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The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct and analyze the long history of Tourism Review and try to outline the future of this journal.

The authors show that Tourism Review has been a good example of multiple life cycles over time and of survival by adaption.

The authors illustrate also how this journal has seen decline, as well as revival, and stagnation, as well as innovation.

It is also a proxy of the state and issues of tourism research and publication over 75 years.

The fast changes of the tourism markets make it necessary to adapt destination management organisations, their functions and financing. The paper tries to develop a model for an optimal, efficient destination management system, especially to cope with the problem of limiting the necessary government influence and transfer as many decisions as possible to the individual private entrepreneurs. In this model the two tasks of destination management organisations — product development and marketing — are separated and are financed by two different taxes or levies, which are necessary for the function of producing public goods on the one side and internalizing external effects on the other side. The distribution of the levy payments to the different purposes is left to a large extent to the free choice of the individual levy‐payer, the entreprises profiting from tourism. This will induce a competition process between different destination management organisations to find the most efficient system.

This paper presents the result of a document review on leisure and travel developments in mature Central European markets. Based on an extensive analysis of (1) socio‐demographic developments, (2) developments with regard to changing values, (3) developments with regard to the economic framework, (4) the future role of work, leisure and allocation of time here fore, (5) consumption trends, and (6) a number of singular other issues, implications for the tourism industry are drawn: (1) There is an increasing international standardisation (homogenisation) of basic service factors in terms of infrastructure and key service elements functionality, coupled with differentiating efforts in terms of specific service elements and experiences provided. (2) Due to and based on network advantages, future quantitative growth is basically triggered by large supply networks and travel corporations. (3) Growth will further take place at best suitable destinations in terms of securing time efficiency of travel experience, multi optionality of supply and international level of quality.

Like most traditional forms of tourism also alpine tourism has lost its strategic success positions due to the ongoing globalisation of the tourism sector. The traditional structures in tourism marketing — based on political and institutional boundaries — have to make place to a more market oriented structure. The association of swiss tourism managers decided to follow a destination management approach that will lead to corresponding tourism structures. A proposition for such structeres has been presented last year.

The article is a summarised version of a prospective study for the Swiss tourism region of Valais by the Institute for Public Management and Tourism (ITD) of the University of St. Gallen which has been achieved in April 2000. The Transformation Model has served as theoretical background. The Swiss Ski area industry was for a long time a driver of the tourism development in the Alpine regions. The transformation of this sector has a direct impact on the transformation of destinations and other sectors. The necessary changes, the business models and the problems of financing investments explain the transformation process. The analysis is based on two major scenarios. If the status quo — scenario is followed, it would not be possible to change the structures. In this case, the public sector has to support the sector with payments of about 1,5 billions of sfr for the next decade. In the other case of a more managed development, the strategies and the structure of the sector's enterprises have to guarantee a sustainable development. The authors are in favour of a vertical integration of a destination which can create economies of scope rather than for a horizontal integration and economies of scale.

Switzerland with its seven million inhabitants, of which 20,1 % (BfS 2001) are non‐Swiss citizens, ranks among the top seven nations with respect of income per capita. Due to its wealth as well as its small size, the travel intensity of Switzerland is comparably high. Because it always had a tradition of neutrality and liberal political positions, freedom of travel was guaranteed for generations. Since Switzerland hasn't been drawn into World War 2, the emergence of the new dynamic of travel took place early in the fifties. Switzerland therefore is a kind of very developed travel market. According to the WTO statistics, Switzerland ranks among the top tourist buyer countries (cp. WTO 2001). The Institute of Public Services and Tourism at the University of St.Callen (former Institute for Transport and Tourism) has been conducting a survey on the travel behaviour of Swiss customers for more then thirty years (cp. Bieger & Laesser 2002). On a regular base of every second to third year, a representative consumer panels of 2000 households is interviewed by written questionnaires. The Swiss travel market proves a high validity in comparisons with the official Swiss statistical figures for travel, with one small limit: The number of travels intensity is underestimated due to the fact that people tend to undervalue the number of travels to their usual destinations like second homes. The goal of this contribution is to give an overview on the travel behaviour of Swiss customers as example for a well developed country. This will be done in two parts. Part 1 is featuring some descriptive main results, concerning the development and structure of the overall travellers. Part 2 consists of two papers, done by Ph.D students in a seminar taught by the authors of this contribution at the University of St. Gallen. These two articles give a deeper insight into some aspects of travel behaviour.

This workshop involved six presentations, the speakers being: Thomas Bieger, Christine Hope, Harold Pechlaner, Tanja Mihalic, Karl Socher, and Franc Pauko. As the papers are printed in the Hangzhou Congress volume (Keller & Bieger, 2000), attention here is to an integrative and reflexive overview, rather than to reporting sequentially the speakers' presentations.

In the study presented here, travellers from Switzerland are segmented on the basis of their information collection, with respect to their motivation structure derived in a study earlier this year. The study illustrates the important role of information in tourism. A successful strategy consists of providing convenience and of building up a trustful relation between the tourist company and the tourist. Hereby, convenience is determined by quality of admission, availability of information and a customer tailored presentation of information contents. A trustful source of information shall not only be provided by private relations (friends and relatives) but more and more by employees of travel agencies, tourist information and companies.

Reflecting on new demand trends, such as “more quality, less money” and “event” oriented products, the author comes to the conclusion that the Swiss hotel sector needs to rethink its strategy and to “reenineer” its services, procedures and performances. He proposes a model that takes customer benefits and the related chain of tourism services as its starting point.

With the introduction of the EUR, a new time of European economy and tourism has begun.