Mass Tourism in a Small World

David Harrison, Richard Sharpley

• Publisher: CAB International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780648569
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book reviews all aspects of the phenomenon of mass tourism. It covers theoretical perspectives (including political economy, ethics, sustainability and environmentalism), the historical context, and the current challenges to domestic, intra-regional and international mass tourism. As tourism and tourist numbers continue to grow around the world, it becomes increasingly important that this subject is studied in depth and best practice applied in real-life situations. This book: - Is the first to address a range of theoretical issues relating to mass tourism;- Uses a wide selection of case studies to translate theory into practice, covering the historical rise and fall of UK seaside resorts, the increase in Chinese tourism, conflict between different mass tourism groups, destination transformation from mass to niche tourism, and specific problems facing cruise ships;- Is written by a range of international, established authors to give a global perspective on the subject.Finishing with a speculative chapter identifying potential future trends and challenges, this book forms an essential resource for all researchers and students within tourism studies.

1 Introduction: Mass Tourism in a Small World

David Harrison^1* and Richard Sharpley²

¹Middlesex University, London, UK; ²University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

^*[email protected]

The Emergence of Mass Tourism

Large-scale tourism is not an entirely new phenomenon: its antecedents can be found in the large-scale festivals and games of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, in pilgrimage, which has long been a feature of the major world religions, and in spa tourism, which pre-dates Roman times and has long been established in many regions in Europe and North America (Towner, 1996: 53–95; van Tubergen and van der Linden, 2002). The Grand Tour of Europe, popular over much the same period, involved relatively few travellers but nevertheless had a lasting impact on places visited by tourists, on the travellers themselves, and on the culture of their home societies (Hibbert, 1987; Black, 1992; Towner, 1996: 96–138).

However, consistent large-scale, systematic and regular travel for leisure purposes really only emerged in the second half of the 18th century. Impetus came in the mid-1700s from Dr Richard Russell and other physicians who popularized the medical benefits of sea bathing (Gilbert, 1954: 56–86), thus providing an alternative to inland spas, but it was the railways, from the mid-1800s, that established mass tourism in the UK and elsewhere (Towner, 1996: 167–216) and which enabled Thomas Cook, almost by accident, to develop (though not start) package tours, later taking tourists overseas (Pimlott, 1947: 91, 168–169, 191–194; Buzard, 1993; 45–65). Increasingly, for nearly a century, holidaymakers in the developed world went on holiday en masse and small coastal communities accessible to metropolitan centres themselves became urbanized. The prominence of such resorts as Blackpool and Brighton in the UK, for instance, dates back to this time, and others soon followed, in the UK (Pimlott, 1947; Gilbert, 1954; Walton, 1978), in other parts of Europe (Corbin, 1994: 255–281) and also in the USA, as seen in the growth in the early 1800s of Atlantic City on the New Jersey coast and resorts on the California coast (Jakle, 1985: 56–62).

Road improvements and technical advances in transport led to other developments. In the late 1800s, increasing numbers of enthusiasts took up cycling, though it remained popular for much longer in Europe than in the USA (Lofgren, 1999: 69). Better road surfaces, improved technology in automobile production and decreasing prices opened up the countryside to motorized transport, especially after the motor car began to be mass produced. As Jakle (1985: 270) notes, in the USA during the period between the two world wars ‘automobiling was embraced by and dominated by the masses’, leading to the transformation of the countryside, not least by increasing numbers of camping sites and motels that catered to these new tourists, while national parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone came under increasing pressure to accommodate visitors (Jakle, 1985: 67–83; Lofgren, 1999: 56–64).

For more than a century, then, coastal resorts and other destinations in the UK, mainland Europe and the USA catered for the leisure and entertainment needs of vast numbers of their increasingly affluent but highly differentiated populations (Pimlott, 1947; Jakle, 1985; Soane, 1993). It was undoubtedly mass tourism, but it occurred largely within national boundaries. Later, the first shoots of mass international tourism appeared in the 1920s and 1930s, some of which were state sponsored (Baranowski, 2005: 130; Dann and Parrinello, 2009: 26–30), but it was only after 1945, as Europe reaped the dividends arising from peace, increased prosperity, a widespread rise in disposable income, good communications and improvements in aircraft technology, that international leisure travel developed rapidly on a mass scale.

Modern Mass Tourism: the General Pattern

In 1950, when little more than 25 million international tourist arrivals were recorded, most international trips were almost exclusively to Europe (66%) and North America (30%), usually within the same region. By 1990, although arrivals to all regions had substantially increased, totalling nearly 440 million, the market shares of Europe and North America were 64% and 20%, respectively (Harrison, 1992a: 5; Harrison, 2001: 11). If we then fast forward to 2014, it is clear that while both international arrivals and receipts from international tourism had increased, as indicated in Table 1.1, destinations in other parts of the world had grown in importance. As economic development has occurred elsewhere, Europe’s share of international tourist arrivals of 1.133 billion has been reduced to less than 52%, that of the Americas to about 16%, while that of Asia and the Pacific (of negligible importance in 1950) is now more than 23%, and accounts for more than 30% of international tourism receipts (UNWTO, 2015: 4–5).

Table 1.1. International tourism arrivals and receipts: selected years, 1950–2014. (Compiled by the authors from UNWTO data.)

The emergence of China as both a destination and a source of tourists is especially noteworthy. In 1978, the year it opened out to the West, it received 229,600 foreign (i.e. non-Chinese) tourists (Guangrui and Lew, 2003: 16). In 2015, 20.3 million arrived, along with 27.1 million and 4.7 million from Hong and Macau, respectively, and a further 4.8 million from Taiwan (Travel China Guide, 2016). China is now one of the world’s top destinations, attaining fourth place in the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s (UNWTO) league tables of international arrivals and third place in that of international tourism receipts (UNWTO, 2015: 6). It is also the world’s fastest growing source of tourists: since 2012 its citizens have spent more than those of any other nation, in 2014 accounting for more than 13% of global tourism receipts (UNWTO, 2015: 13), in the process changing and increasing the tourism profile of several destinations visited by Chinese tourists. Currently, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the USA, Vietnam, Japan and France are preferred destinations, though the Chinese are targeted worldwide as tourists. Moreover, as only about 5% of Chinese citizens possessed a passport in 2014 (Arlt, 2016: 5), at the time of writing all the evidence points to the continuation of these trends in the foreseeable future, a situation which has attracted increasing academic attention, from within and outside China, over the last decade (Harrison, 2017). Indeed, the UNWTO estimates that, more generally, by 2030 international arrivals will amount to some 1.8 billion, with tourism in emerging nations growing at twice the rate of that in advanced economies, by which time the former will have 57% of the market share of international arrivals (UNWTO, 2015: 2).

Finally, it is worth noting that while international mass tourism has increased remarkably since the 1950s, so too has domestic tourism, building on a much wider base since the mid-19th century. Currently, domestic trips are reported by UNWTO to number between 5 billion and 6 billion a year (UNWTO, 2015: 3), a margin of difference that suggests hugely unreliable statistics (Ghimire, 2001: 11–15; UNWTO, 2013: 13–14). Nevertheless, globally domestic tourism is of major economic importance, including in many developing countries where domestic arrivals sometimes amount to more than five times those of international tourists (Ghimire, 2001; UNWTO, 2013; Harrison, 2017). Indeed, as Ryan notes in Chapter 13, this volume, in 2015 the Chinese undertook around 4 billion domestic tourism trips.

Scholarly Approaches to Mass Tourism

Historians have carried out considerable research on mass tourism. Its development has been traced generally by Boyer (2007) while others have charted the more specific history of holidaymaking in English resorts (Pimlott, 1947; Gilbert, 1954; Walton, 1978, 2000; Travis, 1993) and elsewhere (Black, 1992; Hudson, 1993; Towner, 1996). There have also been important comparative studies of resort development in France, the USA and Germany (Soane, 1993; Berghoff et al., 2002; Borsay and Walton, 2011) while other historians and some social scientists have focused more thematically on the sea or the role of the beach – especially as a liminal, pleasure periphery – in popular culture (Shields, 1991: 73–116; Corbin, 1994; Lencek and Bosker, 1999; Urbain, 2003).

Interestingly, numerous historical records exist of reactions to tourists. These include: (i) Seneca’s condemnation of drunks in the 1st century ad at Baiae (Casson, 1974: 143); (ii) disagreements over the value of the Grand Tour (Hibbert, 1987: 235–248; Black, 1992: 315–337; Towner, 1996: 96–138); (iii) the Reverend Francis Kilvert’s 1870 characterization of English tourists as ‘vulgar, illbred, offensive and loathsome’ (Plomer, 1992: 25); and (iv) Wordsworth’s objections that ‘his’ English Lake District was being threatened by excursionists from the industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, who wanted ‘wrestling matches, horses and boat races without number’ (Ousby, 1990: 192). Anticipating many modern criticisms of tourists, too, residents of late 19th-century Brighton blamed tourism for drunkenness, licentious behaviour and prostitution, asserting that working-class visitors, in particular, were of little economic benefit to the town because they carried their own food and drink with them (Gilbert, 1954: 193–196, 204–206). Criticisms of tourists in other parts of Europe took a similar (and equally modern) tone (Buzard, 1993: 37–40).

Arguably, though, there has been little cross-fertilization across the boundary between historians of tourism and social scientists operating within the field of tourism studies. As Walton (2005: 2) suggests, this might be the result of stylistic and methodological differences, but other factors are also at work. For example, blessed with the benefit of hindsight, historians have generally adopted a largely neutral position, whereas non-historians considering modern tourism and its immediate impacts, especially in developing societies, have often been more judgemental (and possibly more anxious to distance themselves from other visitors). Thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Mass Tourism in a Small World
• 2 Mass Tourism Does Not Need Defending
• 3 The Morality of Mass Tourism
• 4 The Political Economy of Mass Tourism and its Contradictions
• 5 A Theoretical Approach to Mass Tourism in Italy
• 6 Sustainability and Mass Tourism: A Contradiction in Terms?
• 7 Mass Tourism and the Environment: Issues and Dilemmas
• 8 The Dynamics of Tourism Development in Britain: The Profit Motive and that ‘Curious’ Alliance of Private Capital and the Local State
• 9 From Holiday Camps to the All-inclusive: the ‘Butlinization’ of Tourism
• 10 Decline Beside the Seaside: British Seaside Resorts and Declinism
• 11 Mass Tourism and the US National Park Service System
• 12 Transport and Tourism: The Perpetual Link
• 13 Mass Tourism and China
• 14 Mass Tourism in Thailand: The Chinese and Russians
• 15 Mass Tourism in Bulgaria: The Force Awakens
• 16 Mass Tourism in Mallorca: Examples from Calvià
• 17 Tunisia: Mass Tourism in Crisis?
• 18 From Blue to Grey? Malta’s Quest from Mass Beach to Niche Heritage Tourism
• 19 Cruise Ship Tourism in the Caribbean: The Mess of Mass Tourism
• 20 Conclusion: Mass Tourism in the Future
• Index
• Back Cover