Francis Bacon was unparalleled in the art of word craft. Regarding the quality of books, he famously said, ‘Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested’. This book is none of this sort. It is organized to help understand certain research nuances of tourism, metaphors and methods, and to assist tourism scholars in some concepts that have gone vague and ambiguous owing to want of new knowledge. There are books – perhaps lot of them – that deal with such notions, yet these concepts remain stubbornly unexplained, so much so that some of them are considered stale and futile, for example, the concept of carrying capacity is considered almost ‘dead and ready to be buried’. I fear the concept of sustainability may not meet the same fate. We need innovative tools to operate them skillfully. Failure in scholarship should not be attributed to flawed concepts, for example, tourism is generally considered a most vulnerable industry that vanishes from the scene by sheer minor shocks – socio-economic upheavals, physical calamities or cultural loss. The industry has wronged the notion by surviving these impediments and has outlived such a menace as terrorism. It has established its resilient character amenable to quick recovery. The book addresses such challenges and attempts to seek right answers.

About 37 known scholars of tourism, emerging from different disciplines and diverse geographic regions, discuss and argue the threat of challenges. They present a suitable forum for meeting of the minds to find the key to open the door of knowledge. However, the book does not ignore the needs of young learners of tourism studies, particularly tourism’s new found language and vocabulary, idioms and paradoxes that often puzzle the freshers and very often the undergraduates. The new learners will find explanation of terms as post-modernism, post-tourism and difference between traveller and tourist; tourist and a visitor. Such terminologies demand disciplinary orientation.