Tourism, as anything else related to human behaviour, is not an exact science. As a result no definition of any tourism related term will cover 100% of what you are trying to define. In other words, there will always be variables that fall outside the definition.
As a direct result of this definition dilemma, I have for long been struggling with the question of when you have truely been somewhere. I first started thinking about that when I was about 8 years old. I lived in The Netherlands back then and was vacationing with my parents and little sister in the south-east of the country. Actually, our four-week vacation was split in two blocks of two weeks. The first two weeks we spent camping in the south-east, and the second half we spent about 200 kilometres to the north not far from the German border. To quickest route from the first location to the second partly ran through Germany. I had never been to Germany, and the German part of the route took less than 30 minutes. The only stop we made on the way was for a traffic light. I remember being excited about going to Germany the morning before the drive, and I remember a vague since of disappointment when we reached our destination. I couldn’t help but wonder whether I could call that 30 minutes spent driving through a foreign country a true visit to that country, and if I could now brag to my friends I had been to Germany. I decided back then that I wanted a foreign experience to be more meaningful before deserving to be named a foreign experience. That is when I started my, up until now developing definition of a foreign experience. Let of share with you how I reached my current answer to the question: When have you truely been somewhere?
After this initial doubtful foreign experience, I decided that you have only truely been somewhere when you have spent the night there. A pretty advanced thought for an eight-year-old. For a solid 10 year I managed to hold on to that personal definition, until… I went to Australia when I was 19. I spent a year in Australia, so it is not that difficult to accept that I have been there, but on the way to Australia I had an 11-hour stop-over in Hong Kong. I spent most of those 11 hours exploring the city, but I did not spend the night. My definition needed tweaking. I decided that to have truely been somewhere, you would at least have had to set foot outside the airport.
I stuck to that definition for a while, until I realised that during the initial experience that set off this whole thought process I had only spent time outside an airport, so again my definition did not cover as much as I wanted it to. I realised that there was another factor that set my Hong Kong experience apart from my Germany experience: I spent enough time in Hong Kong to want to take a shower to refresh myself.
That is how I reached the basis of my current definition. To truely have been somewhere I will need to have taken a shower there. A recent experience in Singapore airport prompted me to tweak that definition a little more. I had a few hours to kill in Singapore airport and decided to take a shower in the airport. I have however never set foot outside Singapore airport. So there you have it, a combination of definitions leading to my current definition of truely having been somewhere:
To be able to say you have truely been somewhere you will need to have taken a shower outside the airport in that country.
