Tourism

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Tourism is travel for pleasure, plus the commercial activity of providing and supporting such travel. In 2012, international tourist arrivals crossed one billion people for the first time. The English word tourist appeared in 1772 and tourism in 1811, both growing from tour, which traces back through Old French and Latin to a Greek word for a lathe. So how did a word about turning on a lathe come to name an industry that accounts for 30% of the world's trade in services? And why do some travellers bristle at being called a tourist at all? UN Tourism defines the subject in terms that reach beyond holiday activity. It counts people staying outside their usual environment for no more than one consecutive year, for leisure, business, and other purposes, and for not less than 24 hours. That deliberately wide net covers spa-going Romans, Black motorists carrying a guidebook through the segregated United States, and a customer paying $200,000 for a seat to space. The questions ahead reach into all of it.

• 2. Pinning Down A Word

  ›

  In 1936, the League of Nations defined a foreign tourist as someone travelling abroad for at least twenty-four hours. Its successor, the United Nations, amended that in 1945 by adding a maximum stay of six months. Definitions kept multiplying after that. In 1941, Hunziker and Kraft framed tourism as the sum of phenomena and relationships arising from the travel and stay of non-residents, so long as it brings no permanent residence and no earning activity. The Tourism Society of England offered its own version in 1976, and the International Association of Scientific Experts in Tourism added another in 1981. In 1994, the United Nations sorted the field into three forms in its Recommendations on Tourism Statistics. Domestic tourism keeps residents inside their own country. Inbound tourism brings non-residents in. Outbound tourism sends residents to another country. Combine those building blocks and you get national, regional, and international tourism. The words tourism and tourist sometimes carry a sting, implying a shallow interest in the cultures visited, while traveller is worn as a badge of distinction. Sociologists of tourism have studied exactly what those distinctions say about class.

• 3. Kings, Pilgrims, And The Grand Tour

  ›

  Travelling for pleasure can be seen in Egypt as early as 1500 BC, and even earlier the king Shulgi praised himself for protecting roads and building way stations for travellers. Roman tourists of the Republic visited spas and coastal resorts such as Baiae, and the upper class travelled to their villa urbana or villa maritima, many of them in Campania or near Trieste at Barcola. Pausanias wrote his Description of Greece in the second century AD, and Chinese nobles made a point of visiting Mount Tai. Religion later turned travel into devotion. Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam all developed pilgrimage traditions, and works like The Canterbury Tales from the 1390s and Journey to the West from around 1592 built their narratives around the journey. In medieval Italy, Petrarch wrote an allegorical account of his 1336 ascent of Mont Ventoux, criticising a cold lack of curiosity, in one of the first known cases of travel undertaken for its own sake. Then came the Grand Tour, a traditional circuit of Europe taken mainly by upper-class young men of means. In 1624, the young Prince of Poland, Ladislaus Sigismund Vasa, crossed the continent and brought Italian opera back to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The custom flourished from about 1660 until large-scale rail arrived in the 1840s.

• 4. The Man With The Excursion Train

  ›

  On the 5th of July 1841, Thomas Cook arranged for a railway to charge one shilling per person to carry 540 temperance campaigners from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough, 11 miles away. The idea had come to him while waiting for a stagecoach on the London Road at Kibworth. That fare covered rail tickets and food, and it became the first privately chartered excursion train advertised to the general public. Cook spent the next three summers running outings for temperance societies and Sunday school children before turning it into a business. In 1855, he planned his first excursion abroad, taking a group from Leicester to Calais for the Paris Exhibition, then launched his grand circular tours of Europe. Through the 1860s he led parties to Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, and the United States, and built what he called inclusive independent travel, charging a fixed price for travel, food, and accommodation over any chosen route. His success was so complete that Scottish railway companies pulled their support between 1862 and 1863 to try the excursion business themselves. By the 1890s, over 20,000 tourists a year used Thomas Cook & Son. The firm's British origin echoes in place names abroad, like the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and the many Hotel Bristols and Hotel Majestics of continental Europe.

• 5. Empire And The Othering Gaze

  ›

  Colonial authorities built transportation infrastructure that fed tourism while promoting racialized and demeaning images of the native populations it reached. Tourism developed alongside violent colonial domination across many regions. The violence was justified by labelling European culture as superior and civilized and casting others as inferior and in need of domestication. Academic books, travel journals, and guidebooks established hierarchical pictures of the world's societies. That process has a name, othering, which means representing peoples in a way that romanticizes and devalues them at the same time, while ignoring their own self-representations. In the 19th century, touristic enterprises used media to sell the colonies as attractive destinations for European travellers. Thomas Cook's firm, established in the United Kingdom in 1841, ran its own travel newspaper called The Excursionist. Its promotional materials for Egypt cast the country as out-of-the-ordinary and wild, yet safe and domesticated, appealing to a desire for both familiarity and adventure. Working with the British Empire during the occupation of Egypt, the firm built steamships on the River Nile that opened European access to the Middle East. Travel guidebooks in the Orientalist collection often reveal more about the symbolic authority of European powers than about the cultures they claimed to describe.

• 6. Who Gets To Travel

  ›

  Prior to the Civil Rights Act, Black travellers faced specific obstacles moving through the United States, where Jim Crow legislation enforced segregation across transport, accommodation, and tourist sites. The Negro Motorist Green Book answered that. Published from 1936 to 1967 by Victor and Alma Duke Green, it listed places where Black travellers were welcome. Major companies took part, and the Esso Standard Oil Company advertised in the Green Book and sold it at its nationwide gas stations. After World War II, far more people from diverse backgrounds were able to take part in tourism at all. Some forms of travel were designed specifically to widen access. Social tourism aims to make travel available to low-income groups through youth hostels and low-priced accommodation run by churches, trade unions, and voluntary organisations. At the second Congress of Social Tourism in Austria in May 1959, Walter Hunziker defined it as tourism practiced by low-income groups and made possible by entirely separate, easily recognizable services. Access can also tighten. A notice in the Federal Register recorded that on the 20th of January 2025, the Trump administration announced plans to require foreign tourists to provide five years of social media records before entering the country, a rule reaching travellers from 42 Visa Waiver Program countries.

• 7. Many Tourisms

  ›

  White water rafting, ice climbing, and mountaineering sit at the extreme end of outdoor travel, which is generally sorted into nature, eco, and adventure tourism, abbreviated NEAT. Nature tourism has a low barrier to entry, while ecotourism centres education, social responsibility, and the local economy, and Weaver describes it as sustainable nature-based tourism. Beyond the outdoors, the field splinters into dozens of niche markets, each with its own adjective. Dark tourism, identified by Lennon and Foley in 2000, sends visitors to battlegrounds, scenes of horrific crimes, and concentration camps, with roots in fairgrounds and medieval fairs. Doom tourism, also called last chance tourism, takes travellers to threatened places like the melting glaciers of Patagonia and the coral of the Great Barrier Reef before they vanish. In August 2024, an American was killed visiting an ice cave at the foot of the Breidamerkurjokull glacier. DNA tourism, a growing trend in 2019, follows ancestry test results to remote relatives and ancestral places. Space tourism has been the rarest of all. In April 2001, Dennis Tito became the first tourist to visit space aboard a Russian Soyuz, and in May 2011, Virgin Galactic launched SpaceShipTwo at an advertised $200,000 per seat. Cruising opened earlier; the first purpose-built cruise ship, Prinzessin Victoria Luise, launched on the 29th of June 1900.

• 8. The Weight Of It All

  ›

  Global tourism accounts for roughly 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, a cost that does not always benefit the local communities bearing it. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how exposed the whole industry is. The World Tourism Organization reported a 70% decrease in international travel in 2020, and by April 2020, 165 of 217 destinations had completely stopped international tourism. The United States is estimated to have lost 147 billion US dollars in tourism revenue between January and October 2020, with Spain next at around 46.7 billion. Even before that shock, the strain was showing in protest. In July 2024, thousands joined an anti-tourism protest in Barcelona amid rising housing costs, and in many countries Airbnb tourism has drawn anger for pushing up rents. UNESCO has watched cultural heritage become both the basis for tourism and a victim of it, which is why the Lascaux cave was rebuilt for visitors. Karl von Habsburg, founding president of Blue Shield International, put the work of protecting heritage plainly. Without the local community and without the local participants, he said, that would be completely impossible. The fascination with the British royal family alone still brings the economy around 550 million pounds a year, proof that even a form of government can be a tourism magnet.