Tourism has grown to be a significant sector in the global economy, society, and environment over the past 40 years. This paper gives a historical overview of the rapid expansion and changing geography of domestic and international tourism over the past 40 years. It also discusses the factors that facilitated and hindered this growth. The social, political, technical and economic factors that have influenced tourism in the past and future 40 year periods are discussed. A synthesis of long-term scenarios for tourism futures up to 2050 is also provided. Comparing selected non-tourism scenarios suggests that current tourism futures assessments are not comprehensive enough. The tourism sector could benefit from scenario building and forecasting from other sectors as well as analyses of global grand problems. We discuss how to reconcile the expected tourism growth with sustainability and development imperatives over the next 40 years.
Introduction
Tourism and Recreation Research is celebrating its 40th anniversary. It’s fascinating to look back at the dramatic changes in global tourism that the journal and hundreds of contributors witnessed and tried to understand through a variety of disciplines. Over the past 40 years, international tourism has grown to be a global economic, social, and environmental force. It is even more intriguing to wonder: What about the future? What are the future prospects for the tourism industry in the next 40 years? What role does tourism have in the global economy? How can it promote sustainable development and positive social changes? Is there anything that might or should prevent its growth? Long-term tourism forecasts and scenarios are uncertain. However, in an era of rapid technological and economic change and increasing complexity of economic and governance systems, there is an ever greater need for future preparedness techniques.
A global revolution in tourism: 40 years of history
This paper is not able to provide a comprehensive overview of the development of global tourism over the last decades of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century. Multiple authoritative books have covered the history of modern tourism. The reader is encouraged to consult these books (e.g. Gyr, 2010; Lofgren, 2002; Page, 2003).
International tourism has seen a remarkable development over the past 40 years. The volume of domestic tourist trips is four times greater than international trips. Despite the difficulty in obtaining consistent data about worldwide domestic tourism due to the different definitions of domestic activity, there were 4.7 billion domestic visitors in countries that had data available in 2010. (Cooper & Hall 2013).
International arrivals are one of the most closely monitored indicators of the tourism sector. However, they still provide a misleading representation of the relative importance regions have to global tourism. It was possible to measure international tourist arrivals because of the political importance of tracking people’s movements across international borders. While Europe has a relatively small number of countries that have their borders monitored, it is possible to generate millions of international tourists. Larger countries like the USA or China can offer longer travels (e.g. Madrid to Moscow is 3400km by air, while New York is 3900km. In these countries, tourists are not required to cross borders to count as tourists. For example, 82% (of the 508.7 millions international arrivals in Europe in 2010) were generated in the region (United Nations World Tourism Organization, 2011). However, the nearly 2 billion annual domestic trips in the US (Shifflet, & Associates Ltd & IHS Global Insight, 2008), which many could be considered longer trips, are seldom included in global tourism sector measurements.
Although it is difficult to monitor every component of the tourism system at a global level during this period of mass tourist expansion, there are indicators that show how the infrastructure has improved to transport and accommodate more tourists. Over the past 40 years, both passenger and aircraft traffic has seen a significant increase in the airline industry. According to aviation industry data, there were only over 3700 commercial aircraft (more than 100 seats) in the global fleet in 1970 (Airbus 2014; Boeing 2014). In 2010, the world’s commercial airline fleet grew to more than 9100 aircraft. It has also doubled in size over the past 20 years, to more than 21,000 aircraft. The global commercial aircraft fleet grew nearly sixfold between 1970 and 2010, while passenger traffic, as measured by revenue passenger kilometers (RPK), increased almost ninefold during the same time period, from 500 billion RPK to 4500 billion RPK in 1970 (Airbus, , 2014).
The global tourism industry is experiencing an increase in its accommodation capacity. The UNWTO ( 2012) data shows that the number of rooms in hotels and other accommodation worldwide increased from 13.3million in 1995 to 20.2million in 2009/2010. It is notable that the 1995 data includes 175 countries while 2009/2010 data only covers 143. This is why the 2010 figure of 20.2million hotel rooms is a significant underestimate. It doesn’t include hotel rooms in at most 50 countries, such as Russia and Canada with hundreds of thousand of hotel rooms. The growth in the 143 countries where data is available suggests a 61% increase in room capacity over the period 1995 to 2010. This growth rate can be extrapolated to 32 countries for which data is available in 1995. The result is that there were at least 21.0million hotel rooms worldwide in 2010, with an additional 0.8million rooms. This number is likely to have grown considerably in the past five years, and does not include room capacity in at least another 18 countries, considering that the UN recognizes 193 member states (www.un.org/members).
Tourism has evolved from a relatively new economic sector that is mainly concentrated in OECD countries to one of great economic, social, and environmental importance over the past 40 years. When attempting to evaluate the positive and the negative effects of tourism, it is difficult to measure the amount and distribution of tourist flows both domestically and internationally.
The expansion of air travel networks and highways has allowed more people to travel to more destinations. Travel time-space compression was a result of lower travel costs and faster mobility. This contributed to shorter travel distances for tourists (Hall, 2005). Low energy prices fueled the expanding global transportation system for domestic and international tourist. The cost of travel was affected by the substantially higher world oil prices (above US$ 100) in the 1970s and 2005. However, this did not stop international tourism from growing.
Numerous major political shifts have reduced border travel restrictions and created enormous tourism opportunities in many regions around the globe. In 1985, the Schengen Agreement was concluded. It now includes 26 European countries which have abolished passports and other forms of border control at their internal borders. This allows 400 million citizens to freely move within its borders. The dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1991, a few years after the Schengen Agreement was signed, began the process of eliminating travel restrictions between Western and Eastern Europe. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization 2011,, it is believed that 0.5% of the USSR population traveled abroad. However, after the fall of the iron curtain and the new freedom of travel, outbound travellers from Russia surpassed 36 million in 2008. This was combined with 100 million from Poland and Hungary. China was closed to foreigners until the mid-1970s. China received 230,000 tourists in 1978 (Lew, 87). However, China became one of the most visited countries by 2010, with more than 133 million visitors. International tourism has also been affected by changes in China’s tourism policy. China’s Approved Destination Status was established in 1995. It allows citizens of China to travel abroad for leisure on package tours to countries with which they have negotiated and executed agreements. There are 146 destinations countries as of 2013. In 2010, more than 57 million Chinese traveled abroad. China is expected to be the largest outbound market by 2020 (United Nations World Tourism Organization ).
Future of tourism in 2050
Our retrospective look at the past 40 years of global tourist development shows us that planning for a “business as usual” future (BAU) is not a viable strategy given the rapid pace of technological, economic, and environmental change. The first ten years of the twenty-first Century saw many tumultuous developments, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US and the emergence and use of smart-phone technology and other social media. These events, along with the 2008 financial crisis and lingering recession, sovereign debt crisis in several countries, the Arab Spring movement and the Japanese and Japanese tsunamis, highlighted the importance of planning for an uncertain future. While many of the main drivers of tourism development over the past 40 years have been (
While these will be significant influences for the next 40-years, tourism will face new opportunities and challenges that will affect its scale and scope at all levels of travel, including regional, national and international. Buckley, Gretzel and Scott, Weaver and Becken ( 2015) discuss in depth some of the “megatrends” that will influence the future of tourism.
The World Travel and Tourism Council ( 2014) has provided 10-year projections of the economic contribution to the global tourism industry. The global contribution to GDP by tourism has increased from US$ 5.5 trillion to US$ 6.9 trillion between 2003 and 2013, (9.5% GDP), and will increase further to 10.9 trillion in 2023 (10.3% GDP). (World Travel and Tourism Council , 2014). The contribution of tourism to global employment will increase from 265million in 2013 (8.6%), to 345million (9.8%) by 2023 (World Travel and Tourism Council ).
The UNWTO ( 2011) has created 20-year projections for international tourist arrivals in order to give insight into the sector’s future role in global economic recovery and growth. They project an increase of 940 million from 2010 to 1.8billion by 2030 ( Figure). The 2030 forecasts range from approximately 2 billion arrivals, which is the’real transport costs continue falling’ scenario, to approximately 1.4 billion arrivals, which is the’slower economic recovery and future growth scenario’ (United Nations World Tourism Organization ). Global air travel projections are consistent with UNWTO’s 2030 growth scenario. The commercial aircraft fleet and RPK are projected to nearly double by 2030. They will go from approximately 21,300 aircraft and 4500 Billion RPK in 2010, to over 40,000 aircraft and more than 10,000 billion RPK by 2030 (Boeing 2012). Extrapolating the global arrivals rate from 2030 to 2050, when the world population is expected to stabilize, yields 2.9 billion (with a range between 2.2 billion and 3.2 billion depending on the economic growth scenario. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP 2012), produced similar estimates for international arrivals in 2050 under the green economy and BAU scenarios. Yeoman ( 2012) has provided additional projections regarding the international tourist arrivals in 2050, although the methodology isn’t clear. The best-case scenario (5.2 billion arrivals) and the low growth (1.6 million international arrivals), are the extrapolated UNWTO projections. These projections are in Figure 1.. Many countries view tourism as one of the main economic pillars in the future, especially in the absence of other promising industries, such as the case of almost all small island developing countries (SIDS) or countries with a declining extractive resource base (e.g. Australia, Norway).
