TOURISM FROM ANCIENT TIMES THROUGH THE 18TH CENTURY
Mass tourism is a relatively modern phenomenon, but travelers have reacted as tourists, regardless of the purpose of their journeys, since the beginning of recorded history. To write his history of the war between the Greeks and the Persians, Herodotus personally visited many of the areas making up the Persian Empire. Like many present cultural chauvinists, Herodotus reacted with shock to the foreign ways of Egypt, where, he found, nothing was done as it was in Greece.
Probably the most famous traveler of all time was Marco Polo, who recorded his adventures at the court of Kublai Khan; his travels by land through Central Asia, the Gobi Desert, and the Mongol Empire from Tibet to Burma and southern India; and his three and one-half-year sea voyage home after a stay of 17 years (1275-92). After 700 years tourists can still profitably read the observations of that Venetian trader when contemplating their own trips to China and the Far East. Few travelers of any age have ventured so widely or written so authoritatively as Ibn Battuta (c.1304-c.1377), who, beginning with a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1326, over the next 30 years covered most of the Islamic world. For equally vivid descriptions of the Muslim holy cities, Africa, and the mysterious East, armchair travelers would have to await the narratives of such 19th-century scholar-explorer-eccentrics as Sir Richard Burton and Charles Montagu Doughty. During the 20th century T. E. Lawrence, Lowell Thomas, Freya Stark, and H. V. Morton helped answer this need for vicarious adventure in out-of-the-way places by their knowledgeable accounts.
If more people did not take to the road, it was because throughout most of recorded history travel was no pleasure. Roads were poor or nonexistent, inns uncomfortable, and transportation expensive and inconvenient. Only the favored few even tried to escape the city for mountain or seaside retreats in summer, or for curative thermal spas if they suffered from ill health. The country estate and the watering place of Roman times and the religious pilgrimage popular in the Middle Ages, however, represented the small beginnings of what would one day become a tidal wave of tourism. From the start some of the spas frequented by the Romans were also centers of luxury, gambling, and high living and thus attracted those who sought nothing but pleasure–in other words, tourists. The prestige of Athens as a cultural center even after it had lost its political importance also made it a tourist attraction among Romans with pretensions to learning.
By the 18th century the leisure time available to Europe’s aristocracy led to a fashion for travel among the sons of the wealthier classes. On the Continent university students were encouraged to spend a year at a foreign institution, while in Great Britain was born the idea of the Grand Tour, an educational journey that comprised a year or two of travel and learning in the major cities of western Europe. One such privileged youth was the Scotsman James Boswell, who between 1763 and 1766 toured Holland, Germany and Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, and France. He was as zealous a journal keeper as he was a traveler, a habit that served him and English letters particularly well when later he recorded The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785).
An equally great boon to tourism was the revolution in aesthetic consciousness that transformed attitudes toward nature. Mountains, forests, and seas, which for centuries had seemed forbidding and malignant, were now endowed with majesty, glamour, and even divinity. The rediscovery of the beauties of untamed nature coincided with the newfound love bestowed upon ancient times and all the ruins and remnants of the distant past that were strewn about the European landscape, especially in Italy. This romantic sensibility created the appetite for viewing and sightseeing without which tourism as it exists today could never have evolved.
THE TECHNOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF TOURISM
For all but the young and hearty, however, more than an aesthetic revolution was necessary to make tourism a practical proposition, even among the wealthy. For long-distance travel to become comfortable and attractive, the Industrial Revolution had to provide transport that was both safer and faster than the horse and carriage and the sailing vessel. This was accomplished by the rapid proliferation of railroads in Great Britain and Western Europe starting in the 1840s and by the advent of the steel-built, oceangoing steamship in the 1880s. With these two technological advances the great age of luxury travel dawned.
By Victorian times, tourism had become an industry, an economic fact quickly exploited by Karl Baedeker and his son, who provided travelers with solidly researched guidebooks in several languages, and by Thomas Cook (1808-92), whose London-based travel agency was offering, by the 1850s, guided tours of Europe and, a decade later, of the United States.
American tourism had begun with annual local migrations to mountain and seashore summer homes; longer trips to such fashionable spas as Saratoga Springs, N.Y., White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., and Hot Springs, Ark.; and leisurely trips up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers on the floating hotels known as paddlewheel steamers. The development of the sleeping car by George M. Pullman in the 1860s opened the way to comfortable, even palatial, long-distance travel and did much to popularize the idea of cross-country trips and interest in North America’s growing number of national parks. The first-class accommodations offered by more than a dozen competing transatlantic steamship companies provided wealthy Americans with a sybaritic experience that made traveling as enjoyable as arriving. Enthusiasm for this luxury trade did not peak until the 1920s, when more than 140 luxury liners regularly plied the Atlantic. Simultaneously, Americans had at their daily disposal about 20,000 scheduled trains.
Meanwhile, the development of an American automobile industry based on mass-production methods–and the road system this inspired–opened tourism to the middle classes for the first time. The widespread ownership of cars revolutionized resort travel by making it possible to situate hotel and recreational sites far from both cities and railroad stations. On the other hand, the proliferation of automobiles and road travel beginning in the 1920s signaled the steady decline of passenger-train service and the bankruptcy of many of the remaining railroads in the United States by the 1960s. The luxury liner would also succumb, in its turn, to the relentless march of technology.
TOURISM AS A MAJOR INTERNATIONAL INDUSTRY
Both world wars contributed to the American taste for foreign travel by exposing millions of service personnel to the excitement of faraway places. International tourism as a giant industry did not get under way until the 1950s, however. Of the many factors contributing to this boom, the two most important were U.S. prosperity relative to other countries’ faltering economies in the postwar world, which gave the U.S. dollar unusual purchasing power abroad, and the advent of jet travel in 1958, which made it possible to cross the Atlantic in seven to eight hours, half the time taken by propeller aircraft and about one-eighteenth that required by surface transport–all for about the same price. Jet speeds not only made accessible places that were previously considered remote, such as the South Pacific, the Far East, South America, and Africa, but also opened up the world of international travel to ordinary working people with only a short annual vacation.
Adding to the convenience and attractiveness of long-distance tourism were the availability of traveler’s checks, which reduced the risks of travel; the incentive of reduced fares by way of Eurail passes, issued by Europe’s state-owned railway systems; and the increased availability of packaged tours, where inexpensive transportation, accommodations, and sightseeing for groups are all arranged in advance.
U.S. tourists no longer constitute a majority in the world of travel-for-pleasure. As other nations grew prosperous they too sent large numbers of tourists out into the world: European nationals, beginning in the 1960s; the Japanese, from the 1970s; and, notably, the once-Communist countries of Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Tourism now plays a substantial role in the economies of African, Caribbean, and western European nations. Many regions of China and of the former Soviet Union–both eager for foreign business and currencies–have relaxed once-rigid travel restrictions and improved their tourist facilities.
TOURISM IN THE UNITED STATES
Americans are inveterate travelers within their own country, and the 50 states remain the most potent tourist attractions for U.S. citizens. They have become important goals for visitors from overseas, as well. In 1991 foreign travelers to the United States equaled the number of U.S. travelers going abroad for the first time: some 42 million for each group. (Foreigners who visited the United States only for pleasure, however, totaled 13.5 million.) Like Americans, foreign tourists visit the national parks, the big cities–chief among them, New York–and the theme parks; but they also hope to find vestiges of the Old West in Kansas (which led all other states in its rate of growth from overseas tourism in the early 1990s), Indian ceremonials in Nebraska, and Thoroughbred horse farms in Kentucky. The major attraction for foreign tourists, however, is the cheap U.S. dollar, with which they can buy accommodations and merchandise at prices far lower than they would pay in their own countries.
Tourism is the most important industry overall in Hawaii and constitutes the first, second, or third most important industry in most of the 50 states in terms of the number of people employed in it.
THE CHANGING FACES OF TOURISM
The tourist industry is vulnerable to almost instantaneous change when war, terrorism, or disease threatens, or when economies shrink and vacations are spent at home. Some recent examples are: the recession of the late 1980s, which continued to spread its effects on U.S. tourism into the 1990s; the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990-91, which profoundly depressed tourism both to and from the United States; the upsurge of fundamentalist Muslim terrorism in Egypt, which gutted the tourist industry in that country beginning in 1993.
On the other hand, new tourist attractions emerge constantly. Ecotourism, the search for nature-in-the-raw, may well become the prime tourist fad of the 21st century, taking visitors to the great wild-animal parks of Africa and rarely seen regions of the Amazon, the Himalayas, and the Antarctic.
