Elizabeth Becker - Overbooked

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

For Bill, my husband and traveling partner

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 tripto 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 dont think of travel as one of the worlds 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 worlds 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 countriesthink 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 mothers last decade of adventures and wondered how future travelers will discover the world.

Sunday at the Louvre Museum, Paris (WILLIAM NASH)

For aficionados of travel magazines filled with breathtaking photographs of boutique hotels on sugar-white beaches or yachts cruising turquoise-colored seas, the United Nations World Tourism Organization is a let-down. This agency dedicated to one of lifes great pleasures is housed in a nondescript ten-story building on Madrids Calle Capitn Haya, hidden in a leafy neighborhood with far more impressive government ministries and foreign embassies. It looks like what it is: one of the more obscure organizations in the enormous United Nations, a backwater near the bottom of the international pecking order. Moreover, it is dedicated to the business of travel and tourism, not its romance.

Most of the writers of those glamorous travel articles have never heard of the UNWTO, and of those that have, few have visited the office. I get their emails, but I rarely read them, said Stuart Emmrich, then editor of the influential Travel section of the New York Times.

This disconnect is a testament to travel and tourisms reputation as a worry-free break from the real world, not a serious business. The UNWTO is one of the few institutions that recognizes travel as one of the largest industries in the world and studies its extraordinary dimensions to understand how it is changing the world.

The very idea of describing travel and tourism as a serious industry or business is an oxymoron to many people. The oil industry is serious. Finance is serious. Trade is serious. Manufacturing is serious. Foreign policy and economic policy are serious. Tourism is a frivolous pursuit: fun, sometimes educational in the lightest sense, often romantic, even exotic.

Tourisms low reputation is a big reason why the agency is in Spain. When it came into being after World War II, the United Nations ostracized Spain because it was led by Francisco Franco, Europes last fascist ruler. Spain remained something of a pariah on the world scene in the 1950s. (Adolf Hitler had been a supporter of General Franco; Nazi armed forces helped Franco come to power.) The U.N. slowly accepted Spain back into the normal world of diplomacy as Franco loosened up and Spain became more democratic. Finally, when Franco was on his deathbed, the U.N. agreed to set up a small tourism policy office in Madrid in 1974. The sufficiently inconsequential tourism body wouldnt raise too many questions, and Spain could be selected over two rivals that were not considered top-caliber at the time.