TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 4

By the 1960s the jet age of mass tourism was taking off. In 1958 a Pan American 707
flew from New York to Brussels, the first commercial jet flight across the Atlantic without
stopping for refueling. A decade later a TWA 707 flew around the world beginning in Los
Angeles and flying west after the plane was blessed by three Buddhist monks. Lower fares
and bargain flights followed. European countries relaxed passport restrictions and began
to see tourism as an important economic engine. “Tourism—Passport to Peace” became
the organization's motto in 1967, capturing its higher purpose to open borders in the pro-
motion of better relations as well as the practical motive of making money.
As the U.N. shifted its notion about tourism, the U.N.'s tourism office was moved from
The Hague to Geneva, where it was dwarfed among the cluster of U.N. offices and the
International Red Cross. The move to Madrid was a step up the bureaucratic ladder even
though it meant exile from Geneva, one of the power centers of the U.N.
In Madrid the tourism organization confronted the dilemma that faced the industry:
how to prove that tourism was an industry. There was no question that travel and tourism
were growing. In 1950, shortly after World War II, there had been only 25 million trips
recorded by foreign tourists. By 1975 that figure had exploded to 222 million trips. But
there was no agreement about what that meant for any national economy. Tourism wasn't
considered a single, unified economic activity. It was viewed as a constellation of indus-
tries—airlines, hotel chains, railway systems and tour agencies to name just a few. Separ-
ately those industries were taken seriously but not grouped together as the single econom-
ic activity of tourism.
Most conspicuously, tourism was not listed as a separate industry on national indexes.
For example, when the United States created its gross domestic product index in 1937,
tourism was not included as a distinct industry. It was impossible for most countries to
measure what tourism added to their economies.
Then there was the question of motivation. Are business trips and tourist trips part of
the same industry; can you easily distinguish between the two and should you? The an-
swer was to define the industry as travel and tourism since the infrastructure was the same.
Another issue was trade. On national balance-of-trade ledgers, tourism showed up as a ser-
vice that is “exported” to the foreigners who come to visit the country. Finally, there were
few educational institutions that studied tourism and could help measure the industry;
another example of tourism's irrelevance. (Switzerland was the rare nation that fostered
top-flight “hospitality” schools; to this day, their graduates fill management spots in hotels,
restaurants and resorts around the world.)
What countries could count were the numbers of visiting foreign tourists, a figure that
was crude at best. Without a place on national budget sheets, tourism could be ignored
by the economists. Yet every day there was growing evidence that tourism was becoming a
staple of modern life; an essential part of the family calendar. The middle classes were lux-
uriating in newly affordable travel and most of the newest tourists were Americans. Their