TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 2

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TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY
For aficionados of travel magazines filled with breathtaking photographs of boutique hotels
on sugar-white beaches or yachts cruising turquoise-colored seas, the United Nations World
Tourism Organization is a let-down. This agency dedicated to one of life's great pleasures
is housed in a nondescript ten-story building on Madrid's Calle Capitán Haya, hidden in a
leafy neighborhood with far more impressive government ministries and foreign embassies.
It looks like what it is: one of the more obscure organizations in the enormous United Na-
tions, a backwater near the bottom of the international pecking order. Moreover, it is ded-
icated to the business of travel and tourism, not its romance.
Most of the writers of those glamorous travel articles have never heard of the UNWTO,
and of those that have, few have visited the office. “I get their emails, but I rarely read them,”
said Stuart Emmrich, then editor of the influential Travel section of the New York Times.
This disconnect is a testament to travel and tourism's reputation as a worry-free break
from the real world, not a serious business. The UNWTO is one of the few institutions that
recognizes travel as one of the largest industries in the world and studies its extraordinary
dimensions to understand how it is changing the world.
The very idea of describing travel and tourism as a serious industry or business is an
oxymoron to many people. The oil industry is serious. Finance is serious. Trade is seri-
ous. Manufacturing is serious. Foreign policy and economic policy are serious. Tourism is
a frivolous pursuit: fun, sometimes educational in the lightest sense, often romantic, even
exotic.
Tourism's low reputation is a big reason why the agency is in Spain. When it came into
being after World War II, the United Nations ostracized Spain because it was led by Fran-
cisco Franco, Europe's last fascist ruler. Spain remained something of a pariah on the world
scene in the 1950s. (Adolf Hitler had been a supporter of General Franco; Nazi armed
forces helped Franco come to power.) The U.N. slowly accepted Spain back into the nor-
mal world of diplomacy as Franco loosened up and Spain became more democratic. Fin-
ally, when Franco was on his deathbed, the U.N. agreed to set up a small tourism policy
office in Madrid in 1974. The sufficiently inconsequential tourism body wouldn't raise too