Were there tourists in ancient times?
hi! regarding your second question (were there tourists in ancient times), yes there were. I rounded up a bunch of posts a few months ago, but never got around to adding them to the FAQ as intended. See this post for the links
What are the earliest known examples of tourism?
plus, in hunting for that post, I found a few more recent ones
Medieval peasant vacation time.
What are some examples of pre-Industrial international tourism?
I'm not totally sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, nor am I sure this kind of re-submission is allowed, but I've answered on this before.
Everything that follows comes from this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1evct3/when_were_vacations_as_we_know_them_invented/
I can speak to the development of the "Tropical Vacation" idea.
Most of what a lot of people think of as a "family vacation" to a tropical island took off as an idea following WWII. After 1948, when travel bans for Britain were lifted, a number of large travel agencies set about finding ways to make travel accessible to the middle classes.
As late as 1952, only 1.5% of the population was going on regular vacations. In the same year, the International Air Transport Association began offering tourist class seats at reduced fares, mostly to destinations within the British Empire. This opened up a whole new industry, catering to what many saw as an untapped market. Ted Langton, a British pilot, established the price-chopping business model in 1953 – he started Universal Sky Tours, which bought out a room for the entire year and repeatedly chiselled away at the price. If the hotel refused, he simply took his business elsewhere. The use of purchasing power of the West was clearly an advantage over the poorer, developing nations. By 1957, almost all European airlines were offering cheap cross-Atlantic flights.
The idea of the tropical island vacation quickly caught on, and became a product, an experience, rather than a unique destination:
“The tourist beach can be seen as another such non-place. Stripped of geographical and political specificity and fixed within its elements of white sand, blue sea and clear skies, the tropical beach can be endlessly reconfigured as a desirable that is almost independent of social context. Remove the signifiers ‘Goa,’ ‘Cuba,’ ‘Gambia,’ or ‘Barbados’ from photographs in tourist brougchures, and the resorts become indistinguishable places arranged for tourist pleasure, and reached as an end point of a journey through the circuits of terminals, transit areas and transport system that process the consumption of the experience." (New Perspectives in Caribbean Tourism, Marcella Daye)
As this model became the norm in Europe, the World Bank pushed it upon Caribbean nations. It was seen as particularly beneficial for it was a safe business model with high global demand, and they anticipated that high regional competition would drive the industry. At the same time, plantations (no longer enjoying preferential trading after the end of colonial relationships) were on the decline, so Caribbean nations and European travel providers sought out one another, and the result, as Stephen Britton describes:
“With the sheer growth in the volume of tourists after 1950, a distinct travel industry evolved to meet the demand for recreational travel. The consequence of this has been that the travel experience has taken on an increasingly standard- ized form. The introduction of packaged tours in the mid 1960s brought together the conflicting psychological needs of tourists for novelty as well as security in strange environments, and the latent tendency for commercial enterprise to reconstitute individual touring into a repeatable and marketable product” (Stephen Britoon, The Political Economy of Tourism in the Third World in Annals of Tourism Research. Vol. 9, pp. 331.358. 1982)
By the mid 1960s to late 1970s, many Caribbean nations were economically in trouble, so they continuously embraced tourism and insulated it from the local economy. That has created MAJOR problems for their economies, and if you'd like I could chat about those for a bit.
The thesis focused mainly on the way tourism grew in the Caribbean islands throughout the 20th century, specifically how it grew into "enclave tourism" that interacted very little with the local economies. The traditional view in much of the early literature on the subject was that its a result of Western companies having way more economic power, and forcing the hand of the Caribbean nation - this was, to a certain extent, quite true, but it was not nearly the full picture: a lot of the "enclave" mentality came from an initial apprehension on the part of island governments who wanted to keep tourism from becoming too much a part of the local way of life. As a result the two industries - tourism and everything else local - were made to almost never interact with one another. By the early to mid 1960s, this was the primary arrangement, and it kept tourism as a sort of side industry in only a select few islands (Jamaica, Bahamas, Barbados)
As the staple cash crops continued to become less profitable on the world markets and independence forced economic change, governments made some business decisions that allowed tourism to swallow up everything else - tax breaks, creating tax-free zones, etc. This basically invited big corporations to have their way with the local economies, which by the 1970s meant shutting them out and dedicating absolutely no resources to forging links with the locals. Seriously, the percentage of money that left the islands is huge - I can't find the number off-hand right now, I have it written down at home, but its truly astonishing.
The most telling example of enclavism: In Luperon, Dominican Republic, Thomas Cook offered a deal where they sold a flight and a week's room at a resort for 500pound in 1989. They didn't sell the all-inclusive food or bar service. For about 5 months, British tourists flooded this resort, and an informal word-of-mouth network developed, telling the tourists where to eat in the small village - many small shop owners were willing to give discounts for recommended tourists, more recommendations for other shops, and so on. The hotel, not liking this, tried to lower their prices, offer better deals, etc., but their large overhead meant that they simply couldn't compete with the locals on either quality or price. They built a fence around the resort, hoping that tighter checks on the comings and goings of the guests would keep them from wandering freely into the town - that didn't really work either. Eventually they tried to post signs that forbade outside food - people still snuck it in. As a last resort, they brought armed guards to control the only way in and out of the resort, checking for any outside food. People still just ate outside the resort. After 5 months, the resort cancelled their deal with Thomas Cook and have since not done any further business with them. In my opinion, its pretty insane how far the enclave mentality goes.
Source: I presented a paper last year on this subject, a lot of this was my own research, and I do have a long bibliography of stuff on the subject.
Essentially, what we know today as "tourism" and mainstream tourism, especially in terms of travelling to tropical destinations, grew int he 1950s and 60s. This is not to say that other forms of travelling were common beforehand, but I believe that there is a distinct difference in terms.