The tourism industry has undergone many changes and evolved from an experience reserved for very few people into something enjoyed by many. Travel was originally for leisure purposes and was reserved for mainly royalty and the upper classes in the ancient societies. From the ancient Roman era to the 17th century, young men in upper classes were invigorated by travel through Europe. Throughout the Middle Ages, many societies encouraged the practice of religious pilgrimage which caused them to travel to the sacred places of the Saints, which in turn kick started the tourism industry. Cox & Kings was the first known travel agency and was founded in 1758 when Richard Cox became an official travel agent of the British Royal Armed Forces. Due to the industrial revolution later on, more people left to travel to the city. So there would be a degree of return temporally to see relatives and friends who had stayed behind. This meant that someone needed to be able to get them from A to B. This change in society made the tourism and travel industry change as well and so about 100 years later, in 1841, Thomas Cook opened the first leisure travel agency, with cost-effective railway tickets, designed to help Britons improve their lives by seeing the world and participating in the temperance movement. The popularity of rail travel and the emergence of the automobile also offered an additional milestone in the development of tourism.
The travel designed for the tourism industries then was mainly by rail but as it slowly more popular, cruise tourism made its small beginnings as a fortnightly crossing mail service which allowed passengers to travel with mail.
Some factors that have changed are the increase in car ownership has encouraged people to tour domestically for either short stays or full holidays. Before the modern day appliances, women’s time use to be taken up by washing and hanging clothes, ironing them all separately, hand cleaning the dishes and other chores which used to take a very long time. However with this new technology these chores were done a lot faster and therefore more time was made available to travel either nationally or internationally.
Some current practices used in the tourism and travel industry is travel by airlines and cruises. Service design, planning process, service delivery and linkages with intermediaries are also practices that occur in the context of an overall tourism strategy.
For more information visit:
https://opentextbc.ca/introtourism/chapter/chapter-1-history-and-overview/
http://learnabouttravel.weebly.com/development-of-the-travel-and-tourism-industry.html
https://soapboxie.com/economy/Advantages-and-disadvantages-of-tourism
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