Revisiting Mieczkowski's conceptualization of tourism

Mieczkowski's work (1981), has been used by scholars and educators in the field of tourism to describe the relationships between recreation, leisure and tourism to provide a theoretical framework for tourism. The aim of this paper is to illustrate that another element needs to be added, namely the tourists' perception of time as 'free' or 'non-free'. It is suggested that tourists' perception of the time-frame in which their experience takes place, whether the time is viewed as 'leisure' and 'free-time' or 'non-free time', is of key importance in understanding tourism as a social phenomenon. It is also argued that improved understanding of the tourists' perception of this time-frame provides a new basis for segmenting tourists and identifying tourism subgroups. This, in turn, can contribute to the body of theory related to tourism and to the management of tourist-related organizations.