Travel and Tourism

Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes". Wealthy people have always travelled to distant parts of the world, to see great buildings, works of art, learn new languages, experience new cultures and to taste different cuisines. Long ago, at the time of the Roman Republic, places such as Baiae were popular coastal resorts for the rich. The word tourist was used by 1772 and tourism by 1811. In 1936, the League of Nations defined foreign tourist as "someone traveling abroad for at least twenty-four hours".
Its successor, the United Nations, amended this definition in 1945, by including a maximum stay of six months. Leisure travel was associated with the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom - the first European country to promote leisure time to the increasing industrial population.[25] Initially, this applied to the owners of the machinery of production, the economic oligarchy, the factory owners and the traders. These comprised the new Mass tourism could only have developed with the improvements in technology, allowing the transport of large numbers of people in a short space of time to places of leisure interest, so that greater numbers of people could begin to enjoy the benefits of leisure time.