What are some of the earliest cases of document tourism? Or even tourism industry/people making money with tourists. And by tourism i mean something along the lines of traveling just to see something specific or for the sake of traveling. Something like visiting the seven wonders of the world, or similiar.
I have a similar question.
I heard somewhere that people back in the day would pack up enough stuff for several months, and then spend a week or three in a city before moving on to the next city. People, in this context, were more affluent, and "back in the day" is the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This was referenced as being "on tour", and that phrase sticks around in reference to modern musicians going on tour.
Is there any validity to this idea?
I would argue Pausanias' descriptions of Greece from the 1st century CE is the first "tourist" guide book.
Tourism as always existed. For the rich / ruling classes, "travel" (ie tourism) has always been an activity. For the poor, "travel" usually meant migration. However, tourism as an economic activity originated only with wage labour and the creation of a class that had disposable income. Additionally, for tourism to become a popular activity also required developed transportation infrastructures (railroads, regular shipping lines, etc) that could facilitate travel. Signalling the rising popularity of tourism, the first "travel guides" were published in the late 18th / early 19th century. (See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution.)
I suggest this example to show that the Romans went out of their way to appreciate cultures and sights other than their own - tourism, perhaps?
Germanicus set out for Egypt to view its antiquities[...]
On piles of masonry Egyptian letters still remained, embracing the tale of old magnificence, and one of the senior priests, ordered to interpret his native tongue, related that "once the city contained seven hundred thousand men of military age[...]
But other marvels, too, arrested the attention of Germanicus: in especial, the stone colossus of Memnon, which emits a vocal sound when touched by the rays of the sun; the pyramids reared mountain high by the wealth of emulous kings among wind-swept and all but impassable sands; the excavated lake which receives the overflow of Nile; and, elsewhere, narrow gorges and deeps impervious to the plummet of the explorer.
Source: Tacitus, Annals — Book II Chapter 59