The direct and explicit and the indirect, implicit relationships between royalty and tourism (and not just in relation to British royal tourism) are multifarious and have been little researched. This seems to reflect an apparent indifference from tourism social science researchers on the subject of royalty that may be explicable by possible perceptions of the anachronistic, dated and irrelevant notion of monarchical institutions and systems in an era of globalisation and liberal democracy. Alternatively, the subject may simply have been overlooked as having little to offer in developing theoretical and applied understandings of contemporary tourism. However, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that researchers on tourism (and on royalty) may usefully explore this field, with reference, for example, to the work that has been produced by historians on royal biographies that include analysis of royal travels and tours as well as by commentators on royalty and social, political and constitutional matters, where their work may be related to issues of national identity and image as conveyed to tourists (Bogdanor, 1995; Broad, 1952; Coates, 2006; Pimlott, 1996; Prochaska, 2002; Thomas, 1989).

This book links royalty and tourism and, by doing so, it inevitably confronts the much asserted pro-monarchy tourism industry arguments. These arguments, chiefly economic but also political, require further analysis from an academic perspective. Acomparative examination of the relationships between royal families and national tourism industries may be rudimentarily made from the chapters in this volume. Yet there remains scope for a more explicit confrontation of the potential value of a living monarchy versus a legacy of royal heritage and the relationships between this and national tourism strategy.

We hope that this book will prove to be of interest to scholars in a number of disciplines – not solely tourism but across the social sciences, including media studies, cultural studies, history, sociology, psychology and anthropology. We hope that there are insights to be gained arising from the meeting of monarchy with tourism.