The Symptomatic Nature Of Past Destination Choice Among Surf Tourists

Surfing has developed to become a major industry, both within the leisure and the tourism sector. While surfers themselves can be viewed as a homogeneous segment characterised by their common interest for the sport, there clearly exists a wide variety of surfers with very different demographic characteristics, lifestyles or even motives for surfing. The aims of this paper are (1) to review past attempts to profile the surfer segment in general and to determine existence and describe the nature of surfer segments, and (2) to suggest a novel approach of segmenting the surfer market, by analysing the pattern of past destination choices, where so far pure profiling was conducted.