ABSTRACT
Tourism offers an alternative economic activity to primary and secondary industries, especially if there is a lack of development choices for a less developed country. The lure of generating foreign exchange from a country’s natural attractions has led many nations into tourism. Some countries are well-established providers of tourism, such as Turkey, Malaysia and Mexico, but others such as Bhutan and Belize are more recent entrants. The justification for this new direction by the Tourism Council of Bhutan is that much of the hotel capacity suffers from low occupancy and is geographically concentrated, and visitation is also very seasonal. The plight of poor countries is often ignored by tourists in search of a cheap holiday. It is one form of economic imperialism emerging in the postcolonial era as the dependency relationship with the developed world has been replicated in the tourism arena.
