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tourism) cannot be adequately studied or solved at
the level of the nation-state. This is because one of
the main characteristics of globalisation is the
centralisation and concentration of both capital
and power in the private multinational firm,
particularly firms which are located in metropolitan
as opposed to peripheral countries This is not
to ignore the nation-state, but rather to focus on a
conception of a global system based on transnational
practices that have impacts on several
interacting spheres: environmental, economic,
political and cultural±ideological. Multinational
firms are the major source of these practices
because of their enormous scale. In fact, the
gigantic size of these firms is illustrated by the fact
that the annual sales of many of these firms are
larger than the gross national product of many
countries. For example, in 1991, only about sixty
countries had GNPs of more than US$10 billion,
while 139 multinational firms had annual sales in
excess of US$10 billion.
In one sense, tourism has long been `global' or
international in that tourists, as the demand
side of the system, have for many centuries visited
other countries: medieval pilgrimages, grand
tours of Europe in the eighteenth century, the first
package tours of Europe in the mid-nineteenth
century organised by Thomas Cook, and shipbased
travel in the early twentieth century to
remote destinations. As tourism demand increased,
however, with growing prosperity in the developed
nations following the Second World War and more
particularly with the advent of jet airplanes in the
early 1960s, the boom in mass tourism both led to
and was facilitated by increased involvement by
multinational firms in the supply side of the
tourism system.
Modern international tourism is therefore
dominated in corporate terms by TNFs, including
airlines, hotels, tour wholesalers, tour operators,
travel agents and car rental companies.
These firms are characterised by high levels of
vertical and horizontal integration. Vertical integration
might, for example, involve an international
airline offering both regularly-scheduled
flights and tour charters, operating a chain of
travel agencies, and owning hotels and a car rental
company. Horizontal integration might, for instance,
involve a hotel company owning a range of
globalisation 255
classes of hotels, from budget motels to luxury
business-class hotels to all-inclusive resorts.
A second feature of globalisation with respect to
tourism has been the liberalisation of economic
policies, such as the loosening of foreign
exchange controls in many countries. Much of
the increase in tourism from Japan since the 1970s,
for example, is related to the government's policy
change that allowed its nationals to convert
sufficient yen into foreign currency to allow for
travel abroad. A related third feature is a strong
dependency on external market forces in terms of
both demand and supply. Overall, international
tourism is dominated in both supply and demand
by developed countries. That is, most international
tourists originate in and travel to developed
countries, while tourism to developing countries is
dominated by tourists from developed countries.
Economic policies and the state of the economy in
the developing countries, therefore, have great
impacts on destinations. For example, the United
States embargo on travel to Cuba has seriously
slowed the development of Cuban tourism; similarly,
variation in tourist arrivals in the Caribbean
in the 1980s was strongly correlated with the
economic recession in the United States. On the
supply side, the development of a major new
tourism sector in one destination may create an
intervening opportunity that seriously decreases
arrivals in another country; an example was the
rapid expansion of tourism in the Dominican
Republic in the 1980s and the resultant impacts on
other Caribbean destinations.
One result of the globalisation of tourism is that
host or destination nations see much of the
economic benefits of tourism lost to them through
high economic leakage and low economic multipliers
�see mulitiplier effect), to the advantage of
the nations in which the majority of the tourists
originate and of multinational firms. While most
international tourists are generated from and
received by developed countries, the impact of
the globalisation of tourism is most notable in
developing countries because of the impacts of
these firms on what Sklair �1994: 168±9) has
termed the six criteria for development effects:
linkages �imports and exports), foreign currency
earning, upgrading of local personnel, technology
transfer, conditions of work �wages, job security,