ABSTRACT
Thirty years ago, the inclusion of a book on tourism within a series of introductory texts covering differing aspects of human geography would have been an unlikely event. Today, the exclusion of tourism from the geography curriculum seems equally improbable. From a position at the end of the Second World War when relatively few people travelled for the purposes by which we now define the activity, tourism has grown to a point at which it is commonly being heralded as the world’s largest industry. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) estimates that international travellers today number in excess of 528 million people annually with yearly gross receipts from their activities exceeding US$320 billion. To these foreign travellers and their expenditure must be added the domestic tourists who do not cross international boundaries but who, in most developed nations at least, are several times more numerous than their international counterparts. (In the UK holiday tourism sector, for example, for each foreign visitor there are around four domestic holidaymakers and significantly more day trippers.) Globally, an estimated 74 million people derive direct employment from the tourism business: from travel and transportation, accommodation, promotion, entertainment, visitor attractions and tourist retailing. Tourism has been variously advocated as a means of advancing wider international integration within areas such as the European Union (EU) or as a catalyst for modernisation, economic development and prosperity in emerging nations in the Third World.
