TOURISM.

Traveling for relatively short periods, for social and cultural enjoyment or reasons of health, was a European invention of the late eighteenth century. Tourism was a product of, and contributed to, the dynamism of the industrial revolution, helping to create a new, broader spectrum of consumption. Its role in the growth of railroads, expanding their passenger service and lifting profits, has been generally underestimated. In terms of political and cultural life, the construction of national identities has also benefited from tourism, which cultivated and stimulated the development of scenic regions and specific locales.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, tourism had its codes, standards and practices, itineraries, services, and associations, together with its own commercial and industrial sectors. It had appropriated various recent inventions, such as the bicycle and amateur camera; soon to come would be the automobile. All these and more would influence tourism in decades to come.

Typically, tourists in these early years belonged to the wealthy urban bourgeoisie. Their activities—seasonal vacations and outings in the country, to health spas, or to various recreation spots—had a feminine cast and were large-scale and family-oriented affairs. They often justified large investments in equipment and considerable fitting out.

Although most early tourists were themselves European, Americans in the late nineteenth century, mainly from the East Coast, began visiting the great destinations—following in the footsteps of the fashionable British—such as Paris, the Swiss Alps, the ancient Roman ruins, Scotland, and the famous spas in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

TOURISM FOR THE MASSES: A FALSE START

The First World War, which stimulated the democratization of European societies, accelerated the progressive expansion of tourism that had already begun in the early 1900s. However, it was the local excursion—hiking or biking to discover the nearby surroundings—that first grew up around early reductions in working hours at the beginning of the century. The lower middle class, especially its youth, took an interest in leisure activities. They started to take journeys in "legs" and to go camping, which stimulated the development of youth hostels. However, contrary to received wisdom, tourism as a mass activity developed rather slowly in the 1930s. Paid holidays and vacations in most European countries did not arise as a demand from bottom up. Travel as a leisure activity was not in any way a working-class custom. Business associations or philanthropies, depending on the country and branch of industry, trade union, or political organization, working in close collaboration with government, created holidays and promoted paid vacations. These were developed in line with moral, hygienic, and educational goals. Public-relations campaigns fostered the idea, which involved considerable investment, including construction of vacation homes and hotels, campgrounds, hiking trails, and sports facilities, and the use of the reduced fare on trains and buses. In Fascist Italy from 1925 and in Hitler's Germany from 1933, centralized branches of government, responsible for distributing government propaganda, organized and eventually controlled various types of collective entertainment, such as the Ò pera Nazionale Dopolavóro (National After-Work Organization) or Nach der Arbeit (After Work), which later became Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) . Hiking and outdoor sports, low-cost railroad travel, and even cruises represented an attractive program for using cultural activities to spread political ideology.

While the working class was assimilating a structured and healthy way to spend time off, sophisticated bourgeois tourists experienced the new freedom provided by new forms of individual transportation. Tire manufacturers such as Michelin and Dunlop published helpful guides. Drivers and bicyclists could go equipped with detailed road maps, specially adapted to the difficulties they might encounter, which also highlighted the interesting and beautiful sites not to be missed. Supported by various associations, such as influential touring and automobile clubs, which were able to finance road signs and even spur the construction of scenic highways, privileged travelers from urban and industrialized Europe could explore first their own country and then that of their neighbors. Isolated villages, historic places of note, and hard-to-reach nature sites were all listed, described, protected, and visited. They were photographed and the photos appeared on postcards. The rural became almost entirely touristic, which created a vision of it among the urban well-off that helped to nourish regionalism as a kind of glorification of patriarchal values that were embraced by the demagogic political movements in the interwar years. The first European nature preserves were created in this spirit. But, even as new tourist destinations emerged, the earlier vacation spots seemed all the more attractive, growing larger and expanding their clientele. In fact, however, they would remain successful only until tourists significantly changed their habits with the advent of new democratized vacations of the 1950s—namely the winter sports and Mediterranean summer vacations.

NEW SEASONS FOR ELITE TOURISM

Winter sports came about with the need to extend profits beyond the summer season and justify the considerable alpine infrastructure—the hotels, railroads, and highways—that was built to serve the fad for mountaineering that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as from efforts to target tourists for the Swiss, Bavarian, and Austrian Alps. The invention of alpine skiing—popularized by the British mountaineer Arnold Lunn (1888–1974) with techniques derived largely from the Austrian Mathias Zdarsky (1856–1940)—stimulated winter vacationing at places previously known only as fancy summer resorts, such as Chamonix, Mürren, Saint Moritz, Davos, Zermatt, Sankt Anton, Cortina d'Ampezzo, and others. Its popularity made it possible for business to develop new resorts, such as Megève, Méribel, Sestrières, and Gstaad. These offered competing facilities such as ski lifts, which began to be popular in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This expansion of winter sports started up again in the 1970s, with government participation, especially in France.

During the 1920s and 1930s, in and around the French Riviera, where the wealthy clientele for winter tourism had been badly affected by the war and its political and economic aftermath—which included the Russian Revolution, the division of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Great Depression—new patrons and investors created a fashion for summer vacations spent under the hot sun. They brought to the Mediterranean coast activities already going on, in less pleasant surroundings, along the beaches of the Baltic and the North Sea: free baths, swimming, beach sports, and outdoor lounging. Although a vacation on the Riviera still seemed somewhat odd at the end of 1920s, celebrities in business and the arts, many coming from the United States, would soon make it fashionable. They popularized Juan-les-Pins, the bathing resort on the Côte d'Azur that grew up between 1924 and 1927, financed with French and American money. Along the same lines came the summertime successes of Cannes, Antibes, Monte Carlo, and Rapallo.

MASS TOURISM BEGINS IN EARNEST

After World War II, the quick revival of leisure travel embraced ever larger numbers of social groups. In France, tourism resumed soon after Liberation. Temporary housing of various kinds sprang up—campgrounds, youth hostels, vacation villages organized by youth movements or political organizations, and owner rentals—and this enabled a generation of young adults, encouraged by democratic ideals once again prevailing at war's end, to enlarge their horizons. The cultural model of the trip and of vacation travel finally became the norm, available to everyone though not affordable by all. Private and public investors would consequently begin building a new industry of tourism for the masses, which boomed during the 1960s. At first it developed on the coasts and shorelines where intense real estate speculation and promotion fueled urbanization. State intervention in financing became a crucial component, whether from an economic, political, or social point of view; and such government intervention generally encouraged, though did little to regulate, construction of huge developments that combined hostelry and a range of services. A vogue for resorts and standardized hotel complexes began to dominate the coast of the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the 1960s. This model was also adapted in the Languedoc-Roussillon region (La Grande Motte), much as it was on the Spanish coast (Costa Brava, Costa Blanca, Costa del Sol, Balearic Islands) and other places. These latter, with the introduction of charter flights in the late 1960s, became destinations for sun-hungry urbanites of northern Europe.

Sharply reduced airfare was a fundamental factor in the growth of mass tourism at the end of the twentieth century. The lower prices were stimulated by two main developments. First, advances in aeronautical engineering created larger jetliners by the late 1960s, which came to market as huge civil transport aircraft in the early 1970s. Second, the contemporary vacation package, already in use during nineteenth century, began to include transportation, hostelry, and services. By the 1970s over half of British vacationers bought packages. In the late 1980s some 65 percent of German travelers traveled abroad more than five days on vacation, and 40 percent of them purchased travel packages. Meanwhile, airfare deregulation, initiated by the United States beginning in 1978, led to intense competition among the carriers and finally to the emergence of new so-called low-cost airlines that created new markets in noncentral airports. The framework for these developments was the consolidation of the tourist industry—transportation, housing, real estate, car rental—and the dominance of international corporations, few of which were European.

Although the model of the standard vacation package spread through Europe in the early 1980s, operating in Portugal, Yugoslavia, and Greece, it also provoked rejection and a search for distinctive alternatives. Some of these new kinds of tourism were rapidly and widely commercialized by travel agents who organized trips for wealthy customers looking for what was presumably authentic and liberated. The most striking example was Club Med (Club Méditerranée), which had been founded in 1950. Along similar lines, specialized tour operators proposed cultural or high-end adventure excursions. Finally, other novel enterprises were the result of individual initiative on the part of millions of vacationers. Auto travelers accounted for more than 30 percent of tourists in the 1990s, staying in country houses and exploring rural areas and lands that had been set aside since the early twentieth century. Public policy toward preservation and cultural heritage—indeed what is sometimes called "museification"—was carefully prepared for tourists from the early 1970s.

Another counterpoint was a new type of guidebook, highly critical of mass tourism, published in the spirit of independence and originality, aiming to attract tourists from the intellectual rim of the middle class. The French series known as Guide du Routard and other similar guidebooks had remarkable success. In this way, the mainstream tourist industry generated its opposite, which itself had a tendency to create its own beaten paths. At all events, mass tourism and diversification are two aspects of the same reality—the extension of the pleasures of tourism to customers of all ages, cultures, value systems, and social backgrounds.

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE, NEW TEMPORALITIES AND DESTINATIONS

During the 1990s, the aging of the European population and reduced working hours meant extended time off for a growing segment of the population, with retirees wintering in moderate climates while active vacationers and their families filled up the summer season. This phenomenon led to a construction boom for apartment complexes and hotels in the south of Spain, for example, and the Canary Islands. It was also a promising time for the eastern Mediterranean coast of Turkey, Bulgaria, and Croatia, where the tourist industry started to expand once war ended in the former Yugoslavia. Relative pricing played an important role. The growth of mini-vacations reflected their appeal to well-off young urbanites and couples without young children. Budget airlines and travel agencies made it easy to spend weekends in Florence, Vienna, Prague, Barcelona, or Riga at affordable prices, often decided upon at the last minute. This short-term urban tourism, by means of which tourists became consumers in their temporary surroundings, visiting historic public places and various museums and shopping districts, has had profound consequences for European urban policy decisions, including those developing in the formerly Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe. Renovation of historic sites has become a central concern, leading to various shifts in the real estate market and social landscape. Constant cultural events and activities are required. Security is a principal concern. Luxury stores must be nearby. Hotel accommodations must be varied in service and of high quality. To the business rivalry among large European cities in all these areas was added further competition for conventions and congresses—business tourism is very lucrative—or, more generally, to attract employment-generating corporations or headquarters for international organizations. The boom in urban tourism at the dawn of the twenty-first century was a major aspect of the homogenization of the culture of the European Union.

CONCLUSION

In 2004 Europe remained first among tourist destinations worldwide, with some 52 percent of all receipts. Six European nations topped the list of the ten most visited countries in the world: France, the leader, was followed by Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Austria. European tourists are among the most active in the world, and they give priority to visiting European destinations. This encouraging account (with statistics furnished by the UN's World Tourism Organization) is probably only further enhanced by exogenous threats to international tourism such as political crises, terrorist attacks, public health emergencies, and climatic catastrophes; but it must be examined with some caution. Some destinations have grown old or are in decline, such as can be found in France, Italy, and Austria. Intense competition is rapidly developing in Asia, with increased visits to China (up 26.7 percent in 2004 over the previous year) and Hong Kong (up 40 percent for the same period), for example, as well as higher profits in these countries by comparison with countries in Europe such as England and Germany, where visits in 2004 were up 12 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively, over the previous year.

See alsoLeisure; Popular Culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballu, Yves. L'hiver de glisse et de glace. Paris, 1991. Pleasant and easy to read; abundantly illustrated.

Baranowski, Shelley, and Ellen Furlough, eds. Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America. Ann Arbor, Mich., 2001.

Berghoff, Hartmut, ed. The Making of Modern Tourism: The Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000. New York, 2002.

Bertho-Lavenir, Catherine. La roue et le stylo: Comment nous sommes devenus touristes. Paris, 1999. Magnificent, original synthesis of the cultural and social history of tourism in the twentieth century.

Bray, Roger, and Vladimir Raitz. Flight to the Sun: The Story of the Holiday Revolution. London and New York, 2001. Interesting account of the activity of a British tour operator starting up charter flights.

Corbin, Alain, et al. L'avènement des loisirs, 1850–1960. Paris, 1995. A remarkable work, a pioneer in the French historical literature.

Inglis, Fred. The Delicious History of the Holiday. New York, 2000.

Tissot, Laurent, ed. Development of a Tourist Industry in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: International Perspectives. Neuchâtel, 2003. Excellent collection of scientific articles on a little-studied subject.

Claire Billen