In the early 1980s, my mother, Mavis Becker, was a widow living quietly in West Seattle on the money she earned from part time work and Social Security checks. She had raised six children. And, not counting Canada, she had traveled outside of the country only once in her life, to Ireland with our father just before he died. Mom was ready for a change. She moved into an apartment near Holy Rosary church, sold our family home and with the profits declared that she was going to see the world. With other widows in her parish, Mom set off and visited every continent except Antarctica. She went on an African safari. In India she saw a Bengal tiger and was awed by the Taj Mahal. She attended the Passion Play in Oberammergau, Germany, and danced the tango in Argentina.
Her albums from those adventures were piled high on her coffee table, replacing a jumble of magazines. When her doctor told her that her cancer had returned, Mom took one last trip—to newly opened China.
That is the power of travel, the reason why people go dreamy-eyed when they speak of that first taste of other worlds and the liberating freedom of taking a break from their own lives. They don’t think of travel as one of the world’s biggest businesses, an often cutthroat, high-risk and high-profit industry. But it is, and here is one reason: when Mavis Becker made her first voyages of discovery, she was one of some 250 million travelers crossing international borders. Today that figure is one billion and growing.
This book is a rare attempt to examine what the modern travel and tourism industry means for countries, cultures, the environment and the way we live. There are countless tourism books about where to go and what to do once you are there but very few that treat tourism itself as something that matters, as arguably the biggest industry in the world. Few foreign policy experts, economists or international policy gurus discuss the subject, much less ask whether tourism is enhancing or undermining a distinct regional culture, a fragile environment, an impoverished country. Like any industry, tourism has winners and losers, and keeping it out of critical discussions about the direction of the economy or international debates about the environment is short-sighted. For Americans, this is especially true because the U.S. government has been the least likely to acknowledge the role of tourism.
While not encyclopedic, Overbooked tackles the major issues. Each chapter is generally devoted to a single country or destination and the handful of issues associated with the country. The chapters are assembled into sections: the first is grouped around the reasons people travel: to see the world’s cultures; to shop, eat and party; and for nature and the outdoors. The last sections look at the giants in the field: China and the United States.
To examine the industry, I traveled extensively and in my acknowledgments thank the people who assisted me. Everywhere I was reminded of the wonders of travel. But I was also taken aback by the sheer numbers of people flooding the planet in search of those pleasures and the mixed record of the industry. My investigations into the policy and politics of tourism led me in multiple directions. Tourism is octopuslike, its tentacles reaching out to aspects of life that are as diverse as coastal development, child prostitution, the treatment of religious monuments and the survival of a threatened bird species or native dancing.
The best and the worst of tourism have governments at the center. The best examples include the creation and protection of national parks in the United States and the restoring of the French city of Bordeaux. In some of the worst, the Cambodian government oversaw the expulsion of farmers from their homes to make way for beach resorts and casinos, and officials of Venice are allowing tourism to push out local residents and hollowing out their society. Governments sell their countries—think of those advertisements telling us to sun ourselves on Greek islands or ski Austria during our winter holidays. Governments decide how to regulate businesses, who can visit their countries, who benefits from tourism and who loses. As tourism becomes the top money earner for more and more countries, those government decisions are critical.
During my five years of research and writing, I often thought of my mother’s last decade of adventures and wondered how future travelers will discover the world.