TOURISM BECOMES AN INDUSTRY - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 9

Working in parallel and eventually together, the WTO, the new WTTC and the Organ-
isation for Economic Co-operation and Development came up with the Tourism Satellite
Account system. Canada was the first country to try it out. The United Nations refined and
adopted it in 2000, and it is used around the world today. “A movement has been started,”
said Francesco Frangialli, then secretary-general of the UNWTO, after its approval.
The new satellite formula defined the industry as the production, supply and consump-
tion of tourism commodities: transport (airplanes, cars, railroads, boats); accommodation
(hotels, resorts, home rentals, time shares, cruise ships); food; entertainment (anything
from sports activities to gambling to theme parks, to dancing to movies to live theater);
tour operators; tour agencies. This followed the U.N. tourism organization's definition of
tourism itself as “the activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their
usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other
purposes.”
Seven years later, when an updated draft was issued, the methodological framework for
the Tourism Satellite Account system was 135 pages long. Its calculations were nothing
short of a revelation: the tourism industry contributed $7 trillion to the world economy in
2007 and was the biggest employer, with nearly 250 million associated jobs. (And those
figures don't include people who vacation in their own countries.)
• • •
Even with this recognition, travel and tourism remains the stealth industry of the twenty-
first century. Few politicians, government leaders, foreign affairs pundits or economic ex-
perts consider the industry an important subject. During the Great Recession of 2008,
travel and tourism leaders were left out of the inner circle of decision-makers who outlined
the road to recovery, even though tourism by most standards was among the largest world
industries.
The dimensions of the industry are astonishing.
For the first time in history, the U.N. tourism organization celebrated reaching 1 billion
international trips in a single year in 2012. The graph line for this travel phenomenon goes
straight up: 25 million tourist trips to foreign countries in 1960; 250 million in 1970; 536
million in 1995; 922 million in 2008; 1 billion in 2012. Overall, that represents an annual
increase of over 6 percent.
In gross economic power it is in the same company as oil, energy, finance and agricul-
ture. At least one out of every ten people around the world is employed by the industry,
according to Wolfgang Weinz of the International Labour Organization, who told me that
the figure is probably greater, perhaps one in eight or nine, but it is hard to collect accur-
ate numbers in many countries.
Tourism creates $3 billion in business every day.