Page 17 - Tourism The International Business

1. Tourism: its historical development

Exhibit 5: Aboard the Orient Express. (Courtesy

Britrail Travel International, Inc.)

The heyday of the railroads lasted approximately 100 years, from the 1830s to the 1930s. Railroads in the United
States could not meet the challenge of the airlines, which offered speed over long distances, or buses that provided
luxury coaches over shorter distances. Railroads in some cases sought to dissuade people from using rail transport.
They felt there was much more profit to be made from hauling freight. Use of rail tracks by long, heavy and slow
freight trains means that American passenger trains can never reach the speeds of European and Japanese trains.
Tracks are in such poor shape that speed is severely limited.
Water travel. Travel by water naturally preceded rail transport, but it was not until the mid-nineteenth
century that the ocean liners came into prominence. Sir Samuel Cunard inaugurated the first regular steamship

service between Britain and the United States in 1840. By the 1890s the trip was done in six days.
Just as the automobile and the airplane led to the decline of train travel, so too the airplane led to the demise of
the ocean liner. In its peak year of 1957, over one million passengers crossed the ocean on liners. The following year
more people crossed the Atlantic by plane than by ship. Between 1960 and 1975, passenger departures from New
York fell from 500,000 a year to 50,000. Transatlantic travel by liner has almost disappeared.
Existing ships were refitted for cruising, and then newer, lighter cruise ships were built as the demand
increased. The worldwide cruise market is well over two million passengers strong. Yet the potential is much larger.

Less than 10 per cent of the US population has ever taken a cruise. Cruising is much more of a vacation experience
than a mode of transportation.
Travel by road. Henry Ford's Model T of 1908 started a revolution in American tourism. Destination
development was tied to the means of transportation. From the early posting houses to the railroad hotels and
resorts and steamship ports, wherever transportation brought people was where the destinations grew.
Development of tourism was concentrated in those areas. But the arrival of the automobile changed all that. Now
people began to travel wherever they wanted on a road system that criss-crossed the country. Development became
more dispersed rather than being concentrated in a few places. The benefits of tourism were being spread more
widely.

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