Rainbow Holiday

A GAY experience

What is LGBT tourism

LGBT tourism may be broadly dened as any tourism activity, either specically designed to attract the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) market, or one that, by nature and/or design, appeals to and is ultimately pursued by the LGBT market. The interaction between the suppliers, managers, facilitators and consumers of the LGBT tourism product and service, and their subsequent relationship, is an integral part of the concept.

Some Interesting Facts about Gay Tourism in the world

LGBT travel now represents a market that was estimated to be worth US$76.5 billion in 2006(Out Now, 2010). Gay and lesbian tourism should be of interest and concern to more than merely commercial suppliers or market researchers. Holidays are opportunities for many gays and lesbians to make sense of their lives. Hopefully, this initiative will stimulate others to undertake further investigations of this important eld

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The total buying power of the USA LGBT population in 2006 was estimated to be US$641 billion (an increase of 5% from2005) it was estimated to exceed US$800billion by 2008. This buying power is similar to that of African-Americans in the USA (Pink Advertising, 2010). In 2003, it was estimated that the value of the LGBT tourism economy was worth approximately $140 billion (Tebje, 2004). In the USA, more gay and lesbian travelers hold valid passports than the overall American public 88% of gay men and 57%of lesbians in comparison to 29% of the overall American public (The Travel Institute, 2010)

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Many National Tourist Boards now have a dedicated gay section on their websites. For example, VisitBritain uses GayBritain to offer current updates regarding events and festivals, gay cities and gay history and culture. It is estimated that gay and lesbian people living in the UK spent a total of 4.7billion on leisure travel in 2007 (Out Now,2010) approximately twice the value of theUK cruise market (Powell, 2010).

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In 2005, Go Pink China became the rst China-based travel company to offer gay-friendly tours. Primarily Western clients are offered city tours of Beijing, Shanghai and Xian and customized adventure trips to the Silk Road, Yunnan, Sichuan and elsewhere. Sightseeing is enlivened with insider stories about gay empires, gay affairs in the Forbidden City and the gay history of China. Go Pink had 100 clients in 2006 and approximately 300 in 2007 (Moxley, 2008)

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Notions of gay couples as DINKs (doubleincome, no kids) are inaccurate surveys show that signicant numbers of gay and lesbian households include children (Hughes,2006), for example from previous relation-ships and/or conceived or adopted in existing ones. This represents a signicant oppor-tunity for the development of more family-oriented products and services.

Market has always been there !

It was not until the 1990s that the concept of gay tourism became incorporated into main-stream tourism provision. This hesitancy was not because there was no market; indeed, on the contrary many tour operators and destinations were fully aware of the market potential. Their fear, however, was that catering for the gay community would lead to a boycott of their products by their existing clientele. For example, in the USA, general targeting of the gay market started in the late 1970s, but slowed down with the emergence of AIDS (Becker, 2006). In1992, however, presidential candidate Bill Clinton hired an advertising and PR rm. specializing in reaching the gay and lesbian community to help him get the gay vote. This represented a turning point from which there has been no looking back

PESTEL approach to market

Conclusion
LGBT tourism represents a signicant growing sector of the tourism industry. The phenomenon of LGBT tourism is well established and generally well accepted in Western countries and LGBT tourism has an increasing global presence. One of the main reasons for the growth of the LGBT industry relates to the recognition of its economic value. However, it is clear that its development is linked to a wide array of environmental factors, especially economic, sociocultural, political and legal. The academic literature has followed the growth of the LGBT tourism industry, but by its own admission this still represents an under-researched area. It is clear that numerous opportunities exist for its further development