WHEN was the last time you said: 'I need a vacation?' Maybe you felt the need to escape from the stress of daily routine. Have you ever been on holiday in faraway places? Consider: Only a little over a century ago, most people do not regularly went on holiday. Moreover, almost all spent the entire life within a few hundred miles from the place of birth. The pleasure trips or study in distant places were the prerogative of a very narrow circle of people rich or adventurous. Today, however, hundreds of thousands of people can move from one end of the country or even the world. What caused this change?
After the industrial revolution million people were employed in the production of goods and provision of services. This led to an increase in earnings and therefore the possibility of spending. Moreover, the great technological progress allowed to mechanize most of the production processes that once required a lot of manpower. Many people found themselves well to have more free time. As there are these premises, the advent of the means of mass transportation cheaper mid twentieth century paved the way to tourism. At that time, transmitting in homes around the world images of distant places, the fledgling industry of mass communication stimulated the desire to travel.
The result was the birth and rapid expansion of the global tourism industry. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) has predicted that the number of people traveling abroad would have continued to increase, rising from 613 million in 1997 to 1 billion and 600 million by 2020. This increase in demand has paid a similar increase in the number of businesses, destinations and countries that provide services to tourists.