University Press of Kentucky

Ecotourism in Appalachia: Marketing the Mountains. Chapter 1, by Al Fritsch and Kristin Johannsen

BOOK EXCERPT

from Ecotourism in Appalachia: Marketing the Mountains
by Al Fritsch and Kristin Johannsen

Chapter 1: The World's Biggest Industry: The Rising Star of Tourism

As with most smoothly functioning machines, the tourism industry received very little attention from its users-until it broke down. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, most traveling came to a sudden halt. Within the hour, tens of thousands of people found themselves pacing the floor in places they didn't want to be, as airports were closed and airplanes were grounded. Even after air transport was operational again, many Americans felt reluctant to travel.

The impact of these events quickly rippled through the global economy to its furthest reaches. Airlines in the U.S. and other countries saw their passenger loads decline steeply. Around the world, an estimated two hundred thousand airline employees were laid off from their jobs. Thousands of hotel rooms stayed empty while the parking lots at car rental companies stayed stubbornly full. Travel agents sat forlornly, waiting for their phones to ring. Club Med, the giant resort operator, shuttered seven of its properties, leaving workers in Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries unemployed.

The downturn in travel affected companies not often linked with tourism in the public mind. Sales of photographic film plummeted, as fewer people took vacation snapshots. A major U.S. paper manufacturer reported a steep decline in revenue-a large percentage of its income was derived from sales of toilet paper and paper towels to airports and hotels. In Ireland, the parent company of Waterford Crystal laid off workers when purchases by tourists visiting the factory dried up.

Tourism has become an integral part of modern life and plays a key role in the economy of the U.S.-and the world. According to researcher Martha Honey, if the tourism industry were a country, it would have an "economy" second in size only to the U.S.1 Where did this massive industry come from, and what are its key components?

The Old World: From Pilgrimage to Pleasure Tour

One of the most surprising discoveries you make if you travel extensively is that people have been moving around for a long, long time. A museum in Bergen, Norway, on the storm-swept fjord coast, displays pottery from Spain and Syria, found by archaeologists during their excavations of the city's medieval wharf district. On the beach near Ras al-Khaimah in the Persian Gulf, chips of blue and white Chinese porcelain from the fifteenth century still glitter in the sand. Native Americans in Florida during pre-history adorned themselves with ornaments of copper mined on the shores of Lake Superior. Viking mercenaries fought in the armies of the Ottoman Turkish sultans.

Granted, these early travelers were motivated mainly by economic gain, rather than by curiosity or the simple human craving to see something different. The fact remains that people have traveled considerable distances for thousands of years, and many of the records they left behind show that curiosity about faraway places is hardly a modern innovation. The Greek epic poem The Odyssey records adventure and trade along the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Norse epics recount the voyages of the Vikings to unknown regions of Iceland, Greenland-even North America.

Our own ancestors before the twentieth century would have had a difficult time grasping the concept of "tourism." For them, a "journey" (derived from diurnata, or a day's work) was an arduous or dangerous venture, usually for exploration or for military, economic, or religious purposes. They did not connect travel with comfort, much less pleasure. To travel was to risk much and to suffer in order to reach the destination. Still, many early travelers reached the edges of the known world and beyond, leaving us fascinating chronicles of their journeys.

The Greek writer Herodotus, who lived in the fifth century B.C., was not only "the Father of History" but also the father of travel writing. His great History records the myriad wars and political developments of the era, set within the context of his own wanderings from Athens through Asia Minor, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Babylon. He studied cultures that were ancient even then, and environments that were alien to him. He recorded local legends and customs, described everything he saw, and incorporated scandalous gossip into his narrative every chance he got-a precursor of the modern travel writer.

Travel in pre-modern times was generally for religious, scientific, or trade purposes, and often a combination of the three. But the written accounts we have now show that their authors possessed a lively curiosity about the unknown and derived great satisfaction from their wanderings.

The first great long-distance travel chronicle was written by Benjamin of Tudela, a rabbi in twelfth-century Spain who traveled to Palestine to learn about Jewish religious sites, as well as to gather information for use in trade. Over the span of fourteen years, he walked from Spain to Rome to Constantinople, then through Jerusalem and on to Baghdad, recording observations of the peoples he visited and their customs and beliefs. He also wrote down practical details for travelers, explaining how to find the Biblical pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was transformed (and mentioning that, despite being a favorite salt-lick for local sheep, it was still growing).

Marco Polo's name is synonymous with adventure and exploration, and his exploits still boggle the mind. In 1272, at the age of seventeen, he set off with his father and uncle on an overland trading mission from Venice to the court of the Chinese emperor. After three years on the road, they finally reached China, where Marco became a favorite of Kublai Khan, serving as his emissary to India. For seventeen years, he traveled across Asia, finally returning home through Persia and reaching Venice in 1295. Only a year later, he became a prisoner-of-war during a conflict with Genoa, and he dictated the story of his travels to a fellow prisoner during his captivity. That narrative became an enduring classic of travel.

Europeans were not the only noteworthy travelers of the era. Less known in the West but perhaps even more remarkable was the fourteenth-century Muslim geographer Ibn Battuta. From his home in Morocco, he roamed throughout Asia and Africa. He crossed the Sahara to Timbuktu, sailed to Ceylon and the Maldives, walked the shores of the Black Sea, and traveled as far as China and the Russian steppes. In his wanderings, he reached the boundaries of the Islamic world of his day-and beyond.

For the more typical traveler of this era, the main inspiration for long-distance journeys was religious. Pilgrimage was a central observance of medieval Christianity, with sites both near and far drawing men and women on quests of faith. Devout Norwegians journeyed to pray at the cathedral of St. Olav in Trondheim, while pilgrims from southern Europe traveled the long road to the tomb of St. James in Santiago de Compostela. Others traveled all the way to Rome or felt called to make the grueling journey to the Biblical sites of the Holy Land. For those unable to travel, the Stations of the Cross in a nearby church offered a symbolic pilgrimage to the sites of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection.

Pilgrims traveled to fulfill a vow, to do penance, or to be renewed and strengthened in their faith. To this day, the same motivations draw Christian pilgrims to sites such as Lourdes (in France), which receives an estimated seven million every year. And even larger numbers make pilgrimages to Rome and other holy places during Holy Year celebrations, which have taken place every fifty years since 1300. During the year 2000, about twenty million pilgrims went to Rome to take part in the various ceremonies.

The pilgrimage on the largest scale was the Islamic Hajj to Mecca, which every Muslim must make at least once in his or her lifetime, if physically able. When early Islam was developing on the Arabian peninsula, the distance involved was not great, but as the new faith spread as far east as China and as far west as Spain, growing numbers of the faithful undertook arduous journeys of thousands of miles to the holy city. Today, for many Muslims in the Third World, an organized (and subsidized) journey to Mecca may be the only time they will ever travel outside their native countries-or even their native towns.

Travel to Mecca has had profound effects on traditional Islamic societies, bringing people of widely varying social backgrounds together in a setting of (theoretical) equality. At prayer time, a wealthy Turk might rub shoulders with a Malaysian farmer, a North African grandmother could pray next to her Indonesian counterpart. To minimize differences in wealth and status, all pilgrims wear identical plain white garments.

Pilgrimage is prominent in Asian religions as well. For centuries, Hindus from the massive Indian subcontinent have traveled thousands of miles to sites such as Varanasi, where they bathe in the sacred waters of the Ganges River. Buddhists make pilgrimages to sites connected with the life of the Buddha, such as his birthplace in Lumbini (Nepal), and Bodhgaya (India), where he attained enlightenment. Relics of the Buddha are said to be enshrined in eighty-four thousand shrines and stupas, each one a goal for devotion.

Doubtless there has always been an element of pleasure in travel undertaken for other purposes. Religious pilgrims surely enjoyed the new and varied scenery they passed through, and traders were clearly intrigued by the peoples and curious customs they encountered, recording them in their narratives. Given this, it is impossible to say when tourism-which we will define as travel for personal satisfaction-began. The word itself made its first appearance in the Oxford English Dictionary in its 1811 edition.

The English custom of sending young men of aristocratic families on a "grand tour" of continental Europe was already well established by the eighteenth century. A period of a year or so spent visiting the art masterpieces of Paris, the royal courts of the European capitals, and the monuments of ancient Rome was considered nearly an indispensable part of one's education, a sort of finishing school for the young gentleman.

Travel conditions were difficult, to say the least, and many areas of natural beauty were daunting obstacles, not tourist attractions. Even in settled areas, the roads were rutted and riding in a carriage was supremely uncomfortable. To cross the Alps, carriages had to be taken apart and carried across the passes by pack animals.

Nonetheless, thousands of young Englishmen (and a few Englishwomen) followed a well-beaten tourist track around the Continent. The first European travel guidebook was published in 1749, covering France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. In addition to masterpieces and monuments, these travelers were drawn to "colorful" local customs. A standard stop for Protestant travelers in Rome was witnessing the ceremony in which young women were admitted to the convent-foreshadowing the twenty-first century backpacker gawking at a Balinese cremation ceremony.

Interest in nature tourism rose with the increasing popularity of landscape painting in the mid-seventeenth century. For the first time, people began to consider that a natural scene such as a mountain range or a forest had intrinsic beauty, rather than being merely an obstacle to travel. In the 1780s, an English minister named William Gilpin published a series of travel books on Wales, Scotland, and the English Lake District, emphasizing the most beautiful landscapes to be painted, and how travelers could best appreciate them. The term "picturesque" was used quite literally, to designate those scenes that would look most pleasing in a picture.

By the 1790s, the Lake District was the destination of choice for British travelers, and there were already loud complaints that the hordes of visitors were destroying the natural beauty that was its drawing card. Flotillas of noisy tour boats crowded the water, and entertainments like mock naval battles were common. The discerning traveler abandoned the Lake District for the more remote Scottish Highlands, where the process soon repeated itself. One of the underlying themes of modern tourism was born-the quest for an escape from the beaten path, to get away from "one's detestable fellow pilgrim," as Henry James memorably put it.

Such detestable pilgrims, however, were still members of the tiny affluent class that could afford carriages and servants. Affordable travel for the masses had to await the development of the railroads, which began in the 1830s.

In 1841, a young English cabinetmaker and Methodist lay preacher named Thomas Cook had an idea. He felt that he could attract many more working people to his regional Temperance Society meetings if they didn't have to walk the long distance there, and it occurred to him that he might be able to negotiate a reduced train fare if he gathered a large enough group. On his first excursion, 570 traveling teetotalers rode with him the ten miles from Leicester to Loughborough, where they were greeted by a brass band.

The experiment was such a resounding success that he was soon organizing excursions for temperance groups and Sunday school classes all around the area. At the time, the railway network in England was a patchwork of small local lines with bad connections and unfathomable timetables. By planning the itineraries and selling a single ticket at an affordable price, for the first time he made it possible for working-class families to take short trips. He quickly branched out from his religious emphasis and began offering leisure excursions to the seashore and, of course, the Lake District.

Cook firmly believed that travel broadened the mind, and that spending time in clean environments and beautiful scenery was the birthright of all, not merely the aristocracy. His first overseas tour was to Paris in 1861, where he led a "Working Men's Excursion" for English laborers to meet their French counterparts. Over 1,700 travelers took part, staying in temperance hotels and following an arduous itinerary of monuments and museums. And the "working men" were not all men. One of Cook's unheralded achievements was giving Victorian-era women the opportunity to travel unescorted, by joining his eminently respectable groups.

Cook's business expanded rapidly in both scope and volume, attracting a rash of competing firms. He offered trips to Scotland, Italy, and Switzerland. He began leading groups to Egypt and the Holy Land, returning to his religious origins. He added tours to India, China, and New Zealand, and, in the 1890s, he began selling round-the-world tickets with complex steamship itineraries. Needless to say, only the well-to-do could afford these types of holidays, but numerous firms still offered brief trips to the Continent that even working-class families could afford.

By the end of the nineteenth century, mass tourism was firmly established in Europe, and an unprecedented number of people there had come to see pleasure travel, and time spent in nature, as an accepted part of their yearly routine.

The New World: Natural Wonders

Tourism developed differently in the United States. Lacking the history and cultural attractions of Europe, pleasure travel in America centered on natural attractions from its very beginning.

The first long-distance travelers in the young nation did not go to see sights but to escape from the "crowded" East Coast, to distance themselves from legal troubles, or to escape some intolerable personal situation. Remote areas such as the Appalachian Mountains beckoned to such people. Their main escape routes were rivers and slightly improved Indian trails. These "toll roads" also served as livestock-driving pathways. The early explorers of North America, such as Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Alexander Mackenzie, explored, recorded descriptions, plotted locations, and struggled through the wilderness. While they doubtless knew the thrill of discovery, they were hardly pleasure travelers; they were too busy finding coordinates, collecting specimens, making maps, and determining the best trading routes. They were conscious of the overarching purpose of their journey: to expand their new nations.

Pleasure travel, however, began surprisingly early. The first white colonists liked to travel to mineral springs, both for the health benefits they associated with the water and the possibilities for socializing. As early as 1669, Bostonians were visiting Lynn Springs, while Berkeley Springs in (West) Virginia attracted people from the mid-Atlantic region, among them George Washington. Other early destinations drew visitors for their climate. Newport, Rhode Island, attracted throngs of visitors who sailed up from the southern colonies and the West Indies to spend every summer. Its fresh ocean breezes provided a respite from the stifling southern heat, and people spent their time walking on the dunes, collecting seashells, and attending endless social events.

Recognizing Appalachia as a place to visit-and not to avoid-is a recent phenomenon. In earlier times, the difficult travel conditions and forbidding terrain made primitive and mountainous areas unattractive destinations-in Appalachia just as in the Alps. On the other hand, the same qualities made Appalachia a refuge for those trying to escape the crowded East Coast, or evade debt, disgrace, or other ties and bonds. The settlers who followed Daniel Boone in the 1770s did not want to be bothered, and they chose the region precisely for its inaccessibility. Independence and a desire to be left alone characterized the temperament of the early settlers, traits still manifested in a variety of religious and cultural expressions today. Anyone who tries to organize modern Appalachians around some pressing issue will soon discover the independence and individualism of mountain people, who are "born to be free."

By the early 1800s, advances in transportation began to make some inland journeys easier. Although Appalachia remained inaccessible, canals were created to link major waterways, and turnpikes connected many cities along the East Coast. But travel was almost unbelievably slow. In 1802, it was possible to go 1,200 miles by direct stagecoach service from Savannah to Boston-but it took three weeks.

This did not deter Americans from traveling. The price of passage to Europe made it a once-in-a-lifetime trip for all but the extremely wealthy, so there soon developed an American version of the "grand tour," centered on the country's most imposing scenery. The classic circuit of the early 1800s ran from New York City through the Catskill Mountains to the Hudson Valley, across to Niagara Falls, and then back to New York by a slightly different route. Some travelers added a loop through the White Mountains of New Hampshire and on to Boston.

Patriotic Americans insisted that the natural wonders of their young nation were the equal of anything in Europe. They compared the Hudson Valley to the Rhine and the Catskills to the Alps. And, of course, nothing in Europe could compare to Niagara Falls, which many visitors viewed as concrete evidence of the power of the Almighty. The Falls were already a prime honeymoon destination in the early nineteenth century-it was already equipped with souvenir stands selling Indian crafts.

With the advent of railroads in the 1830s, moderate- or long-distance trips became a bit more comfortable. Instead of a misery to be endured, mechanized transportation made travel an opportunity to look out the window at a changing landscape. Travelers could enjoy the view while the engineer sped the iron horse along the rails. The singing of the wheels on the tracks provided a rhythm to the trip to go with the pleasant countryside, deserts, and mountains. Relative safety (despite the serious railroad accidents and train robberies) was assured to most passengers by the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, for the first time railway passengers became sightseeing "tourists," able to enjoy the ride across the Great Plains and through the Rockies. And the development of the Pullman sleeper car allowed the tourist to go to bed and wake up hundreds of miles away.

As in Europe, the spread of the railroads opened the way to mass tourism. In 1869, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific lines were linked to form the first transcontinental railway. In the next decades, five other transcontinental lines were built. To drum up business, the competing lines began offering cheap summer excursion fares to families, and they prepared guidebooks detailing the attractions of the areas they served.

All of these attractions were nature-based. The Northern Pacific boasted its service to Yellowstone National Park, which was quickly developed with hotels, tent hostels, and wagon roads to make possible a five-day loop tour. The Great Northern Line followed suit by touting the marvels of Glacier National Park, while further north the Canadian Pacific brought tourists to the Canadian Rockies. The Southern Pacific featured Crater Lake (which became a national park in 1902) and the sunny climate of southern California, while the Santa Fe Line advertised the glories of the Grand Canyon and the cultural heritage of the Southwest.

It was in this era that John Muir wrote, "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigation rivers, but as fountains of life."2 The Sierra Club, which he founded, began organizing group treks for its members in the Sierra Nevada Wilderness in 1901.

Automobile touring began on a small scale almost as soon as the car was invented. The first coast-to-coast drive took place in 1903-and required fifty-three days! With the advent of the National Highway System in the 1920s, the vision of crossing the country on the Lincoln Highway became a practical reality.

Over time, travelers abandoned their goggles, leather gloves, and vast stocks of spare parts for emergencies. They purchased heavier vehicles with relatively more room and trunk space, packed the bags in back and on top, and set off to see Yellowstone, Pike's Peak, and points beyond. U.S. Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles became one of the main routes for sightseers and for people seeking jobs in the Golden State. Some touring cars were convertibles, some were equipped with rumble seats in the rear, some had front windows that cranked open, and some had running boards on the sides with a spare tire attached. Automobile touring was seen as adventurous. Filling stations and country stores dotted the routes; tourist courts of one-room cabins became plentiful, and road maps showed the way. Roads and cars were tying America together-and the public loved it.

With the advent of better roads and the U.S. highway system, Appalachia, along with other previously isolated regions, began to become more connected to the rest of the nation. An account written by W. M. Likins in 1929 tells in detail of a trip along newly finished Kentucky Route 15, "The Appalachian Way." He traveled from Winchester through Whitesburg, Kentucky, crossed the border to Virginia, passing through Norton, Coeburn, and ending up at St. Paul, Virginia. Though today it would be a drive of only several hours on the improved highways, seventy years ago it took days of slow travel. The writer spoke of the picturesque beauty of the landscape and towns, described the Hazard No. 4 coal seam, and mentioned the schools he saw along the way.

Many of the most popular destinations for these early automobile travelers were nature-based. In 1920, nearly a million tourists visited the country's national parks and monuments. Motorists often stayed in the newly established campgrounds in areas where no hotels were available. The first RVs-truck bodies with homemade wooden houses built on the back-made their appearance in the 1920s, and before long, people were getting "back to nature" with incredible amounts of baggage-tents, cots, mattresses, cookstoves, iceboxes, and all the other comforts of home.

Satisfying leisure trips, generally covering less than a hundred miles a day, became increasingly common with the spread of the motorcar. Many roadways were dirt paths for the most part, studded with obstacles such as puzzling road signs and creeks requiring fording. The first cars were real adventures in themselves, with their cranks for starting the engine, the trusty spare tire, and the scattered filling stations with their precious hand-pumped ethyl gasoline. Dust and chickens were always flying in every direction. Young kids scampered and waved at them while dogs chased behind. With time, auto touring became somewhat less of an adventure, as roads became first macadamized and then paved with smooth concrete. But with the increased number of cars and the popular Model T and Model A, the problems of horse manure and road dust were supplanted by congestion and air pollution.

During the 1920s, a prosperous period in the United States, an increasing number of Americans crossed the Atlantic for pleasure. Inflation and economic hardship in Europe made prices there more affordable for Americans, and 437,000 of them traveled overseas in 1928.4 But the Depression of the 1930s, followed by the outbreak of World War II, put a stop to most recreational travel for a decade and a half.

You Are Here: The Rise of Mass Tourism

One little-remarked aspect of World War II was that, during their military service, ordinary people were exposed to some very extraordinary places. American troops served from the jungles of Burma to the glaciers of Greenland, and GIs in Europe went on leave in towns and scenic regions that had previously been visited only by the wealthiest of Americans. This contact with intriguing, unknown places may be one factor in the upsurge in international travel that has continued ever since then.

The post-World War II period was the era in which opportunities for international travel reached the middle class. As national and international airlines grew, competition between them intensified, and airlines began concentrating on using tourists to fill the seats not occupied by business travelers. And the traffic was two ways, with wealthier Europeans beginning to cross the Atlantic for pleasure.

There was also an economic factor that drew American tourists to Europe. Following the war, the shattered European economies were desperate for U.S. dollars, so for the first time governments opened tourist bureaus overseas to attract visitors. U.S. government policy encouraged Americans to tour Europe, using the slogan, "Trade, not aid."

But the main factor supporting massive growth in international tourism was improvement in air transport. Some long-distance routes had been introduced in the 1930s, but they involved numerous stopovers, and because they relied on seaplanes, they could not operate when temperatures were below freezing. The first scheduled transpacific service in 1935 took a total of sixty hours to get from San Francisco to Manila.

Aviation technology developed during the war made flying dramatically faster-and cheaper. In 1945, flying from New York to Paris took twenty-two hours. Only four years later, that time had been cut to twelve hours, and many airlines were competing to offer luxury service-including sleeping berths! The advent of commercial jet service in the 1960s transformed plane travel from a once-in-a-lifetime luxury to a common vacation choice for middle-class families in the developed world.

International travel has increased exponentially in recent decades. The number of international arrivals increased from 25 million in 1972 to 528 million in 1996, according to the World Tourism Organization.6 In 2000, according to data collected by the International Air Transport Association, over 1.4 billion passengers traveled on scheduled flights of its member airlines-an increase of 5.2 percent over the previous year. And these passengers were traveling ever greater distances-the number of international passengers up 9 percent from than the year before.

Travel closer to home is booming as well. In 1999, U.S. residents made over 346 million pleasure trips, staying an average of 3.7 nights away from home and spending a total of $426 billion. The top tourist magnets in 1998 were California, Florida, and Texas, but even last-place North Dakota took in over a billion dollars in tourist expenditures.

There is simply no question that tourism in Appalachia is ripe for further development. The challenge of merely getting around has since subsided, as better roads, including tollways and interstates, crisscross the region. One can get within fifty or a hundred miles of most places in the region on higher-speed highways, though driving the smaller highways may still be an adventure-especially if a logging or coal truck blocks the way. Regional tourism is rapidly becoming big business, and states like West Virginia and Kentucky are banking heavily on the industry.

The Spiraling Scope of Travel

An underlying theme in the history of travel is the ever-broadening range of travel as recreation. Social and technological changes have made journeys once undertaken only out of practical necessity now comfortable enough to undertake for pleasure.

Tourism began at the local level, in an era when all but the shortest journeys were too expensive or arduous to be undertaken lightly. In that era, pleasure travel included such activities as Sunday or weekend strolls, local wedding, funeral, or festival processions, the Way of the Cross (for those Christians who could not travel to the Holy Land in the late Middle Ages), hunting and fishing for sport, berry- or nut-gathering expeditions during the growing season, and visits to relatives.

For centuries, most touring was no more than strolls and family outings on a Sunday afternoon. Little wonder that earlier vacations consisted of visiting relatives and friends for short periods of time when they lived nearby, or for occasional longer stays at a greater distance. Visiting another farm was about as far as tourism went for most rural people, while a trip downtown was the limit of big city touring.

Footpaths, canoe routes, traces, turnpikes, canals, railroads, and then surface roads all increased the scope of touring, making it first regional, then national, and ultimately global. The barrier of the oceans was first traversed by clipper ships and then steamships and ocean liners; then in the last century there was the leap over the vast distances by airplanes, bringing people distances in a matter of hours that had taken weeks in ocean vessels.

Today, except for refugees or hard-core "adventure" travelers, travel seldom holds the danger and discomfort that it did for our immigrant ancestors who braved the holds of sailing ships. Now, simply getting there is no longer challenge enough; for many people, adventure means touching the last remote reaches of a well-trodden globe. Our thoroughly explored world has been "discovered" by almost all peoples, and present-day tourists will find traces of previous visitors in virtually every deep cavern and craggy mountain they explore.

Missing out on the thrill of being there first may discourage some travelers, and other motivations will have to develop. However, some would-be "discoverers" are turning their attention to outer space, hoping to find there some place to land and explore on some heavenly body.

Pleasure travel may now be reaching that level. In 2001, a wealthy American named Dennis Tito paid the Russian space agency $20 million for a ride to the new space laboratory being built in outer space. He called himself the "first space tourist," but even that has been contested. On December 2, 1990, Toyohiro Akiyama, a reporter for the Japanese television network TBS, traveled on the same type of Soyuz rocket that Tito did and docked with Mir-at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

However, it is not just the Russians who have sold flights into space. In 1985 NASA launched Senator Jake Garn aboard the space shuttle Discovery. It can also be argued that Senator John Glenn's second ride in space was nothing more than pleasure travel under public subsidy. Space agencies are now thinking in commercial terms, and in a short while the rich and famous will be blasting off to outer space-largely at taxpayer expense. It was just such high-rolling benefactor/tourists who were on an American naval submarine distracting the crew in 2001 when it accidentally struck and sunk a small Japanese fishing expedition near Hawai'i and killed nine, some of them young students.

Wouldn't it be fun to cavort about a cabin in a space suit, without the normal drag of gravity pulling you down? Space tourism is attractive, and yet it is so very costly, even when subsidized by the government. Still in its early development, it is indeed a "journey" with many difficulties, rather than a mere tourist trip. Columbus's voyages, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and other such voyages of discovery involved risk to human safety and the possibility that disaster could occur-as did happen in travels such as Amelia Earhart's flight around the world.

Space claims to be that last "frontier"-but is that appeal to pioneer courage and independence really justified? In space, all travelers live on artificial life-support systems, all need immensely expensive rocket send-offs, and all must have technical backup from programs and agencies that cost the taxpayers billions. Why should a few thrill-seekers be subsidized at the expense of the taxpayer, and why should the various international agencies allow this practice, especially since they should know that such elitism will not enhance the popularity of financially strapped space programs?

Today, the very notion of adventure travel is changing. Reading a catalog from a high-end adventure tour operator can be a profoundly depressing experience. Travels which even twenty years ago would have been regarded as a once-in-a-lifetime experience are now commonplace events, baseball cards to collect and show off. Angkor Wat, Mount Everest Base Camp, canoeing the Amazon, and gorilla safaris are all depicted in succulent adjectives to tempt the most jaded traveler. In an effort to increase sales, tourism promoters are in a heated competition to package and sell new and ever more alluring types of travel, and in touting their offerings of "unspoiled" destinations, they unwittingly underline their own negative impact. As geographer David Zurick points out, "The adventure tours unwittingly confront the disturbing fact that in their search for authenticity, the tourists dispel the very qualities which they seek."

A Look Inside the Tourist Machine

As we have seen, tourism is often proclaimed to be the "world's largest industry." Some components of this tourist machine are familiar names to anyone who has ever driven an interstate highway or flown from an American airport. A single major airline-United, American, Delta, Northwest, and British Airways-may fly to airports on every continent. Hotel chains like Hilton, Marriott, and Best Western have properties overlooking Alaskan glaciers and Arabian deserts. Major car rental chains, including Hertz and Avis, offer identical cars from identical offices around the globe. Other high-profile tourism participants are cruise lines, rail lines, travel agency chains, tour operators, and amusement parks.

Needless to say, there are also smaller regional and local companies, such as hotels, rental car services, and restaurants. And at the bottom of the tourist food chain are the mom-and-pop motel, the family-owned restaurant, and the quirky local tourist attraction advertised only by word of mouth.

But who, exactly, runs the industry? In this era of increased globalization, it should come as no surprise that many of the major players are international trade organizations and huge transnational corporations (TNCs). For a quick snapshot of the tourism industry, it's worth looking at the major industry bodies and who participates in them.

The main international organization in travel is the World Tourism Organization (sometimes referred to as WTO-OMT, adding its European name to distinguish it from the World Trade Organization). It originated as the International Union of Official Tourist Publicity Organizations in 1925, in The Hague, and was later renamed the International Union for Official Tourism Organizations (IUOTO) and expanded to include not only government tourism agencies but also tourism-related companies. In 1967, it became an intergovernmental organization. The IUOTO was renamed the World Tourism Organization in 1975 and signed a formal cooperation agreement with the United Nations two years later. It is an executing agency of the United Nations Development Program.

What is highly unusual about the WTO-OMT, now headquartered in Madrid, is that membership is open not only to government agencies, but also to corporations. The WTO-OMT boasts in its own literature that it is "the only intergovernmental body that offers membership to the operating sector and in this way offers a unique contact point for discussion between government officials and industry."

In 2001, membership of the WTO-OMT consisted of the tourist boards of 139 countries, along with over 350 "affiliate members," divided into the Education Council (ninety university-level training and research institutions) and the Business Council. The Board of Directors of the Business Council represents many big-name corporations, from Japan Airlines to MasterCard International, and the membership list is a virtual roll-call of entities that stand to profit from people's desire to go somewhere else: from the Association of Brazilian Travel Agencies to VISA International. Conspicuously absent, however, are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activist groups promoting fair or sustainable tourism. Though in theory there is nothing to prevent them from joining, the basic annual membership fee is $1800, which few grassroots activists can afford.

WTO-OMT's primary role is promoting the growth of tourism. The organization's analysts carry out a tremendous amount of research on the scope of tourism and its impact on the world economy. They are a prime source of widely quoted factoids like the one about the "world's largest industry." Though activist groups have questioned statistics such as these, they lack the money and resources to carry out this type of wide-ranging research.

This emphasis on the significance of tourism in the economies of countries around the world has a highly self-serving purpose. Through it, the WTO-OMT argues for government policies favoring the industry, and portray any opposition to tourism development as a threat to people's livelihood. In their view, the cure for economic underdevelopment in the Third World can be summarized in two words: promote tourism. Of course, their main thrust is not family-run guesthouses, but massive corporate-owned resorts.

Another important body is the World Travel and Tourism Council, made up of the CEOs of seventy major international corporations involved in the tourism industry. Though the roster of members includes some predictable people (the CEOs of Marriott International, the Hertz Corporation, and five of the world's ten largest airlines), others represent companies not generally linked with tourism in the public mind: Boeing, MasterCard International, Yapi Kredi Bank of Turkey, AIG Insurance. This should give some idea of the economic heavyweights attempting to promote and benefit from the growth of tourism.

The WTTC, too, hires armies of statisticians and analysts to chart and predict the future of tourism, with similar results, and similar aims. A WTTC report produced in 2001 stated that worldwide travel and tourism was expected to generate $4.5 trillion of economic activity that year, a figure that would grow to $9.3 trillion by 2011-an annual growth rate of 4 percent in real terms.

Its philosophy is similar, too. Its 2000 report Linking the Past With the Future asserted, "Travel and tourism can be an engine, and sometimes the engine, for generating jobs and wealth in the world's emerging economies."

These industry organizations have their domestic counterparts within the United States. The Travel Business Roundtable, headquartered in Washington, D.C., was formed in 1995 "to educate legislative leaders-on the national and state levels-of the importance of the industry to the nation's economy." Its seventy-plus members, all top executives of travel-related corporations, are each asked to spend one day a year in Washington meeting with "lawmakers and policy makers" and also to "develop relationships with elected officials in their home districts." Underlining the burgeoning scope of the industry, membership includes executives not only of Delta Airlines and Walt Disney Attractions, but also of Coca-Cola Corporation, Diners Club, and the National Football League.

The main national industry body is the TIAA, which produces a vast amount of PR material tying the economic well-being of the United States to a flourishing tourism industry. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, it produced TV and radio campaigns, posters, information kits, and a jazzy logo promoting Americans' "Freedom to Travel."

While the scope of the tourism industry has expanded to encompass an ever broader range of businesses and activities, many well-known tourism-related companies have themselves branched out into an ever-growing range of activities.

Thomas Cook, the British firm that began by organizing temperance picnics, now owns the largest chain of travel agencies in the UK, with over seven hundred offices. It operates six different tour companies as well as its own charter airline, and has subsidiaries in India, Egypt, and Canada. It sells travel insurance and issues credit cards and only recently sold its huge travelers' check and currency exchange businesses, which will continue to operate under the Thomas Cook brand name. Not bad for a Methodist lay preacher.

American Express, which though founded in 1850 didn't even enter the tourism industry until the early twentieth century, is even more astonishingly diversified. Best known to tourists for its travelers' checks (which it likes to call "cheques"), it also issues a variety of credit and charge cards; sells mutual funds, insurance, and annuities; provides brokerage services, accounting, and tax preparation for businesses-and still claims to be "the world's largest travel agency."

Overall, the trend in tourism is for increasing integration of different areas of operation under the umbrella of a single corporation. With the globalization of the economy, ownership of the world's airlines, hotels, tour operators, and travel agents is increasingly concentrated in transnational corporations, overwhelmingly based in the developed world. For example, in 1995, nineteen of the twenty largest hotel chains in the world were based in North America or Europe.

"Hosts" and "Guests"

One unusual feature of tourism as an industry is that it mimics and reflects a social relationship: that between a host and a guest. In fact, references to careers in the "hospitality industry" (specifically lodging and food service) are common.

Clearly, there are parallels between the commercial and noncommercial varieties of "hospitality," and in many cases the welcome that is given to tourists springs from genuine warmth and a desire to share the scenic and cultural bounty of one's hometown with visitors. However, it's important to keep in mind the differences between tourism and the genuine, noncommercial guest-host relationship.

For one thing, the tourism version of such a relationship is transitory. Unless a visitor comes back to the same town and the same restaurant year after year, his interaction with the waiter who serves his table will never move beyond the most superficial level. Furthermore, the relationship is unequal. Unlike true hosts who welcome guests voluntarily, tourism workers are generally less affluent than the customers they serve, and the "hosts" are at work, while the "guests" enjoy leisure. In all too many cases, low-paid tourism workers can't afford the enjoyable experiences that they provide for visiting vacationers. And, most importantly, the interactions between tourism workers and tourists are programmed, not spontaneous.

There has been a great deal of research on the relationship between tourism workers and tourists. Anthropologist Valene Smith points out, "Catering to guests is a repetitive, monotonous business, and although the questions posed by each visitor may be 'new' to him, hosts can become bored as if a cassette has been turned on. . . . As guests become dehumanized objects that are tolerated for economic gain, tourists have little alternative other than to look upon their hosts only . . . as objects."

Smith and others have analyzed how relationships between tourists and local people change as the industry becomes increasingly developed. After fieldwork in Barbados and Canada, G. V. Doxey developed his widely cited "index of tourist irritation" to describe how communities react to increasing levels of tourism. His "irridex" covers four main stages. In the first, "euphoria," local people are enthused about tourism and its benefits, and welcome the first trickle of visitors. In the next stage, "apathy," the community takes the presence of tourists for granted, and contact with visitors becomes more impersonal. In the third stage, "irritation," tourism nears the limit of carrying capacity, causing strain on the community. At the fourth stage, "antagonism," the tension becomes overt, and the community blames the tourists for all its problems. Beyond this is the "final stage," in which the environment is destroyed and cultural values lost.

Of course, not all people in a community will share the same opinion, and the process is hardly inevitable. It's easy to imagine well-planned tourism programs that produce a flow of visitors at a level tolerable (and beneficial) to the community. But Doxey's model suggests that the relationship between visitors and the visited is not a static thing-and is not always positive.

Furthermore, where the cultural difference between tourists and the residents of the destination is part of the attraction, the host culture itself becomes part of the commercial equation. In a paper entitled "Culture by the Pound," Davydd J. Greenwood discusses the example of a festival called the Alarde in Fuenterrabia, Spain. Every year, the population ceremonially reenacted the breaking of a historic siege of the town, with much pageantry and gunfire. When the government asked that it be performed twice in the same day so that more tourists could see it, the townspeople simply stopped participating, because the ritual lost its meaning for them.

Greenwood observes, "Worldwide, we are seeing the transformation of cultures into 'local color,' making people's cultures extensions of the modern mass media. . . . For the moneyed tourist, the tourism industry promises that the world is his/hers to use. All the 'natural resources,' including cultural traditions, have their price, and if you have the money in hand, it is your right to see whatever you wish."

Room to Grow

Though the actual size of the tourism industry is debatable, there can be little question that tourism is big and growing bigger. An increasingly interconnected network of corporations is competing for opportunities for further expansion, trying to increase their sales and market share by packaging ever more profitable "travel experiences" and selling them to an ever larger market of travelers.

And one region with a high potential for expansion in tourism is Appalachia. Despite its array of attractions-natural, historic, and cultural-many parts of the Appalachian region receive only a small number of visitors. For example, West Virginia, despite its stunning mountain scenery, masterful traditional crafts, and world-class white-water rafting, ranks only forty-fourth among U.S. states in annual receipts from tourism. At the same time, the state's unemployment rate and other economic indicators compare unfavorably with national averages.

Organizations such as the WTO-OMT and their corporate members proclaim that they can offer a sure cure for economic underdevelopment. What harm can there be in trying to get more people to come and visit and pump some cash into the economy? Plenty, as we will see.

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