Tourism is a highly complex phenomenon, riddled with a number of intriguing problems and stubborn challenges that gnaw at the patience of tourism researchers, owners, resource managers and stakeholders. There are many factors that make these challenges unassailable. Global in dimension, it is one of the largest industries of the world, hosting over 1.08 billion tourists earning over 1 billion US dollars and creating 1.11 million jobs in 2013 (UNWTO, 2014). Imagine how many businesses, firms, services and workforce would be engaged in serving these tourists; it is a huge challenge by itself. There are challenges inherent in tourism, such as seasonality and sensitivity, besides being an ensemble of many disciplines. This multidisciplinary demands acquisition of rudimentary knowledge in some of the related disciplines (e.g. geography, economics, anthropology, psychology and other bio-sciences). Heroes of these disciplines have not only contributed to tourism studies, but have enriched tourism idiom and vocabulary; terminologies and epithets, like the tourist gaze, post-tourism, secular pilgrim are now part of tourism lexicon, nevertheless a learner of tourism faces a strange paradox when he fails to identify a tourist and confuses between a tourist and a traveller or a visitor, as these terms are often used interchangeably. Tourism often borrows metaphors, methodologies, concepts from other disciplines. One of the questionable drawbacks in proper understanding of tourism is want of a clear and succinct definition despite prolonged efforts of World Tourism Organization (WTO) (now United Nations WTO (UNWTO)) and other international organizations (Theobald, 2004: 15). Having none of its own doctrine, it is a discipline in making; to some scholars, it is 'indiscipline' (Hall, 2006: 4; Tribe, 1997: 17).

This book Challenges in Tourism Research is an effort to understand, identify and analyse some of these challenges with the help of the collective wisdom of tourism scholars who have spent years in studying and researching the phenomenology of tourism.