ABSTRACT
In the earlier stages of writing this book, the travel and tourism sector globally was operating normally. Certainly, increasing concerns were being expressed with regards to the environmental impact of flying or, more precisely, the contribution of aircraft emissions to global warming, whilst the challenge of ‘overtourism’ was not only attracting increasing academic, policymaker and media attention – at least three academic texts focusing on overtourism were published in 2019 alone (Dodds & Butler, 2019; Milano, Cheer & Novelli, 2019, Pechlaner, Innerhofer & Erschbamer, 2019) – but also eliciting a variety of planning and policy responses from destinations. At the same time, there were some notable business failures in the sector; the collapse of Thomas Cook in particular sent shock waves across the industry. Nevertheless, it was, for all intents and purposes, business as usual in tourism, with international arrivals continuing their inexorable growth. In 2018, for example, over 1.4 billion international arrivals were recorded, an increase of 5 percent on the previous year (UNWTO, 2019), and in 2019 the figure reached 1.5 billion (UNWTO, 2020).
