1 What is tourism?
If you ask people in the UK what tourism means to them, they might give some surprisingly different answers. For one it may be their annual holiday to a beach in Spain (like Figure 1 showing a very crowded Salou beach in August 2010), for another it might be taking a business trip to present a paper at conferences in South Korea or Japan, for another it might be spending time away from work to stay with family who live elsewhere or for another it might be going to a museum in a town close to where they live.
Take a moment to reflect.
What does tourism mean to you?
UN Tourism; the relevant agency of the United Nations promoting responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism, defines tourism as:
‘…a social, cultural and economic phenomenon which entails the movement of people to countries or places outside their usual environment for personal or business/professional purposes.. tourism has to do with their activities, some of which involve tourism expenditure.’
This means:
- Tourism can be local or it can be global. What matters is that it is ‘outside (someone’s) usual environment’. If you worked in the Natural History Museum in London, for example, you could not be defined as a tourist if you went there but you could be a tourist if you went to the Horniman Museum. Even though this is also in London it is outside your usual environment.
- Tourism is social because it encourages visitors to interact with others – both other visitors and people in the places they are travelling to.
- Tourism is cultural because it can protect a community’s or country’s heritage as visitors want to see it. Cultural describes lots of things so this could include buildings, monuments, food, dancing or storytelling amongst other things.
- Tourism is economic because it creates jobs, creates tourism infrastructure such as better roads between places of interest or cafes near to them (that the general population can use) and it can assist in countries’ development particularly if tourism expenditure stays within the community or country.
People go to countries and places outside their usual environment as tourists for lots of different reasons. This can be for leisure travel (travelling for fun), seeing friends and family who live elsewhere or for business travel. These are the main types of tourism although there are many others.
Were you aware of the social, cultural and economic parts of tourism before reading this definition? Can you think of a time when you travelled and became aware of any or all of these aspects?
Discussion
There’s no right or wrong answer here because everyone has different travel experiences. For example, I (the author of this course) currently live near Nottingham. When I went to Colwyn Bay in Wales I stayed at a locally-owned guesthouse (economic), talked to people not just at the guesthouse but also when I went shopping and when I went out to eat (social). I learned about Welsh food and traditions and visited castles in Caernarvon and Conwy (cultural).
Notice that the definition from UN Tourism doesn’t say anything about ‘staying’ anywhere – it talks of ‘movement’ instead. This is because although someone is ‘outside their usual environment’ this is defined rather loosely. This means, as in one of the examples above, someone could be a tourist if they visited somewhere in their own town or village, rather than travelling anywhere different. Eustat (nd), however, defines tourism as ‘the activities of persons travelling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year’. This aspect of ‘staying’ could be very short – if someone was going to a museum near their home, for example – or it could be a long time such as students, or people able to afford the cost, taking a ‘gap year’ and using it to travel.
Why is tourism defined as staying somewhere ‘for not more than a year’?
Discussion
Because longer than that suggests someone has either settled in one place or has settled into a travelling lifestyle.
The next section outlines a brief history of tourism to explain how long tourism has been going on. Within that, though, it explains that travel has gone from only being something for the very wealthy to do, to being something that now many, many people have the opportunity to do. It identifies the ancient history of tourism to the development of tourism in the UK as well as a few of the people who played an important role in that.
OpenLearn - Can tourism be both responsible and sustainable?
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