6.1.2

The Growth of Tourism

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Growth of Tourism

Tourism has grown since the 1500s. Innovations in transport has had huge impacts on tourism.

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Beginnings of tourism

  • Tourism started with public baths that people relaxed in. Middle and upper class people would travel to these baths from the 1700s.
  • Very rich people travelled to Rome and Athens to see the culture there from the 1500s onwards.
    • The Colosseum (Rome) and the Acropolis (Athens) were frequently visited, as well as the capital cities of Vienna and Paris (Austria and France), which were seen as the home of the arts and culture.
    • These holidays would usually have to last months or years because of the limited means of transport.
    • Journeys would be taken by horse and carriage along dirt tracks.
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Package deals

  • Package deal holidays were created by Thomas Cook.
    • The first one in the UK was for a religious seminar on avoiding alcohol in 1841, encouraging travel by train between Leicester and Loughborough.
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Transport

  • In the UK, tourism grew through railways.
  • After WW2 more people began to own cars and the government invested more in roads.
    • This opened up opportunities to go to holiday parks like Butlins and seaside resorts like Blackpool.
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Transport 2

  • Post-1945, the invention of the jet engine made air travel much more attractive for larger numbers of people.
  • Many UK locations could not compete with the sunshine in Spain and France, especially because it had become so quick to go abroad.
  • Budget airlines like Easyjet were created in the 1990s, which made going abroad cheaper by being more basic a service.
  • This made travel more affordable so it became more normal to go abroad.
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Television

  • TV and the internet make other parts of the world visible and encourages people to visit more isolated locations to do some exploring, e.g. Antarctica or St Helena island.

Jump to other topics

1Geography Skills

2Geology of the UK

3Geography of the World

4Development

5Weather & Climate

6The World of Work

7Natural Resources

8Rivers

9Coasts

10Glaciers

11Tectonics

12Climate Change

13Global Population & Inequality

14Urbanisation

15Ecosystems

16Life in an Emerging Country

17Analysis of Africa

18Analysis of India

19Analysis of the Middle East

20Analysis of Bangladesh

21Analysis of Russia

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