Mass Tourism

Defining Tourism

At the root of the term tourist is the word tournos, which can be defined as “making a circle.” Tourists travel from one place to another, stay for a while, and return home. There is a disagreement among tourism scholars about whether one can differentiate between tourists and travelers; this entry considers them to be the same, though the word tourist has some negative connotations connected with regimentation (“will everyone please get on the bus”), superficiality (“if it's Wednesday, we must be in Istanbul”), huge numbers of people, and consumer culture.

According to the World Tourist Organization, tourism can be defined as follows:

Other definitions of tourism allow people to work for short periods of time away from their homes in other countries or cities, but they must return to their homes after they have finished their work to be considered tourists.

There are two kinds of mass tourism: domestic tourism, in which people stay within the country where they reside and travel to different cities and areas of the country, and foreign tourism, in which people travel beyond their borders. Some foreign travel can be a short day trip across a border.

Size of the Tourism Industry

Figures provided by the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) indicate that there were 924 million international tourist arrivals in 2008. This breaks down as follows (with all figures rounded):

There are around 6.3 billion people on the earth, which means that approximately one out of every seven persons made an international trip in 2008. The ten most popular countries were as follows. See the UNWTO World Tourism Barometer Update for more recent statistics on world tourism.

This list of the most popular countries to visit changes from year to year. In 2001, Austria and Germany were on the list and China, Poland, and Hungary were not. The Olympics in Beijing, China, in 2008 were popular and help to explain why China made the list of top ten travel destinations for 2008.

Characteristics of International Travel

In Deconstructing Travel: Cultural Perspectives on Tourism, Arthur Asa Berger offers a list of characteristics of foreign travel (2004, 9):