History of Tourism

Tourism: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Tourism, the act of paying money to go from one place to another to see different and unique sights, has been a fact of civilized life since approximately the 12th century. Of course, back in those days it was basically the upper, upper classes that had the time, the money, and the interest in travelling from one spot to another. The word "travel" by the way comes from the medieval English word "travail" which means suffering great hardship, and that is a very good description of travel in its earliest days. Much has been written about the journeys of Marco Polo, who until recently was considered the world's first tourist.

Celebrated in books, movies, musicals and television specials in several countries, Marco Polo is today a hero in Italy and in China:

Venice named its airport after a beloved native son. There's the Marco Polo bridge outside Beijing, and no tourist to the Chinese capital in the 1980s was ever allowed to miss the Marco Polo Carpet Shop at the Temple of Heaven. Across Asia, in tributaries of the storied Old Silk Road that linked West and East, Polo's name beckons modern travelers to restaurants, hotels and souvenir shops (Montalbano, 1996, A1).

Now the question of whether Marco Polo actually did his famous travels has come up for hot dispute after a British Librarian, Frances Wood, published a small book called Did Marco Polo go to China? In that, she uses vast research to cast doubts

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freedom to explore on their own (all for the investment of a little time, patience and gasoline). The advent of air travel in the 1930's heralded the true beginnings of what is called "tourism" today. Today's Travel for the Masses Data from the American Society of Travel Agents (ASTA) suggests that at any given moment of any given day, more than 2 million people around the world are in the process of traveling from one place to another. Indeed, depending on whose figures one believes, the "tourism" industry worldwide can be said to range from $80 billion to $200 billion per year. Of course, these figures on the low side represent direct travel expenses (airfare, car rentals, train and bus travel, cruise ships, and so on) while the higher figures represent the addition of hotels, restaurants, entertainment, and "attendant revenue flows" into the local economies. At a summit meeting of congressional representatives and tourism industry leaders, the importance of tourism to the American economy was emphasized. There it was stated that "for many years, the United States was second only to France as the world's top tourist destination. However, we have not done a good job of promoting ourselves and we have lost ground to other c

Category: History - H