2.1 The birth of package holidays

Thomas Cook was a religious man and a member of the Temperance movement. This was a large and influential body of people who hated the idea of anyone drinking alcohol. Walking through Leicester to a meeting, Thomas Cook realised he could use the train station (which had only opened the previous year) to take people to Temperance meetings in other places. Click through the flashcards to learn more about Thomas Cook and Billy Butlin.

After the Second World War, commercial airlines started to offer services too. Lusher (2015) details the first Horizon Holidays package to Corsica offered to guests in 1950. This promised ‘meat-filled meals and cheap wine’ (very important to people in Britain who were still experiencing meat rationing). When the first people arrived ‘on an airstrip built by the American army in 1943, the slightly bewildered tourists were greeted by a delegation bearing flowers and a municipal band’. Vladimir Raitz, the founder of Horizon Holidays, booked a number of flights for passengers in advance, choosing to do so to cut journey times and to allow fixed pricing. He is credited with starting the modern ‘package holiday’ that is so familiar to many today and takes us back to the picture of a beach holiday seen at the start of this course.

Since then, travel and tourism, globally, have expanded to levels that neither Thomas Cook, Billy Butlin nor Vladimir Raitz could have been able to dream of (and may not have wanted to dream of). Travel has become cheaper. More competition and more hotels means prices can be much lower than previously. Tourism is something undertaken by many people from many countries. Before we discuss responsibility and sustainability, though, it is important to understand the global significance of tourism including tourism for development, which follows on.