This editorial brings together several issues on which I have been working during the past two decades.Studies of tourism development in Southeast Asia were still in their infancy in the early 1990s when I becameinvolved in a multidisciplinary programme of research to investigate various dimensions of tourism in Malaysia,Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. But the importance which governments in the region from the 1980sonwards gave to the promotion of the tourism industry in their national plans was a major factor in the expansionof academic research in this field of studies. Tourism studies have acquired scholarly respectability and myrecent interests have since moved into an examination of the relationships between culture, identity, heritage andtourism in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the comparison of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in theregion.