Growth In Tourism

Tourism Is the biggest industry in the world. Some estimate that one third of the world's population is employed directly or indirectly through tourism. To succeed in this section you must be able to explain why tourism has increased, where those increases have been and what the implications are for the environment, economy and culture of developed and developing world countries.

Destinations For 1998 France was the top tourist destination who received 70,000,000 visitor nights from overseas. This accounted for 11% of their tourism making the total number of visitor nights spent in France somewhere near 700,000,000!

Top Destinations Country No. Of Foreign Visitors France 70,000 United States 47,127 Spain 47,743 Italy 34,829 United Kingdom 25,475 Mexico 19,300 Canada 18,659 China 24,000 Poland 18,820 Austria 17,282

The Statistics Countries with established tourist industries are still the biggest destinations. This is because they have established images, good infrastructures (including airports), good numbers of hotels and large threshold populations. However, it should not be ignored that the developing world is investing heavily in tourism with Africa's industry growing by about 50% over the last ten years, South Asia's by 63% over the same time and the Middle East by 70%. This is set against a world growth rate of 37%. So, where as the developing world is not currently in the top ten destinations it is certainly the largest growth area. This growth is set to continue as tourists are always looking for new places to explore.

Cycles And Tourism It is believed that tourist resorts go through cycles. They are discovered and just a handful of people (we'll call them the explorers) know about them. Next, mass tourism arrives and numbers escalate until the resort becomes over-crowded and over-developed: tourism has destroyed the thing it wanted people to see. The area goes into decline.

Cycles And Tourism Meanwhile, the explorers have moved on. Somewhere new and undeveloped, then the same thing happens. It is a continuing cycle. If this is to be believed (and there is plenty of supporting evidence), then tourism in the developing world is going to become more and more popular as tourism continues to grow and look for new, unspoilt areas to exploit.

Activity Using A2 Geography P283, answer the following questions… Look at Figure 7.31 on P283 and create a list of reasons of why the graph looks how it does, and why some places have more tourists than others. What PERSONAL human and physical factors may hinder a persons’ ability to travel? What POLITICAL human and physical factors may hinder a persons’ ability to travel?