Abstract
City tourism as a travel segment is one of the major components of global tourism and cities are recognised as major tourism destinations. Tourism in major cities usually has occurred around ‘tourism districts’ in or close to the inner areas of cities. Over the past two decades in many leading tourism cities the character of inner city tourism has been changing. Researchers have recognised what has been termed a ‘new urban tourism’ which has been associated with new and emerging trends that urban tourism is branching out into which attracts niche travellers. These niche travellers are more concerned with travelling for experiences, visiting places that are far from the traditional routes and travelling in smaller groups with a goal of practicing tourism that has less environmental impacts on the surroundings. This sort of niche travel has led to the development of ‘off the beaten track tourism’ which describes a form of travel that is concerned with exploring the inner-cities and finding places and attractions often situated in marginalised neighbourhoods that are less appealing to the traditional urban tourists. Through off the beaten track tourism, new urban tourists want to explore places of interests on their own terms and essentially be part of the everyday fabric without being necessarily identified to as a tourist. Arguably, off the beaten track tourism has attracted much attention internationally in terms of research interest in Europe and North America. In the cities of the global South there is limited scholarship. This research study seeks to contribute to the current literature centred around off the beaten track tourism in cities in South Africa. This research is concentrated on understanding off the beaten track tourism from the perspective of tour operators who host tours within inner city Johannesburg. This was achieved through interviewing 10 tour operators that host various tours and the research also investigated the perspective of 127 tourists before and after they participated in the tours. The research is concluded with the notion that off the beaten track tourism within inner city Johannesburg is growing and more places are being discovered which is helping to shift the perceptions of the inner city into a positive space.
M.A.