Exploring the Use and Impact of Travel Guidebooks

This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of travel guidebooks and their conceptualisation, use and impact. Guidebooks have been key tourism paraphernalia for almost two centuries and although researched in some areas, academic knowledge on guidebooks in tourism has not been expansively communicated. The uncritical, unreflective and largely pejorative approach to guidebooks in the public sphere, and to some degree also present in academia, is reassessed in this book. This challenges the current limited tourism research approaches to the topic, including the routinely held assumption that the internet has all but destroyed the printed guidebook. This book will be a useful resource for postgraduate students and researchers in tourism and tourism communications and consumption.

Victoria Peel is a senior lecturer in cultural tourism management in the Graduate Tourism program hosted by the National Centre for Australian Studies, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on cultural tourism and the backpacker and student tourism markets.

Anders Sorensen is owner and manager of Tourismlab.dk, which provides tourism and hospitality research and consultancy and produces knowledge of tourism and tourists. His research interests include backpacker tourism, travel guidebooks and tourism in peripheral areas.