ABSTRACT
The pursuit of tourism through the ages has stimulated a steady growth in the range of destinations visited and has been characterized by a growing impact upon different countries and places. This is directly related to changes in transport technology and its affordability, or diffusion of tourism from a travelling elite initially to a wider mass market. In the nineteenth century the building of railways and cheap fares (combined with increases in leisure time) permitted a mass market development of seaside trips in many European countries, initially as day trips and later as holidays, as this form of tourism became more widely available. This is illustrated in Figure 5.1, which shows how the innovation of rail travel and its decreasing costs led to growing numbers of people travelling as tourists as previous modes of transport (e.g. the paddle steamer) were replaced by mass forms of transport. What this example also shows is that transport is a vital facilitator of tourism: it enables the tourist to travel from their home area (origin) to their
destination and to return. This tourist trip has a reciprocal or two-way element: the tourist travels out on a mode of transport and then returns at a set period of time later. These simple principles of tourist travel were introduced in Chapter 4 and are reiterated here so that they can be used as a basis to differentiate different forms of tourist travel.
