TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 8

ives—the CEOs of Hertz and Avis, Regent and Accor, American, United and Singapore
airlines, East Japan Railway, Disney and others, to gauge their interest in joining a new
high-powered tourist council representing all the industries that make up the travel and
tourism industry.
“By the time we left Paris, we agreed there was significant work to do and that we
needed to enlist the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to help us build a
solid body of data about the industry,” said Robinson.
With the opening up of borders in 1990, there was no question that travel was on a
big upswing, with extraordinary opportunities to make money in the nascent global travel
boom. Robinson wanted to erase long-held prejudices and band together all the strands of
the tourism business from the airline companies that considered themselves too import-
ant to associate with car rental companies to the high-end hotel chains that wouldn't mix
with low-end resorts. That was the only way to present a united front as the world's biggest
industry and create new business strategies to multiply profits and create new markets. Re-
maining separate would mean losing a vision that might place tourism at the top of the
global business hierarchy.
Robinson took the first step toward a modern definition of the tourism industry with
other executives by inaugurating the World Travel & Tourism Council in 1991 in Wash-
ington, D.C. The new industry group was dedicated to using the full economic and social
power of their companies to advance the business of tourism. Robinson was elected chair
of the new board and set as its top priority the discovery of a formula for calculating the full
economic power of tourism. That was the data that was missing. If the new council could
measure how much money tourists spent, the industry would know how much it contrib-
uted to national economies as well as the global marketplace. From there they could begin
flexing their muscles. The WTTC teamed with the Wharton School to produce a statist-
ical model that a region or country could use to measure income from tourism. The stat-
isticians defined the industry by categories: accommodation services; food and beverage
services; passenger transport; travel agencies, tour operators and tourist guide services; cul-
tural services; recreation and other entertainment services and a final miscellaneous cat-
egory that included financial and insurance services. It was an expansive definition meant
to capture every American dollar, German mark, French franc, British pound or Japanese
yen spent on a trip. And it required years of research and consultations before it proved
accurate.
At the same time, the United Nations tourism organization had embarked on a similar
project to calculate tourism's full economic impact in order to influence public policy. In
1993 the U.N.'s statistical commission recommended a new reporting concept called Sa-
tellite accounts for tourism that would measure the “economic and employment impact
of consumer expenditures, capital investment, government revenues and expenditure, for-
eign trade and business expenditure from tourism.”