Tourism

Traveling to distant places and lands has been a human activity since people first began to spread over the earth. However, there has always been a difference between visiting, inspections, migrations, business trips, scientific expeditions, pilgrimages, and tourism.

The great improvements in transportation in the 19th century opened the way for enormous numbers of people to go on tours around Europe and beyond for recreation such as visiting spas, or other leisure purposes. At first, touring was affordable mainly to the gentry, but with rising levels of prosperity members of the emerging middle class went touring.

Before World War II, most touring was of the United States, Canada, or in Europe west of the Danube. In the United States and Canada a great deal of tourism was ...