In
1972, 25-year-old Tony Wheeler and his new wife Maureen bought an old
car and decided to drive it as far from London as it would go. They
reached Kabul, where they sold it at a profit. From there, they carried
on by bus and train over the Khyber Pass and then kept going until they
arrived in Sydney with 27 Australian cents left.
Wheeler had just
graduated from the London Business School. The couple thought the
journey would flush the travel bug from their systems before they
settled down. Instead, it never left them. The trip led to their
founding Lonely Planet, the travel publishing company - which means
they now have more than 27 cents.
Looking back, Wheeler says
their trip was part of one of the most important developments of the
last decades of the 20th century: the explosive growth and spread of
international tourism.
Wheeler and his wife were baby boomers,
indulging in the sort of travel that became typical of their
generation. They went to places, many then untouched by tourism, that
would have seemed extraordinarily adventurous to previous generations,
he writes in Trends and Issues in Global Tourism 2008 , a
volume of papers by travel chief executives and academics from last
year's ITB Berlin, the world's premier international tourism fair.
When
Lonely Planet took off in the 1970s, Wheeler recalls, China was closed
to the outside world. You could go to Hong Kong and look across the
border with binoculars. Today, Lonely Planet not only produces
guidebooks to China in several languages; it also publishes guidebooks
to other countries in Chinese.
Travel has moved on since Lonely
Planet began. Travellers are now more experienced. Some are still happy
to trot around in groups. Others are content to return to the same
villa each year. But many ask the Monty Python question: "What's the
point of going abroad if you're just another tourist?"
These
travellers want something further off the beaten track. Yet they also
want everything to work. Holidays require an anxious investment of time
and money. As one of the contributions to Trends and Issues
points out: "Vacations are a scarce resource. The annual number of
vacation days is limited; the anticipation of rest and relaxation for
this time is nevertheless immense. And, to top it off, vacations are
expensive. A family of four has to invest the equivalent of purchasing
a used compact car."
These three books sum up the dichotomy. The tourism chiefs represented in Trends and Issues
have to provide security and certainty to travellers if their
businesses are to survive. But they need to promise adventure and
romance too - the sort suggested by National Geographic's Journeys of a Lifetime: 500 of the World's Greatest Trips .
If
your idea of a holiday is riding the Darjeeling Toy Train from "the
paddy fields of northern Bengal to the misty tea gardens of the
Himalayan foothills" or sharing a Bedouin feast ("cardamom coffee and
lamb roasted in yoghurt") in a thatched goat-hair tent in Jordan, this
is the book for you.
As you would expect from National
Geographic, everything is beautifully photographed, but the trips
themselves - "wonderful, indelible, life-changing journeys" - sound a
little too charmed to be true. These essays, anonymously written in the
style of elegant travel brochures, present a world in which all aromas
are heady, vineyards are sun-touched, waters are crystal clear and
scenes are "biblical in their timelessness".
Journeys of a Lifetime
allows that western Scotland is "notoriously wet", but does that really
matter when you can "follow in the footsteps of Bonnie Prince Charlie
on a journey of high romance among Scotland's mountain-ringed lochs and
dreamy glens"? Reality does threaten to break through on a luxury train
journey from Rajasthan to New Delhi, where you are warned that all this
pampering "can't shield you from the real essence of any trip to India:
the hubbub of streets crammed with rickshaws, sacred cows, camels and
the ever-present" - what, grinding poverty? No - "aroma of spices".
Given the weight of expectations, holidays are bound to fall short of the Journeys of a Lifetime
ideal. Experienced travellers joining this summer's airport queues will
discover how far short: flight delays, hotel rooms above noisy streets,
non-stop rain, stomach upsets. Travel often doesn't feel like fun.
Sometimes, says Peter Greenberg in The Complete Travel Detective Bible , it feels like abuse.
Greenberg is the travel editor of NBC's Today
show. His book is too fat to take with you; you are probably meant to
read it at home before you pack. It is full of advice about how to
avoid travel's disappointments. Take stomach upsets, for example.
Always carry your own bottle of water on to the aircraft, Greenberg
says. Don't drink from the water bottles on the flight attendant's
trolley. Airlines have been known to fill them from aircraft holding
tanks, where the US Environmental Protection Agency in 2004 detected
nasty bacteria. The EPA also advised against drinking tea or coffee
during your flight: the airlines don't heat the water to a temperature
sufficient to kill pathogens.
When you get into your hotel room,
tear off the bedspread and throw it into the corner (it may harbour
goodness knows what) and clean the telephone handset and television
remote control with wet wipes. This is so important that Greenberg
tells us twice. (This book is a little repetitive but then you are
probably not supposed to read it from beginning to end. Given how much
Greenberg warns you may go wrong, you might be too scared to leave for
the airport if you did.)
Greenberg tells us it is no good
clicking on a window seat on the web-based aircraft diagram. It may be
cramped: check on seatguru.com to suss out the legroom. You may want to
change airlines when you have looked at the photographs of inflight
meals that helpful passengers have posted on airlinemeals.net. And
don't forget to check your hotel's mattresses on bedbugregistry.com.
There
are fascinating details that you probably don't need to know but can
always use to enliven conversation with the person in the seat next to
you. For example, Singapore Airline's Airbus 340-500 aircraft has a
dedicated corpse cupboard. This is to avoid the sort of awkwardness
British Airways encountered when cabin crew carried the body of an
economy passenger who had died into first class, where there was more
room. (A BA flight attendant told the passenger who objected to sitting
next to the deceased to "get over it".)
But once he has
instructed us on how not to get ripped off or let down, Greenberg is
off on the usual tack of avoiding the madding crowd and finding true
adventure. Here is modern travel's dual demand for safety and novelty
in one book: once you have wiped all those germs off the remote
control, why not pretend to risk your life?
Have you, for
example, considered a storm-chasing holiday? Tempest Tours arranges for
you to follow tornadoes in America's Great Plains. Dallas-based Tornado
Research and Defense Development guarantees that if you don't see at
least two storms in a week you can have a $200 discount on your next
trip.
Adventure travel company Covert Ops allows you to "unleash
your inner James Bond" with a three-day programme in Tucson, Arizona of
high-speed evasive driving, crashing through barricades, running attack
vehicles off the road, mastering espionage techniques and recognising
explosives. If that is too tame, Air Combat USA will teach you to fly
fighter aircraft and challenge fellow holidaymakers to aerial dogfights.
Behind
the faux-danger, the travel bosses at ITB Berlin recognise what's
happening here: Tony Wheeler's generation have been travelling for
years and, as they reach retirement, they have the money, time and
desire to do something different. "Individualisation in society is
without doubt a mega-trend for the future," say Hans Rück of the
University of Applied Sciences in Worms, Germany, and Marcus Mende,
chief executive of Schober Information, a marketing group, in Trends and Issues
. Many consumer goods and services industries have segmented their
markets, tailoring products for different groups, and tourism is no
different.
But that doesn't mean mass travel belongs to the past.
While the Lonely Planet crew may have experience sun-etched into their
skins, somewhere in the world new travellers are tremulously setting
out for the first time, many on all-inclusive packages. The numbers of
tourists from Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia are growing fast.
In the early 1980s, a little more than 1m Indians travelled abroad. By
2006, the figure was 8m.
The new travellers mean there is little
likelihood of tourism slowing down. Apart from holidays, millions now
need to travel to see their families. Trends and Issues points
out that there are 191m people living outside the countries of their
birth. Unlike previous generations of migrants, who often never saw
their families again, today's "global clans" can fly back home. They
present the industry with new opportunities. No doubt these new
travellers will one day, too, want to tack on a weekend of skydiving to
their family visits.
Can anything stop the growth of tourism? The
business is not immune to downturns. After 9/11, it went though a rare
dip but has since grown strongly. Individual countries and regions have
had setbacks: Egypt, Turkey and the UK have suffered terrorist attacks.
Asian destinations were damaged or destroyed by the 2004 tsunami.
But
a few quiet years dampensuch memories. And with the right
infrastructure, new destinations can be conjured almost from nothing:
look at Dubai, with its skyscrapers, sports tournaments and shopping
centres.
The rising price of fuel might slow things for a while too, but the environment is a longer-term consideration. As Trends and Issues
says, tourism both contributes to and suffers from climate change.
Flights add to carbon emissions; the tourist hordes strain water
supplies.
Destinations suffer too. European ski slopes sometimes
lack snow. The Mediterranean summers can be unbearably hot. But if the
snow melts, ski spots can become mountain resorts. If Spain and Greece
become overheated in August, their peak seasons can be moved to to
spring and autumn. And although European tourism has traditionally seen
people travel from the cool and cloudy north to the sunny south, if
global warming makes the north balmier, tourist traffic might flow in
the other direction.
Throughout its relatively short history,
international tourism has shown immense adaptability, and so have
tourists. If their aircraft (along with cars, factories and other
climate changers) make their favoured distinations uncomfortable, they
will find others. Dissatisfaction and disappointment are travel's
inescapable accompaniments. But travellers never stop hoping.
Somewhere, they believe, they will find the perfect holiday. These
books are testament to their determination to carry on looking.
Michael Skapinker is an FT columnist
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