Tourism as the World's Largest Industry

Tourism as the World's Largest Industry

Tourism is a typical activity of fashion that the public participate widely and it has grown in importance over recorded human history. Innumerable articles refer tourism as “the world’s largest industry”; policy-makers, analysts, and scholars often speak of the size of the tourism compared to that of other industries (Smith 2004: 26). These series of misleading statement, together with the mass media’s reports (out of context), make the idea that tourism is a single large industry branded into many people’s minds. However, in this essay I will demonstrate that it is a simplistic and misleading idea, which should be replaced by the plural term, “tourism industries”. Moreover, tourism is not the world’s largest industry, but largest service sector.

Is tourism an industry and if not, what is it and how can it be defined? To answer these questions we need to find the definition of industry first. An industry is a group of firms producing products and/or services that are close substitutes for each other(……). To be considered as an industry, it must meet three factors -- individual businesses, revenues of those businesses, and a common product. Now let’s see what tourism is. However, there is no single definition, that is to say no agreement on what tourism should be. There are some reasons: tourism includes a number of diverse sectors (e.g. transport, accommodation, attractions, other services); tourism includes a number of academic subjects -- some argue that as a subject tourism is conceptually weak; difficult to establish strict boundaries around tourism both as a business and as an area of academic study; weak data sources which make comparisons between countries difficult.