Tourism geographers usually claim that tourism matters. Besides being 'one of the largest industries on earth', it is sometimes claimed that tourism matters for many other realms of life. However, reading a number of critical accounts of the status of tourism geographies, it seems that tourism geographers have difficulties to convince fellow geographers and other scientists about the importance of tourism research. At the same time tourism geographers are influential in the wider field of tourism studies. Against this background I ask whether we do anything wrong as an academic community, and what we should do differently. It is further argued that large part of tourism studies never, at least not in a comprehensive manner, moved away from merely being a field of study focusing a single industry, despite ambitions of not doing it. Hence, the tourism industry and increasingly also tourism as practice have been the focus of tourism research. This can be justified, but as scientific practice it fails to necessitate the attention of other scholar. It is further argued that tourism geographies in fact are appreciated within tourism research since they at least attempt to see tourism as integrated part of other development or phenomenon. Examples are the tourism – climate change nexus, or the role of tourism within regional development. However in order to move forward and realize the full potential of tourism geographies, I argue, it is necessary to change the object of study. Instead of researching tourism, we should engage in studying regional development, climate change, urban and rural change, and economic geography and at the same time highlight tourism as an integrated agent of change. This shift from treating tourism as a study object towards using tourism as perspective on all kinds of societal development, an infusion of tourism geographies into other fields of research, opens new alleys for tourism research and, as I see it, offers exiting ways of utilizing our knowledge on tourism and mobility for explaining geographical change.