tourism

(tʊr'ĭz'əm)
n.

1. The practice of traveling for pleasure.
2. The business of providing tours and services for tourists.

View more History, Politics, Society videos

Making a holiday involving an overnight stay away from the normal place of residence. This is in contrast to recreation which involves leisure activities lasting less than twenty-four hours. This holiday may be based on the cultural, historic, and social attractions of an urban centre, or on the appeal of a different environment. Urban tourism increases the importance of the central place while tourism at the periphery can provide the income for economic development.

The mushrooming of international tourism may be explained by high levels of disposable income and longer holidays in more economically developed countries; the development of package holidays, which reduce risk; cheap, mass air transport; and place myths, which persuade the tourist that the local culture they see represents the ‘real thing’. Of critical importance has been the internationalization of finance: credit and debit cards, travellers' cheques, and hotel vouchers. Technology clearly mediates relationships to places.

As a development strategy, international tourism has been charged with corrupting and exploiting local cultures, promoting urbanization and environmental degradation, and contributing to global warming, since aircraft are the major emitters of carbon dioxide. See ecotourism.

From sunbathers at Myrtle Beach to Civil War buffs at Gettysburg, Americans travel to many different destinations for a variety of reasons. Today, tourism plays an integral role in American economy, society, and culture. The Travel Industry Association of America reported that in 2001 tourism generated 7.8 million American jobs and revenues in excess of $545 billion. Yet tourism is relatively new. In less than two hundred years, touring has changed from the activity of a small elite to a mass phenomenon spurred by a thriving economy, improved transportation, national pride, and an increased desire to escape the pressures of modern life.

Before the 1820s, Americans rarely traveled for pleasure. In the next two decades, however, the fruits of industrialization created the necessary environment for tourism, as more Americans possessed the time, money, and opportunity for recreational travel. With the invention of the steamboat and increased use of railroads after 1830, Americans could travel faster, more inexpensively, and in relative comfort.

For most of the nineteenth century, Americans traveled in pursuit of improved health, sublime scenery, and social opportunities. Large spas sprang up in upstate New York and the Valley of Virginia, where the elite could "take" the waters. Americans also traveled the country searching for picturesque wonders. Popularized by the British, the "picturesque" tourist sought sublime scenes that astonished by their grandeur, beautiful vistas that soothed through pastoral serenity, and landscapes that intrigued by their quaintness. Favorite destinations included the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the villages along the Hudson River, and most of all, Niagara Falls. The historian John Sears has shown that such journeys became sacred pilgrimages as tourists found spiritual renewal gazing on the power and beauty of the divine in nature. A popular itinerary, the "fashionable tour," combined health and the picturesque as visitors steamed up the Hudson River to Albany, traveled west along the Erie Canal stopping at the Ballston or Saratoga Springs, and ended up at Niagara Falls. Popular guidebooks such as Theodore Dwight's The Northern Traveller (1825) showed tourists where to visit, how to get there, and what to experience. In turn, trips became a sign of status for the individuals and of cultural identity for their new nation.

After the Civil War, attention focused on Florida and the West. Northerners gathered to winter in Jacksonville, a semitropical Eden according to a multitude of guidebooks from the 1870s and 1880s. Popular excursions included a cruise down the St. John's River and a visit to America's oldest city, St. Augustine. Even more people flocked to the state after the oil tycoon Henry M. Flagler constructed a railroad along Florida's eastern coast and built a string of luxury hotels including the lavish 1,150-room Royal Poinciana Hotel in Palm Beach, completed in 1894 and at the time the largest wooden structure in the world. Henry B. Plant used similar methods to lure tourists to the state's Gulf Coast.

The West, however, attracted visitors more out of curiosity than climate. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and luxurious Pullman Palace cars enticed visitors to California. Visitors to the West marveled at the wonders of Yosemite and Pike's Peak and stayed in luxury resorts such as the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey. Americans increasingly viewed the West as a mythic, golden land. Railroads busily promoted this image in guidebooks and pamphlets while travel agents, such as the Raymond and Whitcomb Company, helped smooth the journey westward.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, preservation groups worked on several popular sites. In 1860, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association purchased and restored George Washington's Virginia home and in the process spurred similar efforts that rescued such sites as the Hermitage and Jamestown Island. Cities and states created chambers of commerce and tourism boards that urged patriotic citizens to "see America first." The federal government responded to pressures for preservation and conservation by establishing Yellowstone as a national park in 1872. Later, the National Parks Act of 1916 established the National Park Service (NPS), whose mission was to conserve the scenery, natural and historic objects, and wildlife of America for future generations.

In the decades after World War I, the automobile spurred a great expansion of tourism. By 1930,23 million Americans owned cars, and middle-class Americans traveled the country staying at hotels, motels, and campgrounds. Federal legislation earmarked large sums for roads, highways, and turnpikes, including the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. During the Great Depression close to $4 billion was spent by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to build, repair, or improve 651,087 miles of highway and 124,031 bridges. The WPA also issued guidebooks for several states and key cities through the Federal Writers Program.

After 1945, America tourism experienced phenomenal growth. Most Americans enjoyed a two-week vacation that had been denied them during the years of depression and war. As Americans' disposable income rose, so did the promotion of tourism. Major destinations included cities, ski resorts, and national parks. Several cities revitalized their downtown areas to attract tourists. San Antonio's Riverwalk and Baltimore's Inner Harbor are but two examples. And beginning with the 1955 opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, there has been phenomenal growth in theme parks with attendance totaling more than 163 million in 1998.

After the attacks of 11 September 2001, air travel plummeted and domestic tourism suffered, though by spring 2002 the World Trade Organization had announced that recovery was well underway.

Bibliography

Aron, Cindy S. Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Brown, Dona. Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1995.

Cocks, Catherine. Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850–1915. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Sears, John F. Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Shaffer, Marguerite. See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001.

Though tourism was not a product of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik emphasis on raising the cultural level of the masses and educating through practical experience made tourism one of the concerns of the new regime. The government created a number of institutions to encourage development in this field. Within Narkompros and Glavprolitprosvet, excursion sectors were established as early as 1919 to organize educational trips throughout the country; a number of these bureaus later developed into scientific-research bodies such as the Central Museum-Excursion Institute in Moscow. The two major organizations for Soviet tourism - the Society for Proletarian Tourism (OPT RFSFR, created by decree of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and the joint-stock society Soviet Tourist (created by Narkompros in 1928) - merged in 1930 under the name of the All-Union Society of Proletarian Tourism and Excursions (OPTE) under the direction of N. V. Krylenko. It was also at this time that mass tourism began to develop as a movement among Soviet youth, marked by the establishment of a separate bureau within the Komsomol in 1928. Students, pioneers, and other young Soviets went on tours of the country organized under themes such as "My Motherland - the USSR." Excursions were designed to acquaint citizens with national monuments, the history of the revolutionary movement, and the life of Vladimir Lenin. This so-called sphere of proletarian tourism was thus intended as an integral aspect of the construction of socialism within the Soviet Union.

The importance of travel was not limited, however, to shaping Soviet ideology within the country. The state recognized that foreigners visiting the Soviet Union also represented a significant means through which socialism might gain expression and adherents throughout the world; additional consideration was given to the inflow of capital from international tourists. Though certain privileged groups of udarniki, fine arts performers, musicians, students, and government officials traveled beyond Soviet borders in the country's initial years, millions of visitors ultimately toured the Soviet Union throughout its roughly seventy-year history.

To aid in the maintenance of foreign tours and international travel to the Soviet Union, on April 12, 1929, the Council for the Labor and Defense of the USSR adopted the decree "On the organization of the All-Union Joint-Stock Company for Foreign Tourism in the USSR." Otherwise known as Intourist (an acronym of Gosudarstvennoe aksionernoe obshchestvo po innostrannomu turizmu v SSSR and an abbreviated form of Inostrannyi turist), the company was supported by a number of Soviet organizations such as the People's Commissariat of Trade, Sovtorgflot, the People's Commissariat of Rail Transport, and the All-Union Joint-Stock Company Otel'. A. S. Svanidze was its first chairman. Though Intourist was occasionally responsible for organizing the visits of more prominent foreigners such as Bernard Shaw and Theodore Dreiser, in its initial years it played host primarily to international labor delegations as part of the movement to acquire foreign technical assistance. Only in the post-World War II period did Intourist experience rapid growth and an expansion of its services. This was the result, first, of the general postwar spirit of internationalism and faith in international organizations and, second, of the new friendships between the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Intourist became a member of numerous national and international bodies such as the World Tourism Organization and participated in various conferences on tourism such as those hosted by the United Nations. More importantly, however, was the creation of a unified commercial organization for international tourism and satellite travel bureaus in each of the socialist Eastern Europe nations. This network facilitated exchanges among worker delegations, students, theater troupes, trade unions, kolkhozes, and other social groups. It was also during this time that Intourist constructed the basic infrastructure of hotels, autoparks, and restaurants used by foreign visitors until 1989, when the organization was withdrawn from the control of the central state apparatus and restructured as an independent enterprise.

Intourist's operations raise numerous questions about the meaning of leisure and privilege in a socialist society. Its advertisements and exhibit materials throughout the Soviet period spur consideration of the various messages the state promoted about itself to the outside world. And its list of itineraries that, at one point, covered 150 cities of the Union republics - with cruises along the Dniepr from Kiev to Kherson, along the Black Sea to Odessa, along the Dunau to Rus in Bulgaria or to Dzurduz in Romania - give credence to the geopolitical power of the entity that was the Soviet Union.

Bibliography

Margulies, S. (1968). The Pilgrimage to Russia: the Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners, 1924 - 1937. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Ostrovskii, I., and Pavlenko, M. (1998). Intourist 1929 - 1999. VAO Inturist.

State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) Fond 9612, opis 1, delo 2 and 123; opis 3, delo 557.

—SHAWN SOLOMON

An economic and social activity that has widely varying manifestations in the Middle East and North Africa.

Since the rise of civilization, the Middle East has been rich in notable sights and sites, and people have been visiting them for millennia. The Great Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and places of religious significance such as Jerusalem and Mecca were drawing visitors long before the invention of the word tourism. And while travel for the purpose of seeing religious sites or carrying out religious obligations may be rightly termed "pilgrimage," the social and economic effects of this sort of travel are essentially indistinguishable from travel for purely secular reasons. If one accepts a broad definition of tourism, then it has been going on for centuries, on a large scale, to the region's many religious destinations. If one defines tourism more narrowly, as secular travel for the purposes of sightseeing and leisure on a scale large enough to be economically significant, then tourism, especially by Europeans, became important in the region only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when transportation methods improved and leisure time increased along with disposable income.

Europe's interest in the region historically had a religious component: Its Christians and Jews were keenly aware of the Holy Land, and much of the literature of European travelers to Palestine is intertwined with religious themes. Colonialism also drove European curiosity. The French and British occupations of parts of Egypt brought a flood of information about the land of the pharaohs. And with
the coming of steamship travel and the wealth and leisure generated by the industrial revolution in Europe, tourism as an organized industry spread from Europe to the Middle East. The first tours of Egypt from England were organized by Thomas Cook in 1868, and the first editions of Baedeker's guides for Palestine, Syria, and Egypt were published a few years later, first in German and later in French and English.

Early tourists were drawn by the region's sites of religious and historical importance, and today many still flock to such world treasures as the Great Pyramids at Giza, the Blue Mosque of Istanbul, and the old medina of Fez. As modern governments and private investors attempt to increase tourism revenues, they are adopting new strategies to attract visitors and keep them entertained. Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and some Persian Gulf countries have been developing waterfront resorts. Turkey, long a summertime destination for many Europeans, has begun to develop mountain areas for winter tourism. Bahrain expanded its International Exhibition Centre in 1999 and plans to construct facilities for international-caliber formula-one auto racing. Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, has for years been hosting international tennis and golf tournaments. Several countries have built large exhibition and convention facilities, new sports venues, and a variety of resorts, from Tunisia's Saharan winter resorts to beach complexes on the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Gulf of Oman and Indian Ocean coasts.

Turkey has the largest volume of annual tourist arrivals in the region, with about 11.6 million visitors recorded in 2001. Tunisia also has an active tourism sector, with an average of about 5 million visitors between 1999 and 2001. Morocco, where tourism is important in the country's development strategy, averaged more than 2 million arrivals between 1999 and 2001. Countries with the least tourist activity were Algeria, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, and Yemen.

The political and security situations in a country can have a markedly negative impact on tourism. Periods of prolonged conflict can cut the number of visitors drastically, even in places where tourism often is encouraged. For example, despite a highly developed and well-funded tourism infrastructure and an active Ministry of Tourism, tourist arrivals in Israel dropped from 2.3 million in 1999 to 1.2 million in 2001, due in large part to continuing violence. The fact that arrivals in Algeria, a country with tremendous tourist potential, numbered fewer than 200,000 between 1998 and 2000 can be attributed in large part to the unsettled security situation there. Violent groups sometimes attempt to make a political statement by attacking tourists or other foreigners. This was the case in Egypt when Islamists carried out a number of deadly attacks in the late 1990s. The government responded by increasing security measures, including the hiring of special "tourist police." In Yemen it has been the practice of some tribes to put pressure on the government by taking hostages, often foreign tourists. After the events of 11 September 2001, security became more perilous as the government, in cooperation with the United States, attempted to capture or kill al-Qaʿida members and sympathizers.

Bibliography

Compendium of Tourism Statistics, 2001 Edition. Madrid: World

Tourism Organization, 2001.

— ANTHONY B. TOTH

Food has always been a component of tourism. As a physical necessity and as a prominent arena for expressing creativity and for embodying cultural and individual identity, food has functioned as destination, venue, and vehicle for tourism. As destination, food is the primary experience sought. The preparation, consumption, and even the viewing of a foreign dish gives the tourist a sense of otherness and the exotic. As vehicle, food offers an entry point for viewing another culture. The sensory attributes of food enable consumers to feel a deeper level of experiencing; by ingesting food representing another culture, they can feel that they ingest that culture. As venue, food offers a site from which a culture can be explored. These aspects can be commercial or domestic, public or private, festive or ordinary. Restaurants, festivals, cookbooks, grocery stores, private festive food events, cooking classes, cooking shows, advertising, literature, films, tourism brochures, food tours, and other such sites are physical loci for experiencing tourism. They also offer a tangible, knowable base from which other facets of culture—history, religion, artistic traditions, customs—can be understood and experienced.

Tourism is generally thought of as an activity in which individuals explore a culture that is foreign to them. Valene Smith defines a tourist as "a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change" (Hosts and Guests, p. 1). The theme of tourism as spiritual and emotional quest appears frequently in scholarly works. Dean MacCannell sees tourism as a modern phenomenon in which tourists are on a quest to recover lost authenticity: it offers a way for modern man to explore the "real life" of others (A New Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 91). Mark Neumann suggests that "tourism is a metaphor for our struggle to make sense of our self and world within a highly differentiated culture" ("Wandering Through the Museum: Experience and Identity in a Spectator Culture," p. 22). Most scholars of tourism now see tourism both as a state of mind in which anything, including the everyday and the local, can be subjected to the "tourist gaze"—to borrow John Urry's book title—and as a continuum of types of experiences involving otherness. Erik Cohen offers a typology of tourists based on their concept and concern with authenticity: existential, experimental, experiential, recreational, and diversionary tourists ("Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism"). Valene Smith, in Going Places, outlines a typology of tourists based on aspects of culture being explored and on the motivations of the tourist: ethnic, cultural, historical, environmental, recreational. Maxine Feifer adds the "post-tourist" who sees tourism as a game and inherently inauthentic in its experiencing of another culture.

Culinary tourism is a theoretical framework for analyzing the role of food in tourism. It refers to the "intentional, exploratory participation in the foodways of an Other." It is voluntary and consciously contains an element of curiosity—that is, people eating out of choice, not only physical need.

The term "foodways" involves all the other aspects of food, referring to the network of activities and systems—physical, social, communicative, cultural, economic, spiritual, and aesthetic—surrounding the product itself: procurement, preparation, preservation, presentation, consumption, clean-up, and conceptualization. In this sense, culinary tourism can occur in any aspect of foodways, from purchasing familiar ingredients from a new grocery store to adding exotic ingredients to a familiar recipe. It can also include behaviors connected to thinking and talking about food: collecting recipes, watching televised cooking shows or films incorporating food, conversing about restaurants, reading cookbooks and food columns, reminiscing about food experiences.

The culinary Other is simply anything different from the known and familiar. It can be broken into six overlapping categories. National or cultural identity is the most commonly perceived category and includes "ethnic" foods as well as "foreign" foods. Foods become a cultural Other by being placed in a context in which they are different. Thus, kimchi is standard fare in Korea, but is ethnic and foreign in the United States.

Region is the second category of Other and refers to groupings within a culture, differentiated by geographic location and physical resources. Within the United States, regional foods from areas such as the South (grits, fried chicken, hominy, corn bread), New England (baked beans, lobster, boiled suppers), the Southwest (chili peppers, Mexican-based foods), the Mid-Atlantic states (crab and seafood), and even the Midwest (meatloaf, mashed potatoes); and from specific cities, such as New Orleans (gumbo, jambalaya), Kansas City and Memphis (barbecue), and San Francisco (nouvelle cuisine) are advertised as culinary Others appropriate for tourism.

Time as Other refers to both past and future. Foods from the past are commonly found in museums, reenactment events, and cookbooks, and are used as a way of touring a historical era. Similarly, visions of the future can be translated into foodways—astronaut foods, freeze-dried ice cream, foods compressed into pills and vitamins. Ethos and religion as Other offer foods representing different or novel worldviews and value systems. Religions specifying food taboos or guidelines, such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, can be explored as tourism by experiencing their foodways. Vegetarian foods—textured protein, veggie burgers, and foods commonly used in the United States as meat substitutes, such as bean curd and tempeh—are frequently tried out of curiosity rather than ethical belief.

Socioeconomic class is another category of Other. Gourmet foods, fine wine, and expensive restaurants are associated with the upper class, and individuals can get a taste of that lifestyle through these foodways. Conversely, foods associated with lower classes—white bread and bologna sandwiches, junk foods, processed "cheese food," opossum meat or roadkill, meager portions—can be tried in order "to see how the other half lives."

Gender represents the final Other. Although strict taboos do not exist in the United States, there are certain foods associated with each gender: women eat salads, "light" foods, poultry and fish, dainty portions; men eat red meat, large portions, hearty foods. By trying the foods associated with another gender, an individual can try out that identity.

Culinary tourism involves three realms or continua of experience: the exotic, the edible, and the palatable. Based on the perceptions of consumers, the exotic ranges from those food experiences that are familiar and commonplace to those that are strange, new, and different. The edible-to-inedible continuum represents concepts of which items are physically, conceptually, and morally possible for ingestion. These concepts are culturally constructed but also draw upon the consumer's personal ethos. Palatable refers to pleasant and satisfying tastes, and represents individual preferences as well as social trends identifying desirable foods and designating their symbolic associations. Since the placement of foods and food experiences within these continua is a matter of perception and experience, this placement can shift over time or place and between individuals. Foods, therefore, that are perceived as appropriate for culinary tourism can become mundane and familiar, and then may be eaten out of hunger or taste preference rather than curiosity. For example, in the United States, foods that were recently touristic but have become standard fare in many American diets include Japanese sushi; Thai noodles with peanut sauce; Chinese chop suey, chow mein, and egg rolls; Mexican tacos and burritos; and Middle Eastern pita. These and other foods range in the extent of their adaptation to American tastes and resources. As these foods become more familiar, those eaters seeking more touristic experiences tend to seek more authenticity and depth of understanding of a foreign cuisine.

Food will be a part of tourism as long as people are curious about the world around them, but both are multivocal and multivalent domains of activity. And it is important to remember that although foodways can offer an entry into another realm of Other, culinary tourism is frequently not as much a window into other cultures as a mirror on our own.

Bibliography

Cohen, Erik. "A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences." Sociology 13 (1979): 179–201.

Cohen, Erik. "Authenticity and Commoditization in Tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 15 (1988): 371–386.

Feifer, Maxine. Going Places. London: Macmillan, 1985.

Long, Lucy M. "Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness." Special Issue of Southern Folklore 55/3 (1998):181–204.

Long, Lucy M., ed. Culinary Tourism: Eating and Otherness. Special Issue of Southern Folklore 55/3 (1998).

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973.

Mintz, Sidney. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture and the Past. Boston: Beacon, 1996.

Neumann, Mark. "Wandering Through the Museum: Experience and Identity in a Spectator Culture." Border/Lines (Summer 1988):19–27.

Smith, Valene. Hosts and Guests. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage, 1990.

—Lucy M. Long

For a list of words related to tourism, see:

• Travel and Tourism - tourism: travel of foreign visitors to another nation and income derived therefrom; similar travel within one’s own country

---

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - turisme

Nederlands (Dutch)
toerisme

Français (French)
n. - tourisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Tourismus, Fremdenverkehr

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - τουρισμός, περιήγηση, τουριστική βιομηχανία

Italiano (Italian)
turismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - turismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
туризм

Español (Spanish)
n. - turismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - turism

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
旅游, 观光, 旅游业, 观光业

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 旅遊, 觀光, 旅遊業, 觀光業

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 관광 여행, 관광 사업, 관광객

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 観光旅行, 観光事業, 観光

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) ألسياحه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮תיירות‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.