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Book Review 'Seasonality in Tourism' By Tom Baum and Svend Lundtorp (eds) Pergamon, Oxford, 2001; ISBN 0-0804-3674-9; C75 US$80, hardback; 192pp
Tourism rarely attracts a uniform level of demand; seasonality is the term which refers to the variation experienced across the seasons. It is often characterised by long periods of low demand and short periods of excess demand. The editors of this multi-authored collection point out that seasonality has been a long-standing problem for many destinations and is an issue for tourism managers across the world. This is why the subject area is an important one and of real interest to the student. This book is particularly useful as it affords both an introduction to the subject and an opportunity to investigate several aspects in more detail.
The book comprises a short introduction and ten chapters written by a several contributors. The introductory chapter provides a useful agenda, but Chapter 2 is where the reader finds an extended discussion of the core concept and an explanation of key issues and implications. Here, Butler refers to his earlier work when defining seasonality as a:
'temporal imbalance in the phenomenon of tourism, which may be expressed in terms of dimensions of such elements as numbers of visitors, expenditure of visitors, traffic...