IB Geography Option E: Leisure, tourism and sport

What Option E covers

Option E follows the guide's four parts: changing leisure patterns; tourism and sport at the local and national scale; tourism and sport at the international scale; and managing tourism and sport for the future. The sets start with the vocabulary of leisure: tourists and excursionists, primary and secondary tourist resources, honeypot sites, and carrying capacity, physical and perceptual. For sport they cover the threshold and catchment area of a facility, distance decay and the hierarchy of venues; for travel, time–space compression and low-cost carriers. At the international scale: the pleasure periphery, mass and niche tourism, enclave tourism, leakage and the multiplier effect, and the legacy of an Olympics. Then the models of how destinations change, the Butler model and Doxey's Irridex, with ecotourism, community-based tourism and the commodification of culture.

Where students slip

• A cathedral is a primary tourist resource, even though people built it, because it was not built for visitors. A secondary tourist resource is one built for them, such as a hotel or a theme park.
• Tourist spending does not all stay in the place visited. Leakage is the share lost overseas, through foreign-owned hotels, imported goods and repatriated profits, and it is highest in enclave resorts; the multiplier effect is the extra local spending and jobs that the rest generates.
• The threshold is the minimum number of people needed to support a facility; the catchment area is the zone its users come from. A large stadium needs a much bigger threshold population than a local pitch, so it draws on a much wider catchment.