Futures 41 (2009) 367–376
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The future of tourism and globalization: Some critical remarks Julio Aramberri Hospitality Management Department Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history:
Present-day generalizations on the future of tourism see it as a key force in the process of globalization. This paper challenges this notion by pointing out that our knowledge of the real shape of world travel and tourism is still quite limited and that the sketchy evidence we can gather with present-day tools thus presents a much more modest picture confronting the claim that tourism has reached a high level of globalization. While it is an activity practiced all over the world, it is scarcely global. In this sense, the perception that tourism is wholeheartedly global and that it mainly connects the richer parts of the world with the poorest pleasure peripheries is but a figment of the post-romantic collective imagination that dominates much tourism research. ß 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Available online 25 November 2008
1. Introduction When talking about the future, one usually makes two assumptions. The first is that whatever the subject, it will remain in more or less the same shape until, well until it does not. The second assumption is that the description of the object whose future is under discussion has a clear contour in the present. In Modern Mass Tourism (MMT), with respect to the first assumption, we expect that barring massive crises, whether environmental, economic, political, or health related, people will want to travel in increasing numbers, and that in the 10– 15-year range tourism will be similar to what we know now but bigger. Unexpected crises that affect tourism such as 11 September 2001; Iraq and SARS 2003; Tsunami 2004; Avian Flu Scare 2005 are inevitable, so we should prepare for the unexpected. However, when reckoning the shape of the future, this unforeseen remainder is left out of the picture in favor of what is not just possible, but probable. Thus, by default, the forecast by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) that by 2020 the number of international arrivals will reach 1.6 billion people, is widely accepted, even considered conservative [1]. Prematurely one might conclude that MMT is, and will be, a paragon of globalization. The second assumption, that our description of present-day MMT dynamics is correct, is also to be questioned. This is because the widely used UNWTO database has several weaknesses: first it depends on data collected by its member governments, which often use unreliable techniques; second, it only counts international travel, involving border crossings.1 Thus, the UNWTO database sidelines travel by residents within their own country, known as domestic tourists. This would not matter except because data on domestic tourism are sketchy and, in consequence, researchers tend to ignore them. In this way, international travel, again by default, becomes shorthand for all tourism.2 Additionally, assuming the UNWTO data implies that the number of international arrivals will be high in areas of the world that are densely populated, and include many mid- and small sized states. Even if its residents did not have their present high level of disposable income, Europe
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[email protected]. This count is far from the real number of people that travel away from their usual place of residence for a period of over 24 h and less than 1 year—the accepted statistical definition of tourism. 2 For instance, the International Sociological Association (ISA) has only one research committee dealing with tourism under the label International Tourism [8], as though domestic tourism deserved a different treatment, or was deprived of interest. Tourism research pays a high price for this convention. 1
0016-3287/$ – see front matter ß 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2008.11.015
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Table 1 Classifying the global tourism system. Countries
Number
Remarks
1. The Top Producers 2. The Successful Developers Developed Countries Developing Stars Flip-Floppers 3. The Laggards
26 67 32 11 24 62
18 at the top have T&T Consumption >25% GDP T&T Consumption between 18–8% GDP High GDP; Highly diversified economies Quickly developing economies Varied economies T&T < 8% GDP (47 <6.5%)
Source: Author’s elaboration on WTTC 2006c [11].
would still flood the international tourism statistics, as is currently the case.3 This has implications for future tourism projections. For example, should the European Union become a single political entity, its citizens would no longer cross national borders and EU tourism statistics as measured by the UNWTO would show a dramatic decline. Based on 2005 data, recorded arrivals would have halved, even though the real number of tourists would remain unchanged. The point is not trivial. The habit of identifying tourism with international tourism has become so ingrained that it narrows down our theoretical views to some deeply flawed hypotheses. It makes it easier to label tourism as another form of imperialism [2–4].4 The few million people that travel between continents are deemed more significant than the 1.2 billion domestic tourists China generated in 2005 [5], or the 1.4 billion leisure trips that Americans took within the USA in 2004 [6]. Although either of those flows embrace larger numbers than their international counterparts, theoretical research on tourism’s complex dynamics remains largely about international demand when, in fact, the global tourism system has a different and more intricate structure. To forecast the development of MMT over the next few years in relation to the phenomenon of globalization requires us to reconfigure the tourism system. With this as the goal, the following sections will address three main topics: classifying the present global tourist system; discussing its inner structure or shape; and hinting at its foreseeable contribution to the general globalization process. 2. Classifying global tourism Globalization is a fuzzy concept and, with unrestrained use, more so by the day. In what follows, we will define it in a strict economic way. Within this economic framework, some people describe globalization as a movement in the direction of increasing world economic integration through the reduction of natural and human-made barriers to exchange and increased international flows of capital and labor [7]. This drift towards integration will never be complete, that is, reach a stage in which transaction costs will come to zero. However, globalization progressively thwarts those barriers, makes people and countries interdependent, and undermines attempts to unilateral growth. What started many centuries ago with the first traders has thus become a general arrangement in which an increasing world division of labor grows together with international production of good and services. On balance, globalization will proceed faster wherever international flows promote exchanges of progressively intangible goods, especially information, or trail when, as with tourism, globalization requires physical displacements. Thus, important as the dynamics, economic and otherwise, unleashed by tourism are, they elicit slower integration than finance, banking, movies, television or the internet. This paper therefore challenges the view that tourism has reached a high level of globalization. The Tourism Satellite Accounts (TSA) provided by the World Tourism & Travel Council (WTTC) offer significant support to this position (2006) [9]. Though these accounts use information on Travel and Tourism (T&T), they are less widely used among tourism researchers, maybe because they have not reached the high level of accuracy required by statisticians.5 The
3 A car traveler from Philadelphia spending a weekend in Washington, DC does not register as a tourist. The same person going by car for the weekend from The Hague in The Netherlands to Lille in France, roughly the same distance, would be counted as four arrivals—twice in Belgium, one in France, one in The Netherlands. If he or she travels with a family of three additional siblings, there will be 16 arrivals in the roster against none in the first. No surprise, then, that Europe’s share of the tourism market has hovered above fifty percent over the years. 4 If you think that this formula is too ‘‘Seventies’’, consider the post-colonial attempt to tag tourism in any of its forms as a part of the globalization trend that makes Western world hegemony inevitable. If one focuses on American travelers to Polynesia or on Europeans to Africa, that is, long-haul tourism to some less developed areas of the world, one might find some shred of evidence for this assertion, but those places are not where the overwhelming majority of tourists wander. 5 The WTTC website (WTTC/OEF 2006) discusses the TSA research methodology [9]. One problem in obtaining reliable data is that tourism is an activity that cuts across several sectors of the economy (eating and drinking, transportation, etc.) where tourism and recreation expenditures are not easily separated from the day-to-day spending of residents and businesses. Nonetheless, the low level of attention paid to TSA by tourism researchers is surprising given that WTTC membership includes many big corporate actors (airlines, hotel chains, tour operators, financial services, think tanks, etc.) that make multi-billion dollar decisions presumably using their joint TSA research. If reliable, WTTC-TSA will help us broaden our scope beyond that of international tourism, and avoid its metonymic entrapments, thus improving our insight on the workings of the global tourism system. That said, some WTTC data is to be questioned, for example, the lionized role accorded to Myanmar. WTTC ranks that country as number 11 out 174 in expenditures on personal travel (the part of residents’ T&T which is not business travel or governmental expenditures for the upkeep of tourist attractions); number 19 in total T&T demand; and number 12 in the size of its tourism industry, which seems highly unlikely.
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overall TSA picture, however, is more reliable. In what follows, TSA is adopted with the same leap of faith that one accords to the UNWTO database and will be used as a valid tool that has been improved significantly since they were introduced. TSA attest that T&T happens in all of the 174 countries and territories included in its database. In this sense, tourism has spread all over the globe. However, by itself this does not translate into a global activity in the sense just mentioned—greater integration of the world economy. T&T would operate worldwide without becoming global if most tourists traveled only within their national borders, if the T&T industry would mostly be local, and if most capital investment or labor were not foreign. This is exactly what happens in present day T&T. Indeed, the global components in the tourism system are rather limited. To discuss the issue, we look first to the T&T ratio to GDP obtained from WTTC tourism expenditure data and the corresponding World Bank national income data [10].6 In 2004 the GDP of the 156 countries and territories for which both data are available reached US$ 40.7 trillion at current prices, while World T&T Consumption was US$ 3.9 trillion, around 10%. The mean T&T contribution to national GDPs was 12.5%. With these data, one can make a first attempt at classifying the different components of the global tourism system, combining their economic development stage (developed, developing or least developed countries or LDC) with the T&T impact in their GDP (Table 1). Three main groupings can be made. For the first group of 26 countries (Top Producers), T&T makes a high GDP contribution. The remainder is divided in two additional categories. The first (Successful Developers) is made of 67 countries, and ranges from the first developed nation to appear in the ranking (Austria with number 27 and a T&T contribution to its GDP of 18%) and Japan (with number 94 and a T&T contribution to its GDP of 8%). The second (Laggards) clusters countries with a T&T contribution below 8%. In total, there are 62 countries in this last category, and the T&T ratio for the great majority of them (47 countries) is equal to or below 6.5%. Already, some trends can be noticed in this classification beginning with the 26 Top Producers (see Table 2). Most share the following features:
Least Developed Countries (LDC). Small islands, archipelagos or territories. Low degree of economic diversification. Rather weak internal demand. Close to large generating markets.
The second group of Successful Developers includes, among others, all developed nations with the exception of South Korea, whose T&T contribution to GDP remains below 6%. This group is far less homogeneous than the Top Producers and comprises two clusters: 27 developed countries (Table 2) plus another five European Union members on their way to becoming fully developed, and 11 developing stars that have already become top international destinations. The common features of the Developed sub-group are: In most cases their T&T impact exceeds 10%. The only exceptions to this rule are five countries (Norway, United States, Israel, Ireland, and Japan) where T&T counts between 9.4% and 8% of GDP. Highly diversified economies compatible with a high degree of T&T development. Increasingly varied and sophisticated tourism products. The common features of the Developing Stars sub-group (see Table 2) are:
Quickly developing countries. Increasingly diversified economies where T&T has become a key ingredient. Close to central generating markets. Well established tourism destinations.
The remaining sub-group of 24 countries of Flip-Floppers (See Table 2) has features akin to those of the three previous groups and sub-groups. Some are small islands or archipelagos with non-diversified economies; some are more developed and find themselves in the vicinity of important generating markets; some are rising stars. Their liminal situation might be an opportunity to consolidate their ascending trend or, perhaps, to join the remaining group. This last group of Laggards (see Table 2) is made of 62 countries that are not counted as developed economies and have a T&T impact of less than 8% of GDP. Many in this category have some similarities:
6 This can be done in two different ways, either by measuring what WTTC calls T&T Demand, that is, the aggregate of all tourism nominal expenses, direct and indirect, in the resident economy and compare them with its GDP; or by using so-called T&T Consumption—including only those expenditures made by and on behalf of visitors, domestic or international, in the resident economy. In shorthand, T&T Consumption only considers direct economic dynamics of tourism in a given economy, while T&T Demand includes both direct and indirect impacts. Both show rather similar results, but we will use the more limited measure because it is closer to the real movement of people, and sidetracks other components such as investments in infrastructures, marketing and related exports that, significant as they indeed are, mark some degree of conceptual distance.
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Table 2 The structure of world tourism by country (T&T/gdp 2006). Top producers
Successful developers coun-
Laggards
Countries
%
Developed tries
Rising stars
Flip-floppers
Countries
%
Countries
%
Countries
%
Countries
%
Countries
%
Maldives Antigua and Barbuda
62.1 55.3
Austria Iceland
18.2 17.0
Tunisia Thailand
15.4 14.2
17.1 15.8
El Salvador Trinidad & Tobago
8.0 7.9
South Africa Congo, Republic
6.5 6.4
Seychelles Bahamas, The Saint Lucia Vanuatu Barbados Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Grenada Burma Jamaica Cape Verde Zimbabwe Cyprus
53.8 50.2 42.6 41.2 40.7 30.7
Portugal Switzerland Spain Greece Hong Kong Belgium
16.9 16.0 15.6 14.4 13.5 12.7
Morocco Costa Rica Malaysia Egypt Kenya Turkey
13.6 12.5 12.1 11.1 10.4 9.1
Estonia Papua-New Guinea Kiribati Lebanon Albania Ukraine Guyana Comoros
15.7 15.7 14.4 14.3 14.0 12.0
Nicaragua Philippines Belarus Malawi Ethiopia Russian Federation
7.8 7.8 7.8 7.7 7.7 7.7
Benin Oman Guatemala Ecuador Iran China
6.4 6.3 6.3 6.1 6.1 5.9
30.5 28.7 28.0 27.8 27.7 27.4
New Zealand UK France Italy Denmark Singapore
12.6 12.3 12.1 12.1 11.5 11.4
Senegal Cambodia Indonesia
8.9 8.8 8.0
12.0 12.0 11.9 11.7 11.6 11.3
Rwanda Botswana Vietnam Lesotho Central African Rep. Peru
7.6 7.5 7.5 7.3 7.2 7.2
Korea, Republic Argentina Niger Colombia Haiti Paraguay
5.7 5.7 5.6 5.6 5.5 5.3
Malta Fiji Saint Kitts and Nevis The Gambia Dominica Croatia Dominican Rep. Belize Bahrain Jordan Bulgaria Syria
27.1 26.4 25.9 25.4 22.7 22.5 21.9 20.3 19.7 19.6 19.2 18.9
Netherlands Australia Luxembourg Finland Sweden Czech Rep. Germany Canada Norway USA Israel Ireland Japan
11.3 11.2 10.7 10.6 10.5 10.3 10.2 10.1 9.4 9.4 9.3 8.8 8.0
10.9 10.8 10.7 10.4 10.3 10.3 10.2 10.1 9.8 8.9 8.8 8.7 8.6 8.2 8.1 8.0
Slovak Republic Burundi Sao Tome & Principe Latvia Mali Cote d’Ivoire Macedonia FYR Bolivia Swaziland Mexico
7.1 7.1 7.1 6.8 6.8 6.7 6.7 6.7 6.7 6.6
Brazil Zambia Chile Congo, Dem. Rep Togo Venezuela Guinea Sierra Leone Cameroon Burkina Faso Yugoslavia FR Yemen Romania Pakistan Bosnia & Herzegovina India
5.3 5.1 5.1 5.0 4.9 4.9 4.9 4.8 4.7 4.6 4.3 4.3 4.2 4.1 4.0 3.8
Saudi Arabia Libya Bangladesh Nigeria Chad Algeria Sudan Angola
3.4 3.4 3.3 3.3 3.0 2.7 2.4 2.2
Ghana Suriname Uganda Slovenia Qatar Solomon Islands Hungary Honduras Gabon Tonga Sri Lanka Namibia Tanzania Panama Kuwait Nepal Laos Madagascar Uruguay Lithuania Poland United Arab Emirates
8–6.6%
<6.5%
Source: Author’s elaboration on WTTC 2006c [11] and World Bank 2006 [10]. Percentages obtained by dividing WTTC/OEF (2006) [9] T&T Consumption 2004 (including Personal and Business T&T and Visitor Exports) by World Bank GDP Data 2004. WTTC/OEF categories include items such as transportation, accommodation, food and beverage, etc. For a more detailed methodological explanation one should go to the referred paper.
Located in the slowly developing areas of the world (Africa, Latin America, Middle East, and South Asia). Least Developed Countries (LCD). Low GDP. Minimally diversified economies. Away from significant generating markets.
3. The shrinking global tourism system From the above, it is evident that in addition to a country’s development stage or T&T impact on GDP, location relative to the main generating markets also influences this classification. Some insight on this aspect arises from UNWTO estimates of world market share for international arrivals in 2005 (Fig. 1). Europe comes on top with over 54% of world arrivals followed by the Americas and Asia-Pacific, both of them with a similar size (17% and 19%, respectively). Africa and the Middle East fill the bottom of the table with 5% each. Remembering that TSA do not address the movement of persons, WTTC reaches a similar picture in dealing with the way T&T is produced by
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Fig. 1. World tourism arrivals by region (2005). Source: UNWTO 2006 [13].
Fig. 2. World share of T&T market (2006). Source: WTTC 2006c [11].
different world regions (Fig. 2). The production of T&T is highest in the Americas (40%) followed by Europe (35%) and AsiaPacific (22%). Once again, Africa (2%) and the Middle East (1%) remain far behind those three regions. Given their methodologies and the fact that these two charts record different classes of activity, there are notable differences between them. The most salient is the exaggerated importance of Europe in the UNWTO database, already explained. However, from our new vantage point it is noticeable that two main geographic and economic regions (Africa and the Middle East) have both a very low level of international arrivals and a low T&T impact. This allows us to conclude that tourism gravitates towards specific regions of the world. However, this is only the beginning. If one breaks the five regions we have just looked at into more detailed areas or sub-regions, this lopsided picture becomes even more unbalanced (Fig. 3). Together, North America (33%), the European Union (31%), and Northeast Asia (15%) account for 79% of the world production of T&T goods and services. If one adds their adjacent areas in the rest of Europe, Southeast Asia, North Africa, and the Caribbean, the total scores an additional 10% to reach 90% of world production. On the other hand, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa only produce a trifling 7%. Oceania (3%) also appears differently. This regional distribution supports the hypothesis of a limited globalization of the world tourist system. Far from a generalization of the trend to all its components, it appears that tourism becomes more and more integrated in three main areas (1) Europe and both the North and South Mediterranean, (2) North America and the Caribbean and (3) Northeast and Southeast Asia. The case of Oceania where Australia and New Zealand act as the anchors of a regional sub-system that includes the rest of the islands of the South Seas appears as a miniature of the bigger picture and its inner trends.
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Fig. 3. World T&T market share by sub-region (2006). Source: WTTC (2006c) [11].
Table 3 Intra-regional tourism 2004. Region
%
Africa Americas Asia-Pacific Europe Middle East
71.4 71.3 78.4 86.1 77.3
Source: UNWTO (2006) [12].
Based on this evidence, the global tourism system is structured around three central regions, each with its own hinterland. In each area, a core of well developed or quickly developing countries have an impressive tourism production within their own borders and also generate major tourist flows to the rest of their vicinity, whether LCDs, developing or developed nations. Whereas in Latin America, Africa or the Middle East this core does not exist or is quite remote, thus tourism remains small. From an economic point of view, both the core developed countries and their immediate peripheries have increasingly close relations and benefit from those exchanges. The rest are mostly excluded.7 Our analysis could be improved if we knew more about the relation between domestic and international tourism in its double dimension of intra-regional and long haul travel. Unfortunately, this area remains obscure. It appears however, that the majority of international T&T arrivals as measured by UNWTO overwhelmingly happen in the same continent where they originate; intra-regional arrivals outnumber inter-continental arrivals. Most African tourists remain in Africa, most Asians in Asia and so on. According to UNWTO (Table 3), in all five regions of the world over 70% of tourists stay within their continent of origin. As could be expected, this is especially true in Europe, given its statistical overweight. In its forecast of tourism development until 2020, UNWTO [1] also points out a similar share. According to it, the split between intra-regional and long-haul T&T has been changing to make the latter somehow bigger. However, if in 1995 the ratio between the two was 80/20, it will remain close in 2020 with a 75/25 share. How international and domestic T&T are related is a more challenging question. Indeed, there is no known satisfactory calculation of their relative weight. WTTC-TSA, however, offers some pointers.8 WTTC estimates that in 2006, the total amount of money spent for Personal T&T and Business Travel reached US$ 3.51 trillion while Visitor Exports topped US$ 896 billion. Total expenditures for individual T&T would thus be in the region of US$ 4.4 trillion. Roughly, this would suggest (Fig. 4) that Visitor Exports, closely related to international travel, are only one fifth of total travel.
7 Whether these groupings create uneven exchanges, as per the neo-colonial analysis or reflect a central or hegemonic relationship between the main partners in each one of the regions and their pleasure periphery, as per the post-colonial hypotheses is not addressed in this paper. 8 Tourism expenditures closer to physical travel, whether domestic or international are Personal T&T, Business Travel and Visitor Exports [9]. Although at the level of individual countries they do not exactly match, when it comes to world estimations the sum of the first two categories comes close to expenditures in domestic travel while the third one would be money spent by international tourists.
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Fig. 4. The shape of the global tourism system (2006).
If Visitor Exports are to be divided between intra-regional and long-haul according to the UNWTO ratio of 75/25, this would mean that domestic tourism accounts for 80% of total T&T, while intra-regional travel (international travel within the same continent) would reach 15%, with long-haul travel reaching only about 5% of the total. If this is the shape of the world T&T pie, then T&T is far less a global activity than usually conjectured. If so, we should also re-assess what these economic considerations mean for the unceasing talk about social and cultural gaps between tourists and providers of T&T goods and services. In fact, the much-vaunted cultural gap would be at its most dramatic in just 5% of cases. Intra-regional contacts would be much more common (and therefore cultural distance minimized), covering about 15% of total T&T communication. Domestic tourism would carve the lion’s share, therefore reducing opportunities for cultural dissonance between travelers and locals. 4. Some tentative conclusions The second assumption in our Introduction – that discussing the future of the Global Tourism System requires a prior reassessment of its present shape – has led to a reappraisal of its actual structure. Now we consider how this affects the first expectation—that in the mid-run T&T will probably remain the same as today barring capricious major crises. The answer should be a qualified yes. The qualification here arises not because one may doubt global tourism’s quick development rhythm, but because the future will hopefully bring better knowledge of its structure, and thus force a change in our hypotheses. One possibility here involves international arrivals. Unless the European Union becomes a single political entity, the UNWTO forecasts that it will double its present dimension to reach 1.6 billion tourists in 2020 seems plausible [1]. The WTTC drums a similar beat. In
Table 4 Change 2006–2016 (US$ billions). Region
T&T Industry 2006
T&T Industry 2016
Growth
Difference
North America European Union Northeast Asia Southeast Asia Other Western Europe C & E Europe Oceania Latin America Middle East South Asia North Africa Sub-Saharan Africa Caribbean
601.8 437.5 260.7 75.4 56.6 38.2 50.9 48.1 27.3 22.0 19.4 16.9 11.6
964.5 676.4 577.4 151.6 87.3 74.1 73.3 72.7 58.9 42.0 35.9 33.1 23.7
1.6 1.5 2.2 2.0 1.5 1.9 1.4 1.5 2.2 1.9 1.9 2.0 2.0
362.7 238.9 316.7 76.2 30.7 35.9 22.4 24.6 31.6 20.0 16.5 16.2 12.1
Source: Author’s elaboration on WTTC 2006 [11].
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Fig. 5. World share of T&T market (2016). Source: WTTC 2006c [11].
current monetary terms, the world T&T demand will nearly double from 2006 to 2016, passing from US$ 6.5 trillion to US$ 12.1 trillion. But will tourism also become more global in the sense we have just discussed? Accepting that there is little reliable evidence, WTTC data offer a not-so-unexpected surprise. The market share of T&T measured by continent (Fig. 5) sees a loss in the Americas (3%) and an even faster decline in Europe (6%) while Asia and the Pacific surge eight points (from 22% to 30%). Africa and the Middle East remain at the very bottom of the table (2% each). By sub-region (Table 4), the highest growth in percentage will be reached in Asia, where the three regions of the Northeast, Southeast and South will double the amount of current dollars they made in 2006. The Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean will also keep the expectation of a doubling in T&T production. The rest of the world will slow even by comparison with sluggish growth in North and Latin America, Europe and Oceania. Fig. 6 shows the new distribution for 2016. Once again, no big changes appear in the broader picture by 2016. The three big areas of North America and the Caribbean, Europe and the Mediterranean and Northeast/Southeast Asia will still account for 90%, of the entire world T&T, Oceania for 3% and the rest will come up with just 7%. Finally, the whole T&T global system will remain structured in the same way it is now (Fig. 7). Domestic tourism will lose a couple of percentage points to intra-regional tourism while long-haul travel will remain at 5%, as in 2006.
Fig. 6. World T&T market share by sub-region (2016). Source: WTTC 2006c [11].
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Fig. 7. The shape of the global tourism system (2106). Source: Author’s Elaboration on WTTC 2006c [11].
Overall, we conclude that tourism will indeed be one of the ways in which globalization will proceed in the near future. However, it will not be its stronghold. People movements for T&T will not easily go beyond their national borders; when they do, tourists stay on their original continent, and only a small minority venture further. Furthermore, this last group will not only go to the most exotic destinations. A sizeable share of long-haul travel will still be by business people shuttling between Europe, North America and East Asia. In this sense, the perception that tourism is wholeheartedly global and that it mainly connects the richer parts of the world with the poorest pleasure peripheries is but a figment of the post-romantic collective imagination that has of late become so dominant in tourism research. While it is not possible to tread firmer ground, one can however add some more mid-range pointers that might improve future research. Better statistics are essential if we want to grasp better how ‘‘the biggest industry on earth’’ works. While this is easier said than done (as UNWTO efforts to set up a TSA system show), there is much more statistical production than meets the eye. The issue is often one of better dissemination. Beyond the general or systemic databases, several countries provide reasonable amounts of information, only found after frustrating website expeditions. Such data might be centralized. So might UNWTO analyses with a twist. Despite being a public sector organization amply funded by taxpayers’ money, UNWTO insists in making users pay for access in contrast to WTTC that opens its databases free to any interested party. Better knowledge usually means better policy-making, and our second pointer looks to another direction. A significant part of present tourism research revolves around so-called travelers’ experiences or the self-styled encounters between hosts and guests. Policies based on such flimsy foundations often miss their goals because they ignore the ways the tourism industry works. Not least, better statistical sources tracking market trends and consolidation in the industry would assist policy-makers, investors, and stakeholders and help researchers. Finally, a better knowledge of our subject would help us in discussing theoretical issues, such as, for example, whether the global tourist system will collectively evolve according to the pattern of Butler’s life cycles or follow a Wallerstein-like world-system template. While the former tends to offer a closed evolutionary outlook on development, the latter is more open to the interplay of broad economic and social factors that might enrich our view of the dynamics unleashed by MMT. These and other similar issues would highly benefit from a better understanding of the tourist system and its place in the process of globalization. References [1] UNWTO (United Nations World Tourism Organization), Tourism 2020 Vision, 2006,
. [2] Nash, Dennison, The Anthropology of Tourism, Oxford/Elsevier, 1996. [3] Timothy S Oakes, Tourism in Guizhou: the legacy of internal colonialism, in: Lew, Yu (Eds.), Tourism in China: Geographical, Political and Economic Perspectives, Boulder Co., Westview Press, 1995. [4] Timothy S Oakes, Tourism and Modernity in China, Routledge, London/New York, 1996. [5] CNTO (China National Tourist Office), China Tourism Statistics, 2006, . [6] TIA, US Domestic Leisure Travel, 2006 ed., Tourism Industry Association, Washington, DC, 2006. [7] Wolf, Martin, Why globalization Works, New Haven, Yale Nota Bene, 2006. [8] ISA (International Sociological Association), Research Committees, 2006, .
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[9] WTTC/OEF (Oxford Economic Forecasting), Methodology for producing the T&T simulated satellite accounts, 2006, . [10] World Bank, Data & Statistics, 2006, http://web.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64133165&pagePK=64133485&piPK=64133503&q=gdp&theSitePK=239419. [11] WTTC (World Travel & Tourism Council), Competitiveness Monitor, 2006a, .; WTTC, League Tables, 2006b, .; WTTC, The 2006 T&T Economic Research, 2006c, . [12] UNWTO, International arrivals by region of origin and regions of destination (2004), 2006, . [13] UNTWO, Tourism Highlights, 2006 ed., 2006, .