and, ultimately, societies.

18.2 Supporting and Challenging Common Beliefs

This book has supported and built on some of the conventional understandings of the air transport and tourism relationship with new and extensive evidence. For example, Chapter 5 is one of a number of chapters that has confirmed that this relationship is far from simple and is in a near constant state of flux owing to shifting market conditions, political interests, and changes in economic developments. This very much links with the notion of a multifactor, multilevel process as discussed before. More specifically, Chapters 7 and 12 have demonstrated than even the choice of airport and surface access mode involves complex decisions to be made, whilst Chapter 14 has highlighted the complicated relationships that can develop even just between airlines and airports. In addition, Chapter 9 has shown that technology is playing an increasingly multifaceted role within the air transport and tourism sectors.

Meanwhile a number of other common beliefs have been challenged and put into perspective by the contributors. From a demand viewpoint, Chapter 3 has questioned the idea, supported by many, that air traffic is dominated by business passengers. Within the context of passenger flows and global figures, leisure travel is much more important, and amongst leisure travel, VFR passengers are often more numerous than those on business (although the authors acknowledge that the situation could be different on specific routes or in terms of revenues). Also Chapter 4 has demonstrated, from a mature market perspective, that not everyone flies and, likewise, not everybody will fly in the future. This suggests that models used to forecast air traffic or tourism based on established past behaviour could be biased and should better take into account the market’s degree of maturity as well as the specific nature of frequent and infrequent flyers. Still focusing on demand but from a different angle, Chapter 13 has argued that the airport journey, rather than being considered as a fairly uninfluential feature of the tourist trip, now potentially plays a much more significant role in shaping the overall tourist experience.

Some other findings have shed a different light on tourism flows. For example, Chapter 6 has shown that at least in the context of Spain, high-speed rail (HSR) services can have a negative, indirect impact on domestic tourism. This is because HSR induces competition, leading to a significant drop in domestic air services that cannot be compensated for by rail services. More generally it is sometimes claimed that it is easy to travel by air virtually everywhere nowadays. However, Chapter 8 has argued vehemently that even for well-established cities and tourist destinations, self-connections improve connectivity.

As regards industry developments, Chapter 10 comprehensively highlighted numerous beliefs regarding the evolution of airline industry structures. However, Chapter 11 has suggested that actually the so-called charter airlines (now rebranded as ‘leisure airlines’) have not mostly shifted towards long-haul markets to escape competition from the low-cost airlines. At least in Europe and based on two key cases studies, the move is significant but certainly less substantial than is usually supposed. Meanwhile Chapter 15 has acknowledged that partnerships between destination management organisations (DMOs) and the air sector may be fruitful for developing tourism, destination stakeholders should first cooperate on developing tourism products and services in the destination to closely meet the needs of the passengers that are targeted by the airlines.

Finally, the exact role of airlines and airports has also been questioned. Whilst the air journey is normally considered as a means to an end to get to a destination, Chapter 17 has discussed how the flight can act as the actual tourist attraction. Moreover as regards airports, Chapter 16 has argued that whilst many of these have claimed that they are becoming new centres of large urban regions by transforming themselves into an airport city or aerotropolis, the evidence points to most of them not having yet reached the ambitions expectations placed upon them.

18.3 Trends, Perspectives, and Uncertainties

Whilst aiming to be as comprehensive and far-reaching as possible, of course it is not realistic to claim that this book brings an end to the complex and dynamic story of the air transport/tourism relationship. As a result this last section identifies key ongoing, and to some extent only emerging, changes that could likely affect the very nature of both air travel and tourism in the future.

First of all, the growth of the new middle class in emerging countries involves a large amount of new travellers (Cohen and Cohen, 2015a). For instance, today there are a substantial number of tourists from mainland China in places such as Japan and Thailand. Not only does this new situation drive a large increase in tourist flows, but it also involves new challenges in terms of (local and global) environmental impacts, and in responding to particular needs related to both cultural habits and less mature markets. It can be argued that research will have to move away from some kind of ‘Eurocentrism in tourism’ (Cohen and Cohen, 2015b) to take into account these specific characteristics.

On the airline side, the extent to which the low-cost model will be replicated with long-haul markets is still debated. Evidence suggests that drops in costs and fares might not be as spectacular as in the short- and medium-haul markets, and that long-haul demand cannot be so easily stimulated. This is notably because most social and economic interactions remain intracontinental rather than intercontinental. However, it cannot be denied that lower cost airlines are penetrating the long-haul market and will change the rules of the games to some extent. In this context, the recent advent of longer range narrow-body aircraft (B737 Max and A321LR) is an important technological change that will certainly deserve attention from scholars in the forthcoming years. For instance, Norwegian (one of the leading European low-cost airlines) has ordered no less than 103 B737 Max 8 and 30 A321LR. Even though the distribution amongst its subsidiaries and related markets has not been unveiled yet, this nevertheless gives information about the potential magnitude of changes.

Digitalisation and new technologies have been discussed in Chapters 9 and 13. In this rapidly moving area, predicting trends with any degree of certainty is becoming increasingly challenging, but it is likely that there will be even more far-reaching and comprehensive techniques in place to sell tickets/products to tourists, accompany them on their journey and track their movements and purchases. More and more powerful and connected personal devices, along with artificial intelligence, may well make trips easier and more integrated from a door-to-door and multimodal perspective. However, all these tools also raise fundamental moral concerns. For instance, how much privacy will eventually remain? How will learning more about individuals make it possible for private interests to manipulate tourists’ behaviour just to sell them services and, ultimately, make profits? As a tourist, would rejecting these tools involve not being allowed to travel anymore?

Another issue is about the environmental impacts of flying. Despite significant progress in fuel consumption, specific (i.e. per seat-km) emissions of GHGs and of pollutants, and in noise emissions, these gains have largely been offset by traffic growth. Also, the magnitude of the impact of aviation on climate change is still being debated, since high-altitude processes and non-CO₂ impacts are not fully understood (Lee et al., 2009; Dahlmann et al., 2015). In addition, estimations of GHG emissions postulate that aircraft should follow the shortest route, which is not the case (Dobruszkes and Peeters, 2018). Here a somewhat unexplored, but fundamental, debate is whether to pursue mitigation strategies or adaptation strategies. The former broadly involves changing lifestyles and models of consumption, and ultimately accumulation regimes. This could only involve flying less which is against all observed trends and hence is a very dramatic suggestion. The latter accepts business-as-usual trends, thus keeping the serious climate changes and inevitable adverse impacts that various nations will have to deal with. This may include relocating people and businesses because of rising sea levels and new damaging weather patterns. Felli (2016) argues that calls for adaptation dominated at the early times of concerns of climate changes, and does so more and more today. In between, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and its objective for developed countries to reduce GHG emissions, was maybe only an interlude. In any case, the balance between mitigation and adaptation strategies may well have very divergent impacts on air transport and tourism.

Beyond the debate between mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change, disruptions may actually come from the so-called peak oil. Peak oil refers to the time when the maximum extraction rate of conventional oil is reached, after which it then only falls. Drops in output in a context of increasing demand would logically mean much higher energy costs, all other things being equal. Beyond vibrant debates (see Chapman, 2014), this would arguably dramatically challenge industries that are significantly dependent on oil—especially aviation (Kerschner et al., 2013) but also tourism (Becken, 2015). In this context, there are three main pathways for aviation in the case of a confirmed reached peak. First, switching to alternative energies provided they are available at reasonable costs, and preferably with limited social and environmental impacts. Second, a major technological revolution that would liberate air transport from oil at an attractive cost, whilst at the same time maintaining its current efficiency in terms of speed, distance range and capacity. Third, a dramatic hike in air fares so that both flying and long-distance tourism would be seen as a privilege again as in the early days of travel. In essence, peak oil could well force a change even more challenging than the mitigation policies that were once called for by the Kyoto Protocol.

Surprisingly, the tourism industry does not generally seem alarmed by the prospect of peak oil (Becken, 2016). However, the ability of societies to innovate at the time they face major challenges should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, should they fail to innovate, tourists may perhaps be forced to (re)think about the concept of ‘slow’ tourism, and focus on more local or regional tourism within a context where the distance decay function is meaningful again (Becken, 2015). In this case, it may well be that the story of the relationship between air transport and tourism might have to be significantly rewritten at some stage in the future.