something that you read here! It is a different approach to producinga text on tourism management and one, that for me at least, is to bewelcomed in the development of our debates, our studies and ourmanagement practices.

Alan ClarkeTourism Department, University of Pannonia,

Egyetem Utca 10, Veszprem 8201, HungaryE-mail address: clarke@turizmus.uni-pannon.hu

doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2008.10.006

Book review / Tourism Management 31 (2010) 147–153 149

Transport Geographies: Mobilities, Flows and Spaces,R. Knowles, J. Shaw, I. Docherty. Blackwell, Oxford (2008).£19.99, pp. 293 (pbk), ISBN: 978 1 4051 53232

Aviation and Tourism: Implications for Leisure Travel,A. Graham, A. Papatheodorou, P. Forsyth (Eds.). Ashgate, Alder-shot (2008). £60, pp. 377 (hbk), ISBN: 97807546 71879

It is some 15 years since the first synthesis of transport andtourism was published (Page, 1994) and research on the intercon-nections between travel, tourism, personal mobility and leisurehave developed significantly since then. The principal researchareas that still underpin the transport–tourism nexus are geog-raphy, economics and the wider domain of management. Thesetwo books illustrate this relationship, since each edited collectionhas contributions from these areas. Current debates on the contri-bution of transport to climate change and the role of tourism asa contributor to environmental pollution has elevated transportand tourism to a central position in international reviews of futuremobility issues related to tourism and leisure. These two editedbooks highlight the growth in research activity around tourismand mobility, with many interesting perspectives on a broad rangeof interconnected themes.

The first book by Knowles et al. (2008) represents a long-standing interest by transport geographers in seeking to engagewith the contemporary issues associated with human mobility. Itrepresents a third contribution from the Royal GeographicalSociety/Institute of British Geographers Transport Studies Groupas a student-oriented text, following on from two highly successfultexts (i.e. Hoyle & Knowles, 1992, 1998). This book is of an equallyexcellent standard, with extremely well edited contributions fromacross the globe concisely in 14 chapters. Why this book isdeserving of a review in Tourism Management is because virtuallyevery chapter has a direct link or relevance to human mobilityrelated to tourism and leisure. The book also has two chapters onglobal air transport and transport, and tourism and leisure. Thisillustrates the central role of these issues within cognate areassuch as transport geography that underpin our spatial under-standing of tourism phenomenon. This book is compelling readingfor anyone with an interest in transport or tourism studies, witha good balance of underpinning concepts, relevant examples anda sound review of the key literature. What is more, it is probablyone of the most well-priced student texts I have seen in recentyears, at under £20. The book is well signposted for the undergrad-uate audience and equally useful for researchers, with two usefulchapters on future directions and research agendas. I am probablysomewhat biased in this review, because it is my type of book: wellwritten throughout, with excellent illustrations and detailed anal-ysis of issues. It is not mundane or pedestrian – it is coherent andwide-ranging. This is just like many of the texts I used as an under-graduate when studying geography. This book is also a testamentto the fact that there is a market for these higher level texts thatcan be used over a one semester module. The authors and editorsare to be congratulated on engaging with a wide range of issuessuch as economic development, the environment, social justice,

governance, connected cities, rural transport, inter-urban andregional transport, maritime transport and air travel. To me themost interesting chapters (aside from the air travel and tourismand leisure ones) were those which discussed individual transportpatterns. There are important research agendas to be nurturedhere. The concluding chapter on revitalised transport geographiescould equally have had a focus on tourism as the material has directrelevance to the subject area. Overall, this is a book you should havein your library if transport is your forte.

The second book, focusing on the relationship between airtravel and tourism is equally wide-ranging. It does not pack thesame punch, conceptually or in terms of its usability because itis less of a specially tailored textbook for a specific niche market– transport geography where there are a standard set of conceptsand themes to examine. In contrast, this book starts with a discus-sion of the transport–tourism linkage and then turns to aviation.There are some real gems in this book, but it does not fit togetheras a coherent, student-facing book like the Knowles et al. (2008)volume, given the breadth of aviation studies. But to be fair to theeditors, who are eminently qualified and acknowledged expertsin the field, this is a difficult area to draw together. It certainlyhas a different intended audience, such as the aviation researcher.The book spans 26 chapters organised into seven sections: leisuretravel demand; regulation and government policy; airline issues;implications for airports; economic and environmental impacts;destination case studies and conclusions. Again, I am probablybiased here because I am not an aviation researcher who special-ises in many of these themes although much of the content wasfamiliar to me. It is always difficult to edit a book to get coher-ence and consistency and this may often be a reflection of thesubject/contribution specified to each author. I found abouttwo-thirds of the chapters extremely useful, informative andbalanced. What I found less useful was the more descriptivedestination case studies which will date quickly and be overtakenby changes in statistical material and policy developments.

Nevertheless, this does fill a very big gap in the market, thougha large hardback format will mean it is relegated to library-onlypurchases unless it is produced in paperback. There is ample illus-trative material in the book and 22 pages of references as well asa glossary. Personally, I cannot fault the choice of content (asidefrom the case studies) since many of the key authors in the fieldhave contributed to the book and there is a focus on contemporaryissues like sustainability and low-cost airlines. This is certainlya book that complements those produced by Doganis and themany specialist aviation titles over which Ashgate has a virtualpublishing monopoly. So it has been produced as part of a main-stream aviation list and will certainly be marketed to, and targetedat its intended audience. From a tourism perspective, it is likely tobe supplementary reading because it is not written in a textbookformat. They are two very different books: one is transport geog-raphy focused and the other is aviation focused. I would recom-mend both of these books and I enjoyed reading them both. Inthe latter case, I probably drew too many comparisons with existingtexts on aviation to which the editors have contributed as morewide-ranging texts. This aviation book is explicitly focused on

gement 31 (2010) 147–153

leisure travel and it achieves its stated objective – to ‘expand anddevelop the knowledge and understanding of the important linksbetween these two industries’ (p. xxvii tourism and aviation).

References

Hoyle, B., & Knowles, R. (Eds.). (1992). Modern transport geography. London:Belhaven.

doi:10.1016/j.tourman.2008.12.011

Book review / Tourism Mana150

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2008,P. O’Connor, W. Hopken, U. Gretzel (Eds.). Springer-Verlag/LLC,New York (2008). p. 591 V149,95, ISBN: 3211772790

There are some books which you do not want to put down untilyou read the last page. Information and Communication Technolo-gies in Tourism 2008, which is the proceedings of the InternationalConference in Innsbruck, Austria, 2008, is one of these books eventhough it is a reference book. This book is a collection of 51 paperspresented at the ENTER 2008 Conference. This is an excellent refer-ence book for both researchers and practitioners. Researchers canget the results of up-to-date research findings and practitionerscan get solutions for their operational problems related to informa-tion and communication technologies in the tourism industry. Thebook is divided into 17 parts with 16 themes and each part has 3papers. The book discusses theoretical and practical issues suchas user-generated content, dynamic packaging, mobile applica-tions, context-aware systems, technology adoption, and recom-mender systems of information and communication technologiesin tourism industry.

The first part of the book is dedicated to ‘‘recommender systemsin tourism.’’ Recommender systems are a popular research area andare increasingly used by e-commerce sites. Recommender systemsare commonly used applications that e-commerce sites exploit tosuggest products and to provide consumers with information tofacilitate their decision-making processes. Knowledge is extractedfrom either domain experts (content- or knowledge-basedapproaches) or extensive logs of previous purchases (collabora-tive-based approaches). Both knowledge extraction approachesare clearly discussed in this book. Under this topic; one paperexamines adaptive conversational recommender systems; anotherpaper explains a comparative analysis of continuous versus discretevisualisation of tourism information; and the other paper explainsthe results of an empirical test of a web log data of an interactivetravel advisory system.

Opinions and recommendations, discussion and debate, rumoursand rants aside, consumers have taken the conversation online.User-generated content (UGC) which refers to content created byconsumers on blogs, discussion boards, forums, user groups andother social media platforms, publicly available, is the fastestgrowing online segment in 2009. Effectively measuring, interpretingand acting on UGC are the key competitive advantage for today’sconsumer-centred brands. The second part of the book is on thetopic of ‘‘user-generated content’’. The first paper in this sectionexamines the way electronic word of mouth sources are used forthe various facets of travel. The second paper examines the implica-tions of user-generated content for travel businesses by focusing onhotel reviews on TripAdvisor. The third study visualises the visitorexperience with photos taken of locations visited by actual visitors.

Web 2.0 is fundamentally changing the way travellers and tour-ists search, find, read and trust as well as (collaboratively) produce

Hoyle, B., & Knowles, R. (Eds.). (1998). Modern transport geography (2nd ed.).Chichester: Wiley.

Page, S. J. (1994). Transport for tourism. London: Routledge.

Stephen PageDivision of Marketing, Stirling Management School,University of Stirling, Stirling, Scotland FK9 4LA, UK

E-mail address: s.j.page@stir.ac.uk

information about tourism suppliers and destinations. Sincenobody can try a trip before they buy it, tourism is the perfectcommodity to bring individuals together online where they canprovide the inside scoop on vacation deals. The kind of networkingmade possible by the web is the perfect stepping stone to sites thatpromote the sharing of photos, videos, opinions, advice and refer-rals related to tourism destinations. Web 2.0 is a dynamic subjectand attracts more researchers. Three sections of the book withquantitative research studies and case studies are dedicated toWeb 2.0 and web services. One study focuses on the online travelcommunity to find out the people’s motivation behind beinginvolved as a member of this kind of community. Another paperexplains the influence of online travel communities on travel deci-sions. A case study explains the difficulties and benefits of usingMySpace as a marketing tool. Another case study discusses a webbased service oriented architecture project ROBINTUR used forcreating a network to support data interoperability. Another casestudy presents the components and technical description of thedestination management offices web portal using extendedmash-up technologies.

Dynamic packaging is one of the core e-tourism subjects of thefuture studies. A dynamic packaging application allows consumersor travel agents to bundle trip components. Although the ideabehind the dynamic packaging is simple, the programming andalgorithms behind the dynamic packaging is complex and requiresexpertise. These systems permit the customer to specify a set ofpreferences for a vacation, and dynamically access and querya set of information sources to find component such as air fairs,car rental, and leisure activities in real time. On this subject thereare three papers discussing this emerging topic. One study explainsthe notion of dynamic packaging from the perspective of SME’sand small destinations. Another study describes a new approachin which a user model with a combination of collaborative anddemographic filtering can be used to recommend product bundlerin dynamic packaging. Another research identifies the networkstructure of travel within Northern Indiana (USA) with the aimof making recommendations toward the development of IT systemsthat may be used to enhance traveller experience in the area.

Destination management systems (DMSs) enable destinationsto disseminate comprehensive information about resources andservices of destinations and local tourism products as well as tofacilitate the planning, management, and marketing of regions astourism entities or brands. There are various technologies thatallow destinations to get a competitive advantage over its rivals.In this book, there are two main parts given over this topic. Onestudy compares perceived utility of city tourism organizationsweb site elements. Another research examines the possible influ-ences of new wireless technologies, such as WiMAX and theirapplications for location based services on tourist interactionswithin their social networks. The other study explores the condi-tions for a successful implementation of a DMS interface in local