Tourism in Asia: A Review of the Achievements and Challenges (Asian Tourism: Growth and Change) (Book Review‪)‬

Asian Tourism: Growth and Change. Edited by Janet Cochrane. Oxford and Amsterdam: Elsevier Ltd, 2008. Since the appearance of our co-edited book Tourism in South-East Asia (Hitchcock, King and Parnwell 1993), now well over a decade ago, the study of tourism development in the region and more widely in Asia has come of age. Janet Cochrane's ambitious edited volume Asian Tourism: Growth and Change (2008a), with its thirty-one chapters, three sub-section introductions and 40 contributors drawn from a variety of disciplines, marks a further significant step in the development of scholarship on Asian tourism. The country coverage is impressive; as well as cross-regional chapters there are contributions on Bhutan, India, Sri Lanka, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Mongolia and Tibet. As a substantial Asia-wide volume with several contributions from both well-established scholars in tourism studies (Airey, Arlt, Butler, Cheung, Cochrane, Goodwin, Hitchcock, Sofield, and Wall) as well as a significant number of early career researchers, many of them Asian, it deserves to be set in a wider research context. This present extended review article provides an opportunity to take stock of some general contributions to the study of Asian and more particularly Southeast Asian tourism, identify some of the important scholarly achievements, linking them where appropriate with Cochrane's book, and to indicate areas of research still in urgent need of attention.