TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 3

many questions, and Spain could be selected over two rivals that were not considered top-
caliber at the time.
“There were three finalists—Zagreb, Mexico City, and Madrid,” Patrice Tedjini, the
UNWTO's historian, told me in his office at the Madrid headquarters. “We wanted to
show that democracy was moving in Spain.”
Back then, the tourism office was a lowly subsidiary of another U.N. body. It would take
another thirty years for the World Tourism Organization to win status as a full-fledged in-
dependent United Nations agency, a reward for the work it had done to define the industry
and fitfully raise its profile.
The drab UNWTO office in Madrid was my logical first stop in a five-year-long study
of the tourism industry. The UNWTO is the repository of rare data on how tourism works,
how it drives economies and how governments direct it, so its headquarters was the logic-
al place to begin my research into how all of the industry's disparate pieces fit together
and determine what it means to be a tourist. Snorkeling in the pure waters off Costa Rica,
studying documents in Paris, tracking down the “anonymous” benefactor of a Zambian
wildlife preserve, interviewing Chinese tour guides who promote the Communist Party
while reciting the virtues of pandas, I inevitably saw the world through an entirely new
prism. If war and revolution marked the last century, the competition for prosperity and
the marketing of ways to enjoy that new wealth is molding the early years of the twenty-first
century. The travel and tourism industry, with its romantic promises and serious perils, is
central to that constant commerce. This topic is about that journey as well as its indings.
• • •
Tourism has a history of confounding countries and societies. The first time the world
powers tried to regularize tourism was in 1925, between the world wars, when it was con-
sidered a traffic issue. Several European countries created the International Congress of
Official Tourist Traffic Associations to minimize border formalities for tourists. That small
office was the origins of the World Tourism Organization.
Nine years later, tourism was recalibrated as a propaganda, or public relations, issue fo-
cused on spreading the word about where and how to travel. In that incarnation the office
was named the International Union of Tourist Propaganda Organizations. Finally, after
World War II, it was decided that tourism had risen to the level of government relations
requiring the coordination of tourism agencies of various countries like the French Office
National du Tourisme and the Italian Ente Nazionale per le Industrie Turistiche. Practic-
al questions were rising along with the increased tourist traffic: Should tourists pay duties
on their cameras and automobiles when traveling into a foreign country? Aren't they im-
ports, and what if they tried to sell them?