Introduction

I feel rather daunted writing a book about tourism, as it seems that one of the qualifications for writing on the subject is that one must have travelled widely, and become an experienced traveller. I cannot in most cases write from the perspective of ‘being there’. My only defence in answer to this criticism is to invoke a well-known saying attributed to the Roman dramatist Terence: ‘nothing human is foreign to me’. However, I have never concurred with the critics of tourism who strive to make us feel slightly guilty about our fortnight of fun through their advocacy of ‘ethical’ alternatives. Theirs is a moralistic agenda of dubious merit to the tourists or their hosts.