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Tourism can be defined as the events and organizations related to travel and vacation made for recreational or educational purposes. (Devoto, Oli, 2011). At the heart of this experience there is the tourist, which is defined by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, as someone who travels to countries other than his usual residence and outside his daily environment, for a period of at least one night but not exceeding one year and whose usual purpose is different from the exercise of any paid activity within the visited state.
Therefore this term includes those who travel for leisure or rest, for holidays, visits to friends and relatives, but also for business or professional reasons, for health or for religious motives.
Tourism is also an umbrella term for the travel industry, the hospitality industry, and the leisure industry. Tourism is subdivided into different categories, for example, which means of transport are used or what kind of travels it is.
It ca ben difficult to assimilate modern tourism, which is about comfort and mass, to the great long journeys that were undertaken up to the eighteenth century from the medieval pilgrimages to explorations begun in the fifteenth century.
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Initially, practical reasons such as the search for food or water or the escape from natural disasters turned people into travelers, but the reasons changed after they settled down. Already in ancient Egypt and others cultures on all continents, there are journeys from religious set up: pilgrimages to the temples of the Deities, such as the Hajj pilgrimages of pious Muslims to Mecca or the meetings of Hindus for ritual bathing in the Ganges.
Other travel occasions included long-distance trade, exploratory trips as well as in their own surroundings and economic and power-political relations with colonies and other dependent areas.
Modern tourism can be traced back to the Grand Tour, which was a traditional journey through Europe, through the territories of Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic. A type of traveler more similar to the tourist of today was the young man from the seventeenth century, who was engaged in the practice of education to the uses of the world from that time, more and more frequent for the children of the wealthy upper class, especially English. After visiting Germany and France, the favorite destinations of these northern travelers were Spain and Italy, discovering picturesque southern Europe. At a time when very few private houses had running water, services and hygiene of what today are usually called accommodation facilities consisted of inns that were generally uncomfortable and not very clean, that acted as resting places and allowed horses to change or rest, and travel remained very tiring and not without risks. Also, for this reason, the Grand Tour generally did not go further south than Naples, until the nineteenth century, when Stendhal wrote about its travel: to capture the full essence of the beautiful country is a must to visit Sicily with its beautiful Greek ruins. Since then many followed him, as for example Goethe, whose Travel in Italy or Italienische Reise, published in 1817, was used by travelers of many decades later as a real tourist guide.
After the migration of peoples whose motive of travel was for better living conditions, Europe recovered only slowly from its economic and political decline, meanwhile, mostly stable conditions prevailed in China and Japan. Soon pilgrimage tourism developed in Europe, and along such pilgrim routes and in places favored by transport geography trade centers were established in all continents, which in turn produced trade travelers. Sea routes developed into travel routes especially in the maritime republic of Venice, as well as Portugal and Spain as early colonial powers.
Until the 19th century, Christian pilgrims were dependent on food and lodging in church hostels, as they usually had no assets and the travels were especially around the three main poles of attraction: Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. A network of sanctuaries, hostels, mansions, hospitals, convents assisting wayfarers and pilgrims stretched out towards these three places.
Until the 1950s, self-determined travel in Europe was reserved for the small portion of the population who were able to pay for expensive travel, and outside Europe, this is still largely the case. Travel for educational purposes, in particular, was for a long time the privilege of the nobility, who sent their sons on so-called cavalier journeys, as well as later of the upper class. Recreation trips were unknown and they did not appear in Europe until the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution must be seen as the decisive turning point since while travel always had a purpose before, travel itself was now the purpose. When the industry was born, the population had to move from the countryside, where they had always lived, to the cities to find a secure job. Thus commuting was born, the idea of the daily move from home to work, and grew the necessary for public services. It is how Thomas Cook saw the need for means of transport to be used not only for work but also for leisure. The British were the founders of international adventure tourism in Europe, as Thomas Cook is considered to be the inventor of the package tour. The tourism as intended today, that is organized and with mass travel, has a certain date of origin and a very specific inventor. In 1841 on the 5th of July Thomas Cook, taking advantage of the new possibilities offered by the train, organized a trip of 11 miles from Leicester to Loughborough. Around 600 people participated, at the cost of a shilling per head. The success was such as to push Cook himself to organize more and more articulated tourist packages, starting the modern tourist industry.
The history of tourism is largely identical to the history of travel. However, there were and are strong regional differences in development. Alpinism, which began to flourish on the European continent at the end of the 18th century, it was mostly for other European mountaineers. Then in many other cultures, spa tourism, apart from ritual ablutions, was ruled out for religious reasons.
In the last decades of the 19th century, the upper classes of British society were so prosperous due to the income from the British Empire that they were the first to afford to travel to distant areas that were barely developed for tourism. The military power of the Empire with bases on all continents and the British fleet provided the desired security. The British example was soon imitated by continental Europe.
The right to leave for a holiday entitlement has been known in Europe and North America since about 1880, but, as far as it was not unpaid leave, it was not possible to enforce it on a broad basis until the 20th century. According to art.24 of the Convention on Human Rights, there is the right to rest. In the German-speaking world in the 20th century, the organized voyage of power through the National Socialist joy program was the first approach to mass tourism; soon, however, the KdF ships had to be rededicated to military hospital ships.
After the Second World War, it was initially difficult to travel at all, especially in Germany and Austria, because the zone boundaries of the Allied occupation areas were impassable for the majority of the population. At the beginning of the 1950s, the number of travelers began to rise in western Europe, partly because leisure time increased significantly as a result of technical and social developments. It is also interesting to notice that in very large countries such as the USA, domestic tourism is the most common form of tourism, as thousands of kilometers can be traveled without having to leave the country. This is why the majority of US citizens do not have a passport, although some people are extremely mobile. For the first time, the terms tourist and tourism were officially used in 1947 at the League of Nations. Tourism was defined as people who travel for periods of over 24 hours.
In the 1970s, the oil crisis temporarily slowed the upswing. But then the general economic upturn in Europe led to a new phenomenon of mass tourism. In the other continents, tourism can usually only be financed by the higher social classes in many different countries, the average citizen has no money for tourist travel.
Since the industrial revolution, travel has become more and more similar to tourism, that is a journey organized mainly by others, and in recent decades tourism has grown enormously thanks to the evolution and multiplication of means of transport, the increase in income in the western world and, recently, also to the new mass media that have changed access to information. All these elements that have led to new needs for mobility in industrialized and rich societies. Today the reasons that drive people to travel are very different: holidays, study, pilgrimages, care, training, business, cultural activities, and this phenomenon is growing every year.
Tourism marketing traditionally began with the local tourist office, which developed from local beautification associations" or interest groups around the turn of the century and especially in the 1920s, in the reconstruction period of Europe and the internationalization of travel as visitor guidance, and since the 1960s as advertising in the classical media. In recent years, tourism marketing has also become increasingly important for the state's economic development and is closely linked to regional planning and location marketing. Most countries have their own tourism services and market their country names as brands and destinations themselves. The most important means of communication with potential or actual guests are the corresponding web portals of the institutions, tourism companies, and umbrella associations. In addition to information about the town and the region and current circumstances, such as weather and events, these websites often also offer the possibility of booking offers online. If required, they have a commercial travel agency in order to be able to fulfill all guest wishes when making bookings.
Information on marketing structures and campaigns can often be found on the B2B websites of tourism marketing organizations.
History - Development Of Travel, Holiday And Leisure Activities And Tourism. (2024, Feb 25). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/history-development-of-travel-holiday-and-leisure-activities-and-tourism-essay
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