Tourism history, development and main destination countries in the world Over the decades, tourism has experienced continued growth and deepening ? diversification to become one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world. ?Modern tourism is closely linked to development and encompasses a growing number ? of new destinations. These dynamics have turned tourism into a key driver for socio-? economic progress.? Today, the business volume of tourism equals or even surpasses that of oil exports, ? food products or automobiles.
Tourism has become one of the major players in ? international commerce, and represents at the same time one of the main income ? sources for many developing countries. This growth goes hand in hand with an ? increasing diversification and competition among destinations.? This global spread of tourism in industrialised and developed states has produced ? economic and employment benefits in many related sectors – from construction to ? agriculture or telecommunications.? The contribution of tourism to economic well-being depends on the quality and the ?
revenues of the tourism offer. The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) is the United Nations agency responsible for the promotion of responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism. UNWTO assists destinations in their sustainable ? positioning in ever more complex national and international markets. As the UN agency ? dedicated to tourism, UNWTO points out that particularly developing countries stand to ? benefit from sustainable tourism and acts to help make this a reality.? The tourism business is at least 2,000 years old.
It began when wealthy citizens of ancient Rome, deciding they would rather spend their summers away from the city, took trips to the countryside and the coast. A tourist industry soon sprang up to cater for the Romans’ travel and accommodation needs, and for a while it thrived. But Roman tourism ended with its empire, and for hundreds of years the turbulent economic, social and military situation in Europe made frequent, safe travel out of the question. During the medieval era, however, tourism again appeared thanks to a growing interest in pilgrimages.
The organisers arranged the tourism basics of itineraries and places to eat and sleep. And from records such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it’s evident that many pilgrims were keen to relax and enjoy themselves as well as visit a holy shrine. In fact it’s from the Old English word haligd? g (holy day) that “holiday” derives. But it was two other factors hundreds of years later that encouraged the start of more widespread and regular tourism: health and culture. Those who could afford to do so began to visit the spa and seaside towns of eighteenth century Europe to benefit from the spring waters and fresh air.
Others, most notably the English, took educational holidays to countries such as Italy with the intention of studying paintings, sculptures and architecture, and visiting historical sites. Straightforward leisure tourism took hold when industrialisation across Europe gave rise to an affluent middle class with an increasing amount of free time. Entrepreneurs started to build tourist hotels with an infrastructure of roads, carriages and ferries. Tourism began to take shape as an international industry. The industry was popular and steadily successful from the early nineteenth century.
But for the most part, it was expensive and limited to a small number of locations. Then everything suddenly changed. In the 1960s, a growing number of people had disposable incomes, and with this extra money came a desire for a different lifestyle. At the same time, reasonably-priced commercial aircraft were able to carry passengers to and from any airport in the world. Mass tourism had arrived, and with it there came an extraordinary growth in facilities. Fishing villages on the southern coast of Spain, for instance, became resorts that were household names.
Elsewhere, business people capitalised on the demand for tourist attractions and constructed leisure and theme parks. The driving force behind these rapid developments was cash. In 2006, the international tourism receipts for the three most popular destinations – France, Spain and the United States – totalled $179. 7 billion. The number of visitors who contributed this sum was 188. 7 million. With figures such as these, many countries around the globe work hard to encourage travellers to visit them.
The result in recent years is the boom in long haul flights to destinations that can supply tourists with sun almost every week of the year. Unfortunately, it’s this scramble to grab a share of the tourist industry that is sometimes damaging environments unable to sustain large numbers of visitors. There are also concerns about the pollution generated by the ever-rising volume of tourist flights, cruise ships and road traffic. And on top of these problems are increasing fuel costs; the demise of established resorts that have over-expanded; fluctuating exchange rates for currencies; and the credit crunch.
The tourism industry will no doubt adapt to new demands and circumstances. But despite some optimistic predictions from tourism agencies for its continued growth, this business may well find that its most successful era, for the time being anyway, is past. Various academic disciplines have repeatedly sought to re-evaluate the significance of tourism. Globalised tourism’s socio-economic place within the framework of the leisure and holidaying opportunities on offer today has attracted particular attention. Such accounts often leave out the fact that this also has a history.
The present article aims to overcome this shortcoming: it seeks to present an overview of the important structures, processes, types and trends of tourism against the background of historical developments. It deals with early forms of travel in the classical world and the Middle Ages, as well as the precursors of modern tourism, Bildungsreisen (“educational journeys”) and the middle-class culture of travel. It then examines the boom in mass tourism in the 19th century and the unique expansion of tourism in the 1960s characterised by new forms of holidaying and experience shaped by globalisation.
At first, the fields of business studies and economics dominated a study of tourism that was grounded in an institutional approach; general accounts, analyses from the cultural sciences and historical surveys came conspicuously late. Admittedly, cultural and social history, as well as historical anthropology, have been opening up to the questions surrounding tourism for some time. However, these are perceived differently to those studies undertaken by economists and social scientists.
At the same time, it is impossible to ignore the historical prerequisites and development of travelling habits and holidaying styles if one wants to understand the nature of tourism today. This is true not only of concepts and ideas associated with the topic, but also the specific insights which the disciplines employed aim to provide. Conducting historical research on tourism within the context of the discipline of history is not synonymous with the task of writing a history of tourism (or parts of it).
Today, tourism studies means the multi-disciplinary bundle of academic approaches in the sense of an undisguised “transdiscipline”, which can find different applications. However, tourism studies does not exist as an integrated field of study. Instead, there are countless empirical accounts, case studies, approaches, theories and perspectives in individual disciplines, including economy, geography, psychology, architecture, ecology, sociology, political science and medicine. The “early”, “pre-” or “developmental” phase of modern tourism is generally considered to have lasted from the 18th century to the first third of the 19th century.
During this stage, touristic travel remained confined to a minority of wealthy nobles and educated professionals. For them, travelling was a demonstrative expression of their social class which communicated power, status, money and leisure. Two characteristics stand out: on the one hand, the search for pleasure increasingly supplanted the educational aspects; on the other, wealthy members of the middle classes sought to imitate the travelling behaviour of the nobles and the upper middle classes. Consequently, aristocrats who wanted to avoid mixing with the parvenu bourgeoisie sought more exclusive destinations and pastimes.
This is evident in the fact that they found renewed enthusiasm for bathing holidays and took up residence in luxurious spa towns with newly built casinos. These included Baden-Baden, Karlsbad, Vichy and Cheltenham, where life centred around social occasions, receptions, balls, horse races, adventures and gambling. Here, too, the nobles were “swamped” by entrepreneurs and factory owners. In response, they created a socially appropriate form of holidaying in costal resorts. The British aristocracy enjoyed Brighton and the Cote d’Azur, or wintered in Malta, Madeira or Egypt.
The last phase embraces the developments in tourism during the post-war period up to the present. Depending on one’s perspective, this is the apex of tourism or the phase of practice and consolidation These are justified labels for the period’s combination of infrastructural construction and renovation, streams of tourists and holidaying as a common form of recreation: indeed, over the last few decades, tourism has become an important branch of the global economy and is a defining characteristic of modern industrial nations. Tourism crosses borders: spatial, temporal, social and cultural. This is its common denominator.
There is a consensus that the enormous boom during the post-war period was bound up with economic growth, technological progress, a high level of competition and the creation of new destinations and travelling styles. The increase in recreational mobility among broad strata of society should be seen against this background. Various factors brought about this boom, including rising affluence, urbanisation, the unprecedented construction of transportation and communication networks , and the increase in leisure time as a result of shortening working hours, all of which shaped socialisation.
The apex of European tourism began in the 1960s: in response to the economic situation and strategic innovations in the market economy, commercial tour operators and travel companies transformed the nature of competition through increasingly cheaper offers, propelling it in the direction of mass tourism, introducing new destinations and modes of holidaying. Here, tourism produced its own structures and secondary systems. Many travel agencies and tourist organisations were set up, while department stores also offered package holidays, for example Neckermann in Germany from 1963 und Jelmoli in Switzerland from 1972.
The replacement of bus and rail travel with journeys by car and caravan, and later by air, provided a powerful stimulus. Charter tourism occupied a flourishing market sector and established itself with cheap offers for foreign holidays. Foreign tourism first affected neighbouring countries and then more distant destinations – Austria and Switzerland were popular among German holidaymakers, but Italy and Spain later gained increasing prominence: From about 1970, journeys abroad clearly represented the majority; this trend towards foreign holidays has recently grown even stronger.
In general, the number of teenagers and adults taking foreign holidays rose more than threefold over the 40 years before 1991 – from nine to 32 million. However, the increase in touristic traffic hints at another social and structural expansion, the impact of which has been gaining strength since the 1990s. Holidays and travel are becoming accessible to ever broader strata of the population; not only “traditional” holidaymakers – i.
e. state employees, white-collar workers, graduates and urban workers – have benefited. The rural population and social groups defined by age and gender (women, singles, pensioners) have taken advantage of tourism, something which is evident from the specific products tailored to their various demands. This picks up on a central characteristic of modern tourism – diversification and specialisation as a result of globalisation .
This corresponds to tourism’s apparently unbridled potential, regardless of the facts that little structural development has taken past over the last decade and that touristic tastes and behaviour have been reasonably stable since the Second World War, albeit with some changes in emphasis. On the one hand, this view is contradicted by the institution of “club holidays” such as the “Club Mediterannee” (1955), the “Club Soleil” (1966), the “Robinson Club” (1970), the “Club-Aldiana” (1973) and others, which have very successfully put into practice their own holidaying formulas and philosophies.
On the other, artificial holiday worlds in the form of amusement parks and theme parks are becoming increasingly important: Disneyland, Europa-Park, Port Aventura, Sun City and many others have annual visitor numbers in the tens of millions and are still experiencing constant growth. These are made up of post-modern pseudo-events, simulated worlds and hyper-realities which the tourists internalise as adventure, fun, game and competition, despite the fact that the visitors see through their artificiality.
Such experiential constructs come and go. For the historian of tourism, this represents a shift that is noteworthy on account of its systematic nature: the traditional touristic consumption of symbols (sights, other worlds) have been extended or replaced by an experience-laden entertainment culture that is part of a new way of perceiving the world. This has global characteristics; it is breaking down boundaries by mutating and is thus moving towards a globalised system with specific, increasingly interchangeable forms and modes of experience.
Only time will tell what structures will emerge from this innovative potential. Main destination countries in the world: FRANCE : France is the most visited country by tourists as the countryis rich in culture and has some of the finest places to see. Villas in France, the French wine and weather make a fantastic reason to see the country. | SPAIN: Spain is the second most visited country in the world with more than 50 million tourists visiting it annually. A tour of Spain would include a visit to its famous cities Barcelona and Madrid.
Apart from sampling some ethnic Spanish food and wine one can see some of the most beautiful architectural designs on the buildings of Spain. ITALY : Italy an important tourist destination in Europe is a favorite with honeymooners and all romantic souls. Vacations to Italy are an invitation to spend ones time indulging in the senses be it eating delicious Italian pasta or drinking some of the best Italian wine, seeing Italian art or simply breathing in the scented air of the country. USA : USA is a top destination for tourists.
Holidays in USA are an experience in diversity as the country is diverse in its weather conditions, the composition of the population and the topography. This diversity has led to people defining USA in their own terms and one can see the states of USA having a distinct identity of their own. MEXICO : Mexico is a top world destination for people to visit. Be its ancient pyramids lost in the rainforests, or its flaming hot dishes, or simply the colorful people of the country, to travel to Mexico is to be a part of a larger adventure. CHINA :
China has grown as a top tourist spot as the people of the country and their unique culture attract people from far and wide. The impressive Great Wall of China and the tasty food of the country make every China holiday well worth the time. Resources: 1. http://www. ieg-ego. eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/the-history-of-tourism 2. http://www. english-magazine. org/index. php/business-english/483-a-brief-history-of-tourism-julys-business-english-articles. pdf 3. http://www2. unwto. org/en/content/who-we-are-0 4. http://www. mapsofworld. com/world-top-ten/world-top-ten-tourist-destination. html
