LES VACANCES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 29

This is infuriating to Americans in the tourism business who have watched France edge
out the United States. “More Chinese visited Paris (in 2009) than all of the United States,”
said J. W. Marriott, Jr., who heads the American hotel giant founded by his father.
That, too, is no accident. The French understood before most other countries that tour-
ism is a serious business, integrating it into major government policy decisions and nurs-
ing it as a parallel business that multiplies the economic benefits of all things that are
French. Tourist spending boosts the profits of perfume-makers, vintners, art dealers and the
corner boulangerie. Now tourism is the premier economic sector in France, the number-
one source of employment and the number-one export. (Tourism counts as an export, not
import, on the trade balance books.)
France is a master of this seemingly invisible trade that is everywhere and nowhere. Its
component parts are spread around the country—airports, train stations, wilderness parks,
restaurants, hotels and beaches—essentials of a normal life, not just tourism. The French
have figured out the paradox that since tourists are drawn to a country, not a particular
resort, it follows that the more France remained France, the better for tourism. So the
French national tourist strategy evolved to guard the national lifestyle. That means co-
ordinating with urban and rural planning, cultural majordomos and environmental regu-
lators. They figured the French could remain arrogant forever, but they had to speak Eng-
lish—and now Chinese.
Many governments woke up to the power of this illusive giant when the World Travel
and Tourism Council created an accounting system to measure the economic effect of
tourism on a city, state or country. With the help of the United Nations, this system of Sa-
tellite Accounts has been set up by nations around the world to count the dollars, or euros
or pounds or pesos, spent by tourists in their economies. Tourism turns out to be the top
single revenue source in countries as diverse as France and Thailand.
With that economic power tourism also became a huge, if unacknowledged, cultural
phenomenon. Early on, anthropologists were measuring the consequences on poor and
often isolated societies when legions of wealthier, foreign tourists visited. Among the em-
blematic stories is one told by the British researcher Dianne Stadhams, who asked a young
girl in Gambia what she wanted to be when she grew up: “When I grow up I want to be
a tourist,” she answered, “because tourists don't have to work and can spend their days sit-
ting in the sun, eating and drinking.”
Tourism has had just as powerful an effect on the richer countries. In bookstores and
many personal libraries, travel guides have replaced history books as the way to understand
the world. Walk into your favorite bookstore and the section devoted to travel books will
be double or triple the size of those devoted to history.
Tourists are the consumer engine of the world, turning airports into a system of shop-
ping malls and “duty-free” into a way of life. Activists harness the power of tourism to ac-
complish what would otherwise be a long-shot goal: saving a threatened African wilderness