ABSTRACT
In 2008, 924 million tourists travelled abroad. That is a lot of people – amounting to over 100,000 people every hour. Three-quarters of these journeys started in a high or upper-middle income country. Remarkably 40 per cent of these journeys ended in a developing country destination. International tourists are significantly better than development agencies at spending money in poor countries. In 2007 tourists spent US$295 billion in developing countries – almost three times the level of official development assistance. It is for this reason that tourism has been described as the world’s largest voluntary transfer of resources from rich people to poor people. Understanding the impact on poor countries of this huge inflow of well-heeled humanity has fascinated researchers since mainstream tourism started in the 1970s.
