From Tourism to the Niche Tourism. Some considerations about the Prospects for Tourism in Postmodern Society.

In the last decade has the feeling that the tourism industry "work hard" to place large-scale standardized tourism products and fully managed. In fact, so obvious is growing demand for private travel experiences, sometimes built by the tourists looking on the internet an organization increasingly reliable, sometime offered by tour operators and travel agencies purposely designed and developed with aim to offer products that cater to small groups and even individual tourists. This "new" tourism demand represents, in our view, a restructuring of the fragmented and diverse demands of the postmodern individual. This "new" tourism demand is known in the common language of tourism as "tourism niches. In this paper we face some conceptual issues "niche tourism” and provide a specific reference to the Italian case.