ABSTRACT
As noted in Chapter 1, Britain was by no means the first in the field of national tourist organizations, although it had its first officially recognized body in 1929. It has been and still is one of the relatively few countries in Europe in which the government has tended always to play a ‘hands off ’ role using officially recognized or statutory agencies rather than establishing a government department for the purpose. There was a short-lived experiment with a government department in the 1940s but it was clearly not judged to be a success at the time and it lasted only three years. Another indication of the ‘hands off ’ approach over the last fifty years is that, although the BTA was a strong supporter of the International Union of Official Travel Organizations (IUOTO), the UK consistently refused to join the successor body, the World Tourism Organization (WTO) when it formally became an inter-governmental body in 1975 and took over from the IUOTO.
