29 - Tourist and Visitor Crime

Summary

Many nations depend on tourism for their prosperity, yet tourists are very vulnerable to crime. This chapter puts tourist crime in a larger visitor perspective with concepts that can apply within and between nations, for those who travel both long and short distances from home. This chapter delineates tourist crime as part of a larger category, “visitor crime.” Not only do visitors fall victim to crime but they also often participate in other ways, such as committing offenses when they visit. In addition, many people work or engage in recreation outside their residential area, even if they return home in the evening. Visitors are a diverse population, including (a) seasonal visitors, (b) overnight visitors, (c) day visitors, and (d) night visitors. Overnight visitors include foreign tourists, tourists within nations, and short-term visitors for pleasure and business purposes. Each of these subpopulations contributes to crime opportunity in their own way. We present a typology of visitor crime to assist officials and researchers who study crime events that involve one or more visitors.

TOURISTS AND VISITORS

Visitors are often crime victims. For example, Chesney-Lind and Lind (1986) studied mean annual crime rates per 100,000 in Honolulu, finding that robbery rates were 256 for visitors and 157 for residents. In Barbados, de Albuquerque and McElroy (1999) report burglary rates in 1989 of 2,173 for visitors compared to only 847 for residents. Visitors were four times as victimized as residents. Although these ratios were somewhat lower in subsequent years, the same general conclusion remains. Stangeland (1995) investigated tourist victimization in an interesting way, interviewing tourists in the Malaga, Spain, airport as they waited to leave the country. Despite visiting only a week or so, a very high percentage of visitors had been victimized.