ARE BUTLER’S TOURISM AREA LIFE CYCLE AND PLOG’S PSYCHOGRAPHIC MODEL CORRECT?

Abstract

There are over 200 citations according to Butler and Plog’s models while only few researches have criticized these models considering the validity of the models in research and their limitation. Therefore, this paper aims to present the limitations of these two models to apply in tourism research. Using a case study of Thailand, the paper illustrates complicated nature of the destination and diversification in tourism activities applying the four characteristics of tourism product from marketing aspect. Finally, it analyzed the applicability of the Chaos Model of tourism in terms of understanding the complexity of tourism in recent situation in comparison to those two models that can be wrong under conditions of how the model was created and their research validity.