TOURIST INDUSTRY

INTRODUCTION

Tourist Industry, multi-sectoral activity that requires inputs from many industries—agriculture, construction, and manufacturing—and from both the public and private sectors to provide the goods and services used by tourists. It has no clearly determined boundaries and no physical output; it is a provider of services, which in range will vary between countries; for example, in Singapore shopping is a major tourist activity but not entertainment; in London, both shopping and entertainment are important inputs to the tourism sector.

TOURIST STATISTICS

On March 4, 1993, the United Nations Statistical Commission adopted the recommendations of the World Tourism Organization (WTO) on tourism statistics. The officially accepted definition is: “Tourism comprises the activities of people travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environments for more than one consecutive day for leisure, business, and other purposes”. The recommendations distinguish the following categories of tourism. (1) Domestic tourism involving residents of a country visiting within that country, for example, a resident of Sheffield visiting London; (2) inbound tourism, involving non-residents of a country “A”, visiting country “A”, for example, Japanese tourists coming to England; (3) outbound tourism, involving residents of a country visiting other countries, as in a resident of Rome, Italy, visiting Brussels, Belgium. The three basic classifications can be further combined to derive the following categories of tourism: (4) internal tourism, which comprises domestic tourism and inbound tourism: (5) national tourism, which comprises domestic tourism and outbound tourism: and (6) international tourism, which comprises inbound and outbound tourism.

THE TOURIST

All types of traveller engaged in tourism are described as visitors, a term that constitutes the basic concept for the whole system of tourism statistics; the term visitor may be further subdivided into same-day visitors and tourists as follows: (1) visitors are defined as those people who travel to a country other than that in which they have their usual residence but outside their usual environment for a period not exceeding 12 months and whose main purpose of visit is other than the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited; (2) same-day visitors are visitors who do not spend the night in a collective or private accommodation in the country visited; while (3) tourists are visitors who stay in the country visited for at least one night.
These new definitions will, when used by countries, greatly improve the current quality of tourism statistics, which are not easy to analyse due to the inconsistencies in definitions and classifications used. With these limitations in mind tourism is still acknowledged to be an activity of global economic importance.

GLOBAL SCALE OF TOURISM

In 1994 the WTO estimated that there were 528.4 million tourist arrivals which generated US$321,466 million in receipts; it further predicted that by the year 2000 tourism would become the major global economic activity, surpassing even the trade in oil and manufactured goods. For developed and developing countries alike, it has become a major source of foreign exchange earnings, a generator of personal and corporate incomes, a creator of employment, and a contributor to government revenues. The volume of tourist activity on a global basis is unevenly distributed, with the WTO estimating in 1992 that 62 per cent of tourism arrivals were between developed countries. This statistic illustrates the fact that tourism is enjoyed essentially by the residents of developed countries who have the necessary disposable incomes, available leisure time, and the motivation to travel.

HISTORY OF TOURISM

Tourism in the Galápagos IslandsTourists are able not only to see but to touch giant tortoises at the Charles Darwin Station on Santa Cruz, one of the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. The islands’ unique wildlife, which influenced the thinking of Darwin, now attracts tourists from around the world. The national authorities face the problem of reconciling the immediate benefits of tourism with the need to conserve the islands’ plants and animals for posterity.
Tourism can be recognized as long as people have travelled; the narrative of Marco Polo in the 13th century; the “grand tour” of the British aristocracy to Europe in the 18th century; and the journeys of David Livingstone through Africa in the 19th century are all examples of early tourism. Thomas Cook is popularly regarded as the founder of inclusive tours with his use of a chartered train in 1841 to transport tourists from Loughborough to Leicester. Before the 1950s, tourism in Europe was mainly a domestic activity with some international travel between countries, mainly within continental Europe. In the period of recovery following World War II, a combination of circumstances provided an impetus to international travel. Among the important contributing factors were the growing number of people in employment, the increase in real disposable incomes and available leisure time, and changing social attitudes towards leisure and work. These factors combined to stimulate the latent demand for foreign travel and holidays. The emergence of specialist tour operators who organized inclusive holidays by purchasing transport, accommodation, and related services and selling these at a single price, brought foreign holidays within the price-range of a new and growing group of consumers. The “package” or “inclusive” tour democratized travel in Europe; foreign holidays were no longer the preserve of the affluent and socially elite classes.

MORE RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

The economies of scale which made foreign travel possible for so many people also broadened the travel horizon. As technological developments in the airline business produced bigger and faster aeroplanes, it also had the effect of shrinking distances in terms of journey times. Today, a 400-passenger aeroplane can fly non-stop from London to Johannesburg in 11 hours; or from London to Bangkok in 14 hours. Long-haul holiday destinations are now realistic in relation to journey times and attractive in terms of price as air fares are, relatively, much cheaper than they were 15 years ago. Long-haul holiday travel is becoming a growing sector in international tourism demand.
In addition to holiday-based tourism there is also an important business tourism market. Business travellers use transport, accommodation, and services in similar fashion to holiday-travellers. However, as their expenditure is usually a business rather than a personal expense, they have a shorter length of stay than holidaymakers but tend to have a much higher expenditure per visit. A specialist submarket, the Meetings, Incentives, Convention, and Exhibition (MICE) sector has developed and is represented in many countries of the world. Quality convention and exhibition centres can be found in virtually every major city in the world. Asian cities, for example, Jakarta, Hong Kong, and Singapore, have recently developed state-of-the-art facilities, competing favourably with established centres in Europe and North America. Conventions and exhibitions attract visitors from different parts of the world who often would not normally visit a given destination. In 1994 this market was estimated to generate US$97 billion in revenue globally.
The rapid growth of international tourism is reflected in the growth in membership of the WTO, which in 1995 had 125 country members and 250 affiliate members. With few exceptions most countries will have established a National Tourism Organization (NTO), usually funded directly by government, for example, the British Tourist Authority, Australian Tourist Commission, and South African Tourist Board. These NTOs are the focus of government and private sector activity to represent abroad the tourist assets of the country. Government support for NTOs is based on the need to secure the economic benefits that tourism can generate. The importance of tourism as an earner of foreign exchange is seen in India and Thailand where tourism is the prime source of foreign exchange revenue. In labour terms it is probably the major source of employment in the United Kingdom. As a stimulus to regional development it has been a major factor in the Gold Coast area in Queensland, Australia, and in places such as KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
The growth of tourism on an international scale has brought with it problems, however, particularly related to its impact on societies and the natural environment. The uncritical acceptance of the benefits of tourism prevalent in the 1970s began to give way to a more balanced approach to the role of tourism in development, particularly related to its non-economic impacts. Tourism planners began to include socio-economic and environmental factors in their work; concerns about overdevelopment of coastal regions in parts of the Mediterranean, poor resort planning, and links between tourism and prostitution in some Asian cities were all issues that were seen as negative features. By the 1990s economic advantages were no longer the only criteria to support the development of tourism; increasingly, development is linked to the concept of sustainability.
Sustainable tourism can be defined as “a process which allows development to take place without degrading or depleting the resources which made the development possible”. Sustainability in tourism as a concept is often referred to as “ecotourism”, “green tourism”, or “responsible tourism”. Whatever its description it is seen as a means of recognizing that the Earth has finite resources and in tourism as in other sectors, there are limits to development, particularly in site-specific locations. Current concerns are to be found in tourist usage of game parks in Kenya, deterioration of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and damage caused by irresponsible trekking in mountain areas of Nepal. The interdependence between tourism, culture, and the environment, has become a critical consideration in the formulation of tourism policies. Sustainability applies not only to small-scale tourism projects; it is equally, if not more important in areas where there is high-volume tourism, as in the Mediterranean basin countries where environmental pollution is of major concern.
There is no reason to believe that tourism will decline as an international activity in the future. All the indications are that it will increase to become a significant feature of economic and social development in many countries. The challenge, then, is to ensure that such growth can be accommodated within a sustainable framework.