What is ‘Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions’?
I started Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions very recently. But what is it?
Perhaps a better question is: “Who are Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions?”
We are a diverse range of people, from academia, journalism, and industry who share a love of holidays and a desire to optimistically explore the economic and cultural advantages of mass tourism.
We are working on a few projects.
Our substack is one. Another, prospectively, is a report on the state of the debate on the travel & tourism industry, which will share the title “Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions”.
Why ‘Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions’?
“These are the days of the millions [who can] o’erleap the bounds of their own narrow circle, rub off rust and prejudice by contact with others, and expand their sails and invigorate their bodies by an exploration of some of nature’s finest scenes.”
Thomas Cook
Thomas Cook, known as the ‘father of modern tourism’, exemplified an optimism about the growth of tourism in the 19th century. It is an optimism regarding the potential in people and technology that we see less often today.
He lends us ‘the Millions’.
‘Horizon’ is also a call back to a another time.
Horizon Holidays was an early, and iconic, pioneer of mass package tourism, based in the UK. Its flights to Corsica in 1950, soon followed by Palma, Lourdes, the Costa Brava, and Sardinia were exemplary of the post 1945 package holiday boom.
Honouring the individuals in the masses
Mass tourism today is maligned in some quarters, and the legacy of mass tourism is often caricatured as bland, crude and destructive.
“[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.”
Raymond Williams
As Raymond Williams — Welsh “author, academic, cultural theorist, literary critic, public intellectual, socialist, and a leading figure of the New Left” — reminded us, masses are made up of individuals.
But often individuality is erased in caricatures of mass behaviour and consumption.
Sadly, that is characteristic of discussions of tourism today, certainly in the universities, and all too often elsewhere too.
At Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions, we like to find the individual in the mass, challenge stereotypes, and celebrate the conviviality of tourism.
We are looking realistically, but optimistically, to the future of travel.
Any assessment of tourism’s future also requires a reassessment of its past, one that recognises tourism’s role in cultural and economic advancement.
We intend to provide much needed balance and, when it is needed, a counter to declinism in debates about a vital industry and joyful, very human activity: tourism.
Please follow us at Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions on Substack.
Share it, get in touch, and get involved.
About the author
Jim Butcher is a lecturer and writer who has written a number of books on the sociology and politics of tourism. Dr Butcher blogs at Politics of Tourism, tweets at @jimbutcher2, and initiated Tourism’s Horizon: Travel for the Millions on Substack.
Featured image (top of post) by Pierre-Laurent Durantin (CC0) via Pixabay.
