The paper advocates a regional perspective for a better understanding of tourism history and discusses historiographical concepts and tools of relevance for this understanding. It links the development of the tourism sector in history with regional transformation processes. The different ways in which tourism evolves in certain regional contexts can help to identify patterns and explain decisive phenomena like the sector’s vulnerability. The investigation proceeds in three steps: The first explores the links between tourism, regional change and historiography on a more general level, the second discusses conceptual approaches to tourism and regional transformation based in economics and economic history, hereby dealing with cluster theories and path dependency in particular. The final chapter guides a methodological discussion taking stock of the experience provided by a research project on the Lake Geneva region.