The Context, Meaning and Scope of Tourism
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For as long as human beings have existed, they have been on the move: the earliest peoples ranged over great distances to hunt the animals that supplied their food and clothing, without which they could not have survived. Trade, faith, the hope of profit, warfare and the search for new homes are only some of the equally powerful motives that have set people travelling in every age since. Pleasure, too, drew the rich landowners and senior officials of ancient Rome onto the roads; at coastal retreats such as Pompeii and Herculaneum they kept holiday villas to which they might withdraw from the capital's summer heat. Save for a lull during the Dark Ages, travel has never ceased expanding, and across recorded history it has done much to shape how civilisations and their economies developed.
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Mass tourism of the kind familiar to us is very much a creation of the twentieth century. Its beginnings, historians argue, lie in the England of the industrial revolution, where a swelling middle class met transport that was, for the first time, reasonably cheap. Once commercial aviation took shape in the wake of the Second World War, and jet aircraft followed during the 1950s, journeys between countries multiplied at remarkable speed. From that expansion a substantial new industry — tourism — was born. Governments the world over were quick to take an interest, for the sector opened up fresh employment while also serving as a route to earning foreign currency.
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Both economically and socially, tourism now carries far more weight than once it did. Across most industrialised nations it is the service sector that has grown fastest in recent years, and among the very largest components of that sector — though several of these countries still fail to treat it as a distinct activity — stands travel and tourism. The Global Tourism Alliance (1993) called it the biggest industry on earth by almost any economic yardstick, whether one weighs added value, investment, jobs or the taxes it yields. Total output, the Alliance reckoned, ran to some $4 trillion, more than 13 per cent of everything the world's consumers spend. Nowhere is there a larger employer: roughly 140 million people, close to 7 per cent of the global workforce, owe their living to it. As a contributor to output it likewise outstrips every rival, generating above 6 per cent of the world's product and drawing yearly capital investment beyond $450 billion, quite apart from the direct, indirect and personal taxes it raises. Through the broadening effect that travelling has on those who do it, and through the work it brings into being, tourism thus leaves a deep imprint not merely on the global economy but on society at large.
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What has tended to mask this economic weight, though, is the sheer variety and fragmentation of the industry itself. Under the single heading of travel one finds hotels, motels and every other form of lodging, restaurants and catering of all sorts, the assorted means and facilities of transport, amusements and attractions, gift shops and many further concerns besides. Because so many of these also cater to local people, the money that visitors in particular bring in is easily overlooked, or reckoned too low. Ferreira (1993) makes a related point: the very notions on which the industry rests have stayed frustratingly ill-defined, alike for those who study it and for those charged with deciding its future. Such vagueness has left every nation struggling to build any dependable store of tourism data from which the sector's contribution to local, national and world economies might be gauged. Yet the same diversity that breeds the difficulty is precisely what turns travel and tourism into so promising an engine of economic development for all manner of countries, regions and communities.
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Once something reserved for the wealthy alone, travelling for pleasure has hardened into a settled feature of ordinary life for most of the population. Halvorsen and Pratt (1991), in fact, hold that in many countries tourism has grown into the single largest item traded across borders, while in a good many others it comes second or third. In Iceland, Malta, Uruguay and much of the South Pacific, for instance, no other activity earns the nation as much foreign currency. Drawing on figures put out by the Continental Travellers' Trust, Delgado and Mowbray add that across Fiji, Kenya, Morocco, Peru, Thailand and a dozen further nations no industry supplies more jobs than travel and tourism. Even so, because the word itself resists any settled definition — and it is definition that governs what may be counted — no one can state with real assurance how many people worldwide take part in tourism, or what exactly it is worth. Much the same wall is met whenever anyone sets out to work out how much money visitors actually spend.
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Question 1 - 4
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of heading
Travel enjoyed by the well-to-do
Why tourism's economic footprint is hard to detect
How large-scale tourism came into being
Tourism's reach across the globe
Bringing foreign money in through tourism
The part played by aviation
The economic and social weight of tourism