Tourism Ethics

The promulgation of the Global Code of Ethics for Tourism by the General Assembly of the World Tourism Organization in 1999 underscored the growing importance of tourism ethics as a significant domain of research and study. Following the lead of other applied fields—like environmental ethics, business ethics, and medical ethics—scholars working in tourism ethics provide theoretical guidance to any number of pressing real-world problems and issues.

As work in tourism ethics continues to flourish, this new title from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a vast and dispersed body of literature. Edited by David A. Fennell, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Ecotourism, Tourism Ethics is a four-volume collection of classic and contemporary contributions. It brings together material drawn from a plethora of journals, as well as excerpts from key books and difficult-to-find sources.

The first volume of the set covers the main theories of ethics and collects materials that explore why ethics is so important to tourism. Volume II emphasizes the applied nature of ethics in tourism. Codes of ethics, corporate social responsibility, and environmental ethics are examples of this applied work. The third volume, meanwhile, is devoted to how ethics have been used in specific types of tourism. Ecotourism is well represented here, as well as notions of ‘responsible tourism’, ‘fair trade’, and the troubling relationship between poverty and tourism. Volume IV of the collection accentuates the value of building ethics into the structure of educational programmes. The major works gathered here include those that examine the relationship between the academy and the practice of tourism.

With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected materials in their historical and intellectual context, Tourism Ethics is an essential work of reference and is sure to be welcomed by scholars, students, and practitioners as a vital one-stop resource.