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Hjalager (2007), Ioannides and Debbage (1998), Reid (2003), Williams (1995),
and Williams and Shaw (2011). However the intention here is to review the
implications of these changes in the context of the emerging architecture of
power relations which flow from these industrial realignments, rather than
to subject these arguments to detailed scrutiny.
The power and shape of transnational tourism corporations
Despite the fact that tourism represents such a major component of
world exports in commercial services, few if any corporations from the tour-
ism industries are listed amongst the world's top 100 corporations ranked
according to their turnover, with the exception of media entertainment
groups (Disney) and airlines (Air France-KLM, Delta and Lufthansa). With
an annual turnover in 2010 of US$22 billion, the TUI group is currently the
world's largest travel and leisure company, ranked 439 in the Fortune 500
listings (CNN Money, 2012).
7
The fact that the measurement of the interna-
tional trade in tourism services is plagued by definitional vagueness is com-
pounded by the manifold and complex network of agents involved in the
provision of tourism-related products and services. The difficulty of delineat-
ing the precise organisational structure and fragmentation of tourism 'com-
modity chains' (cf. Clancy, 1998)
8
is particularly illustrated where, for example,
parent companies such as Bass, which at one time owned several major trans-
national hotel chains, including Holiday Inn and InterContinental Hotels, has
investments spread across different economic activities ranging from brewing,
catering, entertainment and hotels (Griffin, 2000: 27). In addition, the grow-
ing involvement of real estate investment trusts (REITs) and private equity
firms in the international hotel industry, including the Blackstone Group,
which in 2006 raised US$26 billion as part of its leveraged buyout of Hilton
Hotels Corp. (Wei & Hudson, 2008), has resulted in the separation of the
business of hotels from the underlying real estate assets, as well as increasing
the turnover of property sales and acquisitions as REITs seek to maximise the
profits paid out to shareholders (ILO, 2010: 29-32).
According to the new international division of labour theory, the inter-
nationalisation of manufacturing production was strongly influenced by the
squeeze on profits within industrialised countries which resulted in a shift
of investment southwards in search of cheap labour, a process often referred
to as 'peripheral Fordism' (Frobel
et al.
, 1980). While the squeeze on corporate
profitability and, to a lesser extent, demand for cheap labour did play a part
in precipitating the geographical expansion of tourism investment into new
destinations from the late 1970s onwards, the drivers of the globalisation of
tourism have less to do with trends seen elsewhere in the transnational cor-
porate sectors towards out-sourcing and a search for cheap labour. Rather,
the location of tourist activities has always been somewhat constrained by
the intrinsic natural, historical and cultural attributes of the destination
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