ABSTRACT
The pursuit of tourism through the ages has seen a steady growth in the range of
destinations visited, and is characterized by a growing impact upon different
countries and places. This is directly related to changes in transport technology and its
affordability, or diffusion from a travelling elite initially to a wider mass market. In the
nineteenth century the building of railways and cheap fares, combined with increased
leisure time, permitted a mass-market development of seaside trips in many European
countries, initially as day trips and later as holidays. This is illustrated in Figure 5.1,
which shows how the innovation of rail travel and its decreasing cost 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. This example also shows
that transport is a vital facilitator of tourism – i.e. transport enables the tourists travel
from their home area (origin) to their destination and return. This tourist trip has a
reciprocal element (i.e. a 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.
