The impact of distance on tourism: a tourism geography law

In 1970, Waldo Tobler established the first law of geography when he wrote “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” (Tobler, 1970, p. 236). This law entrenched the concept of distance decay into the popular geography lexicon. Basically, distance decay theory demonstrates how demand or volume declines exponentially as distance from a source increases. Its validity has been demonstrated in a variety of contexts, with Greer and Wall (1979) being the first geographers to apply it to recreational tourism. Distance decay has been one of the foci of my research for 20 years. Distance has a profound, though often underappreciated impact on all aspects of tourism, extending well beyond the volume of tourist movements. It also reflects changes in the types of tourist who are most likely to visit a destination and their subsequent behaviour. This brief will explain how it applies to tourism. Waters (2017) indicates laws must satisfy three criteria. They must be universal, necessary and synthetic. Universality means it applies to all members of the class. Necessity indicates that the relationship is guided by some underlying principle(s) and is more than just accidental, while the synthetic component joins to concepts. Synthesis in this context elates to consumer behaviour, physical and human geography. Compliance with the universality concept was verified by a study examining available 1915 origin–destination pairs from 41 outbound markets and 146 destinations (McKercher, Chan, & Lam, 2008). Data were derived from official UN World Tourism Organization figures, and accounted for 77.3% of global tourism when the study was conducted. Distance decay patterns were observed from all outbound countries studied, although the shapes of individual curves were modified by a range of geo-political factors. More strikingly land neighbours account for 57% of all arrivals, while, collectively, destinations within 1000 km of a source market’s border attracted 80% of all arrivals, as shown in Figure 1. Global tourism demand declined sharply thereafter, with cumulative shares stabilizing at between two and three percent of departures, with the exception of a small blip between 5000 and 6000 km away. The study determined absolute aggregate demand fell by about 50% with each 1000 km of added distance from the source market. Compliance with the necessary condition was inferred when a similar pattern was noted in intra-destination movements, or movements within a destination (Shoval, McKercher, Ng, & Birenboim, 2011), suggesting some underlying universal forces must be at work. This study used hotels as the ‘home’ point and analyzed the proportion of a tourist’s total daily time budget by distance from the hotel. Again, most time was spent in the vicinity of the hotel, with the amount of time spent at any one place decreasing exponentially with distance. But that is not the whole story. In theory, the decaying curve results from both a reduction in demand and a concomitant uniform increase in supply as distance changes (Greer