PROFESSIONAL/ Tourism Industry Today – Opportunities and Challenges

When tourism and travel historians decide to write the history of the industry’s first decades they may well call upon classical author’s such as Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote about a different time and era, yet in his classic work a Tale of Two Cities (1859), his opening lines seem to describe much of the current state of tourism. Dickens wrote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the...

It is often said that the process of travelling is more important than the destination itself. With the rapid growth of international tourism, popular travel hotspots are becoming 'common' as victims of mass tourism and tourism promotions. With the death of the destination, refreshing departures from the traditional package holidays are gaining popularity. Tourists are rewriting travel rules and experiences by visiting the world in creative, exciting and unusual ways. Holiday travels for pleasu...

The promoters of ‘adventure-’ or ‘ecotourism’ have popularized slogans such as: “Go visit the last paradises… before they’ll be destroyed by tourist hordes.” In a similar fashion, the British daily The Observer recently suggested that world travellers need to hurry up if they want to see the ‘10 wonders of a vanishing world’. According to the related article, the most wondrous natural tourist attractions we can no longer take for granted due to global warming include: Africa’s highest mountain ...

International tourist arrivals grew by over 4% in 2011 to 980 million and with growth expected to continue in 2012, at a somewhat slower rate, international tourist arrivals are on track to reach the milestone one billion mark later this year. International tourist arrivals grew by 4.4% in 2011 to a total 980 million, up from 939 million in 2010, in a year characterized by a stalled global economic recovery, major political changes in the Middle East and North Africa and natural disasters in Ja...