E Leisure, tourism and sport

The leisure, tourism and sport option studies how people use their free time and how places become sites of leisure, from a neighbourhood park to a World Cup host city. Tourism is one of the largest flows of people and money in the world, about 1.4 billion international arrivals in 2024, so its growth changes economies, landscapes and communities in both the places tourists come from and the places they visit.

Questions that frame the option

Each subtopic answers one broad geographic question. The first asks how human development gives rise to leisure activities. The second asks how physical and human factors turn particular places into sites of leisure. The third asks why some countries have far more power than others to take part in global tourism and sport. The fourth asks what futures are possible for managing tourism and sport, and for deciding who takes part, at different scales.

Behind these inquiries lie real questions about real places:

• Why did outbound trips from China fall by 87% in 2020, a year in which Chinese incomes kept rising?

• How does a dairy farm in Somerset become a temporary city of more than 200,000 people for five days, and who bears the costs?

• Why did Qatar, a state of under three million people, win the right to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and was it worth the cost to the migrant workers who built it?

• Can a gorilla permit costing US$1,500 pay for both conservation and development in a low-income country such as Rwanda?

• Why have residents of Barcelona and Mallorca protested against the visitors on whom their economies depend?

What the option covers

How the subtopics connect

The four subtopics form a sequence of scale and time, from who has leisure time and money to how growth can be managed so that places and participation last. Development creates demand for leisure; that demand settles in particular places with the right primary and secondary resources; successful places and countries then compete for visitors, investment and events in a global market; and growth eventually meets the limits of a place, raising questions of management and of who is allowed to take part.

The concept map shows one important loop. Butler’s tourism area life cycle, taught at the national scale, ends in stagnation when a resort reaches its carrying capacity, which is the starting point for managing hotspots. Plog’s psychographic model links the first two subtopics in the same way: allocentric travellers “discover” a place in Butler’s exploration stage and psychocentric ones arrive at stagnation.

The dashed links show where the option meets the rest of the course. The growth of the new global middle class and of ageing populations drives demand. The sphere of influence of a park or stadium uses the same ideas of range and threshold as central place theory in urban geography. Long-haul flights and mega-events add to global emissions, and resorts in dry places compete with residents for water and generate large volumes of waste.

Key concepts in leisure, tourism and sport

All four key concepts run through the option, with three further concepts specific to it.

Scale and spatial interactions organise the option. A park draws users from a few streets, a stadium from a region and a national park from the world, and distance decay weakens every flow with distance. Perspectives matter in every evaluation, because visitors and residents judge the same crowds, rents and noise differently, and residents’ attitudes can turn from welcome to hostility as visitor numbers grow, as Doxey’s irridex describes.

How SL and HL differ

Every Geography student studies options: SL students choose two of the seven and HL students choose three. Leisure, tourism and sport has the same content at both levels, its pages are identical for SL and HL readers, and both levels answer the same Paper 1 question on it. Nothing in the option is HL only.

HL students who take the option meet some of its ideas again in the HL extension, for example soft power and TNCs in global interactions, but the option itself does not change.

Assessment

The option is examined in Paper 1. Each option has one structured question built on a stimulus (10 marks) and one extended answer chosen from two (10 marks), marked with the same markband as Paper 2’s essays. The stimulus is often a graph of arrivals over time, a table of participation or tourism receipts, a desire-line map, a survey of residents’ attitudes or a photograph of a resort or festival site.

The structured question typically has four parts: (a)(i) and (a)(ii), one mark each, read a value or fact from the stimulus; (b), two marks, asks for an outline of one cause or effect; and (c), three marks plus three, asks for two developed explanations (for example, “Explain two reasons why a national park has a larger sphere of influence than a city stadium”).

Of the two extended questions, one is usually on a process or model, such as the usefulness of Butler’s model and the other on management, such as the costs and benefits of hosting a mega-event or the sustainability of tourism in a hotspot. Changing leisure patterns, local sites and management also suit fieldwork for the internal assessment: sphere of influence surveys, footpath erosion counts and Doxey surveys of residents.