Rethinking tourism: where is it going and how will it impact people and planet? A personal perspective
Posted on May 22, 2025
An essay
By:
Peter E. Tarlow, president of the World Tourism Network and Tourism & More, Inc.
The Canadian author Robert McKay quotes the late 20th century Austrian-American author and teacher stating, “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window” McKay also reminds us that Ducker taught his students: “[1] “The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.” Both statements build on an old Rabbinic statement that after the death of the latter (Biblical) prophets Chagai, Zechariah, and Malachi, “the spirit of prophecy departed”[2]. Although we would be wise not to confuse Biblical prophecy with futuristic predictions both Ducker and the Talmud teach us an important lesson, it is foolish at best and dangerous at most to predict with certainty what the future holds.
Despite this reality humans seek not only to predict the future, but to control it. Every culture has superstitions that its practitioners believe if followed (or not followed) will bring about success, or cause disaster. Gaming cities such as Macau and Las Vegas survive on the belief in “Lady luck” and the performance of specific rituals that will influence the future. Belief that we can control, or at least predict the future is so ingrained in human nature that there are whole genres, and at least pseudo-sciences, based on futurism.
Futurism is big business, although rarely do we go back to previous predictions to determine how accurate they were. Future predictions encompass everything from weather predictions to political rhetoric. Politicians around the world tend to predict doomsday scenarios if the other party is elected and almost nirvana should they be elected. Climate change predictions, most of which so far have been incorrect, are a mixture of religious prophecy and science. Despite these “scientific” predictions, based on mathematical models, the world did not freeze by the end of the 20th century, nor did it end by the beginning of 2023. What is fascinating about futurism is that human beings want to believe that we can predict or control the future. For this reason, if ten predictions are made and only one of these ten turns out to have been accurate, we emphasize the one correct prediction and ignore the other nine.
As noted there is a whole field dedicated to predicting the future. The “Futurist Magazine”,[3] in which this author has also published, dedicates itself to describing a world that is yet to be born. There is also the dystopian futuristic literary classics with books such as George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (published in 1932), and Fahrenheit 451 (published in 1953). All these, and many more, books portrayed life, or death, at a future point in history.
Tourism science/studies are no different than many of the other academic fields as it too seeks to define trends and understand the future. What makes overall tourism futuristic predictions especially difficult is that there is no one single travel and tourism industry. Instead, what we call tourism is an amalgamation of multiple industries that placed into a single category. Tourism is a multifaceted composite industry. This multilayered reality is reflected in its name, “travel and tourism”. Despite its complex nature travel and tourism scholars and professionals also know within the industry certain universal principles also hold true. Despite our cultural, linguistic, religious, and geographic differences human beings have many of the same wants and needs. For example, no matter what form of tourism we consider we know that the public desires fair prices, good customer service and a sense of hospitality. The best principles of good tourism transcend cultures, languages, nations, and religious affiliation and time. In that sense tourism is not linear but circular and what was might well be what is or shall be.
Because much of travel and tourism is based on expendable income and is voluntary in nature tourism professionals spend a great deal of time contemplating future tourism trends. To successfully predict trends means economic success and to fail to note trends can result in economic disaster. This is the reason that tourism professional dedicate both time and money to understanding trends and using statistical analysis to create future predictions. Although a great deal of time and money is spent on understanding future trends, less effort has been placed into the interaction between the industry and the world in which it lives. What we do know is that the travel and tourism industries will change, what we know less is what their impact will be on both human race and the planet’s climate and ecology. Looking at the future of tourism then requires a deal of humility and the realization that the farther-out our predictions are the higher the probability that what we predict might not come to be. For this reason, it is necessary to divide our glimpse into the future into short-range and long-range predictions.
As a general rule, travel and tourism cannot be separated from the world context in which it operates. To begin to think about the industry’s future we have to understand its history and its present and then interpose these tourism concepts on the realities in which the industry lives and shall continue to live.[4] It cannot be emphasized enough that the travel and tourism industry does not exist in a political, social, environmental, public health, or economic vacuum. Tourism scholars and professionals must be keenly aware that what occurs throughout the world touches every aspect of their industry.
For example, the year 2022 saw a boom in the tourism industry. After what seemed to be eternal lockdowns, the public was eager to travel. This boom caused a decline in customer service and multiple price rises. The 2022 travel and tourism boom caused increased profits but also caused or was impacted by:
- Tourism and travel labor shortages
- On-going inflation
- Political instability
- The potential for a new health crisis or a new form of Covid-19
Each of these above factors impacted the world of travel and tourism. How these factors will play out in the short and long term is of course unknown and we can do nothing more than make educated guesses.
The Near Future/“ближайшее будущее
The Russians call the nations that border them “the near abroad: “(ближнее зарубежье / blizhnee zarubezhe”). When referring to those events that border our current reality we might transform the term “near abroad” into “ближайшее будущее – blizhaysheye budushcheye (the near future)”. These are events that almost touch our current reality, but as history has often taught us, nothing is ever certain until it has occurred.
We can be certain that although travel will accommodate itself to new realities. We can be certain that as long as there are human beings there will be a desire to see what is on the other side of the mountain, river of field. Recorded travel is ancient. From the time that Cain set out from the Garden of Eden until today travel is a part of the human condition. In fact, we might read the entire Hebrew Bible as a giant travel log, and a journey not only through the geography of the Middle East but also through time. We can see the Bible’s first five books as the story of travel, from Ur to Israel to Egypt and then back to again to Israel. In the twenty-first century the need to travel became obvious during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Eric Weiner of National Geographic points to the need to travel when quotes Christopher Ryan and writes: “It is not natural for us to be this sedentary. Travel is in our genes. For most of the time our species has existed, “we’ve lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers moving about in small bands of 150 or fewer people,” writes Christopher Ryan in Civilized to Death. This nomadic life was no accident. It was useful. “Moving to a neighboring band is always an option to avoid brewing conflict or just for a change in social scenery,” says Ryan. Robert Louis Stevenson put it more succinctly: “The great affair is to move.”[5] Although the Covid-19 pandemic exasperated the desire to travel, the human need to move beyond the narrow confines of our homes was understood long before the pandemic. The New York University Dispatch noted in 2018 that travel is essential for good mental health and then stated: “Traveling gives us exposure to other cultures. If an individual has remained in their home time for their entire life, it would make it hard to completely understand the struggles and celebrations of other regions and countries. One country can be vastly different from one side to the other. The dialects differ, food, local music, and the terrain can all be different from one place to another. There are different languages and ways of communicating all over the world. Exposure to these things allows us to become open-minded and understand that though we are different, it is our similarities as humans that brings us together. Traveling is great for global humanity.” [6]
Mass modern travel and tourism is not only perhaps the world’s largest industry but also one of its youngest. Prior to World War II there was travel, but for the most part travel existed only for the upper classes. Members of the lower classes traveled as soldiers or merchants, but these often-forced trips were unpleasant and could be deadly. It is not by accident that the word for travel is derived from the French word “travail” meaning work. Modern mass travel as an affordable luxury has existed for less than a century.
There is no doubt that the first part of the twenty-first century’s third decade was dominated by the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic came closer than ever before in bring travel and tourism to an almost complete halt. The United Nation’s World Tourism Organization summarized the pandemic’s impact not only on tourism but on related industries writing:
- As many as 100 million direct tourism jobs are at risk, in addition to sectors associated with tourism such as labour-intensive accommodation and food services industries that provide employment for 144 million workers worldwide. Small businesses (which shoulder 80% of global tourism) are particularly vulnerable.
- Women, who make up 54% of the tourism workforce, youth and workers in the informal economy are among the most at-risk categories.
- No nation will be unaffected. Destinations most reliant on tourism for jobs and economic growth are likely to be hit hardest: SIDS, Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and African countries. In Africa, the sector represented 10% of all exports in 2019.”[7]
As noted throughout this paper, travel and tourism does not exist in isolation. Rather the travel and tourism industry is both affected by and affects multiple parts of society. The UN Secretary General’s report reflects how a downturn in tourism impacted other parts of the world’s social and economic ecology. The report notes that:
The sudden fall in tourism cuts off funding for biodiversity conservation. Some 7% of world tourism relates to wildlife, a segment growing by 3% annually.
- This places jobs at risk and has already led to a rise in poaching, looting and in consumption of bushmeat, partly due to the decreased presence of tourists and staff.
- The impact on biodiversity and ecosystems is particularly critical in SIDS and LDCs. In many African destinations, wildlife accounts for up to 80% of visits, and in many SIDS, tourism revenues enable marine conservation efforts.
- Several examples of community involvement in nature tourism show how communities, including indigenous peoples, have been able to protect their cultural and natural heritage while creating wealth and improve their wellbeing. The impact of COVID-19 on tourism places further pressure on heritage conservation as well as on the cultural and social fabric of communities, particularly for indigenous people and ethnic groups.
- For instance, many intangible cultural heritage practices such as traditional festivals and gatherings have been halted or postponed, and with the closure of markets for handicrafts, products and other goods, indigenous women’s revenues have been particularly impacted.
- 90% of countries have closed World Heritage Sites, with immense socio-economic consequences for communities reliant on tourism. Further, 90% of museums closed and 13% may never reopen.[8]
On the other side of the ledger, in November of 2022 the journal “Statista” reported: “the financial repercussions of the virus manifested later that year as the total travel and tourism spending more than halved between 2019 and 2020. Prior to the pandemic, leisure spending on travel and tourism across the globe amounted to nearly five trillion U.S. dollars and that figure fell to 2.33 trillion in 2020. There was also significant employment loss in the global travel and tourism sector in 2020 as an estimated 62 million people in this sector lost their jobs. By 2021, the sector had recouped some of its financial losses with a slight increase in the total gross domestic product (GDP) generated by travel and tourism worldwide”.”[9]
Since then, tourism has recovered but the pandemic’s impact can be measured not only in numbers of people traveling but in the service provided by the industry.
Travelers across the board have noted a decline in customer service. There are numerous reasons for this perceived decline and coupled with inflation and travel “sticker shock”, the possibility that the tourism industry might face future difficulties is highly probable. The pandemic caused many of those working in the service and travel industries, from hotel housekeeping to restaurants’ servers, and from airline pilots to groundskeepers to be laid off. Many of these people simply chose not to return to their original jobs and this means that the quality and frequency of service has declined. At the same time, fuel and food costs have risen. What this means is that the consumer is now paying more for less. For the time being consumers seem willing to pay more for less, but how long the novelty of renewed travel will last is an open question. Some tourism professionals do not believe that it will impact the industry. For example, Karen Gilchrist reporting from the 2023 ITB Travel Conference (Berlin) quoted WTTC president Julia Simpson as stating: “Inflation and higher living costs may be weighing on consumers’ wallets, but there’s one area where many are unwilling to cut back: travel. Almost one third (31%) of travelers said that they intend to spend more on travel this year than they did in 2022, according to a recent report from the World Travel and Tourism Council and booking site Trip.com.
That’s after the vast majority (86%) of respondents said last year that they were upping their 2019 travel budgets.
Consumers are “spending more on travel than any other experience,” Julia Simpson, president and CEO of the WTTC, said Monday at the opening of the ITB Berlin travel conference.”[10]
How long the public will tolerate poor service, multiple nuisance charges / add-on fees, and high prices is at the moment an open question. Tourism professionals, however, know that the public mode can be fickle and change rapidly and the travel and tourism industry might find travelers might seek new options. Ironically, many of these new options are also the result of the covid pandemic. For example, as the technology for virtual interpersonal interchanges improves business-people may find it equally efficient and a lot less uncomfortable to meet via the internet rather than travel to meetings. In a like manner, we are beginning to see families returning to the private cars for travel, even with higher gas prices, then pay inflated airline prices, deal with luggage fees and airport delays. The trend back to motor travel is especially noticeable for travel under 6 hours.
How will these current changes impact tourism and how will tourism impact the environment? Of course, no one can predict the future, but we do know that tourism uses a great deal of both energy and water. We can expect a future push for fissile fuels to be replaced by electricity. This change means that motor travel might become more frustrating unless electric grids can be updated, and a future reliable source of electricity can be created. It also can mean greater pollution as currently there are no good methods to dispose of large batteries. Additionally, unless the world can solve the lithium crisis (a raw material needed for the production of electrical batteries) we can expect large numbers of underpaid workers to live shorten lives as they mine for lithium.
- Despite the fact that approximately 70% of the earth is covered by oceans, the earth is currently facing a clean water crisis. Large parts of the tourism industry may face water rationing, the closing of sports facilities such as golf courses, and swimming pools.
- As tourism resources become ever scarcer and more expensive tourism staff training will become essential. This means that frontline personnel will need a greater amount of training and salaries will have to be such that the travel and tourism industries will be able to retain employees rather than seeing regular employee turnover.
- Safety and security will need to be emphasized. Currently the industry is dominated by people trained in marketing, but even the best marketers cannot compensate for the fear of travel. Tourism suffers from not only political instability but also crime and acts of terrorism. The industry has basically given nothing more than lip service to safety and security concerns that range from bio-security to tourism police training. If tourism professionals forget that in most cases travel and tourism are choices made by the consumer, who is using his or her expendable income and time, the industry will become part of social problems rather than part of the solutions.
What these challenges mean is that tourism in the near future will continue to grow unless it can handle ecological problems, and adapt to economic and social changes than the industry may be like the symbolic ostrich, putting its collective head in the sand. Tourism will continue to provide large scale employment, especially for entry level personnel and on some levels it allows people from different parts of the world superficially to know each other. On the other hand, it must be emphasized that often visitors have little real interaction with local populations that are placed in a subservient role, poorly trained and poorly paid. Travel and tourism then must go beyond the marketing slogans and consider actions that lead to real human and ecological sustainability.
The More Distant Future
Until now we have looked at what we might call the near- future, that is tourism in the next decade. How travel will interact with the next centuries will, to a great extent, be impacted by humanity’s technological progress. Technology is moving at an ever-faster pace. For example, Madeleine Hillyer writing for the World Economic Forum has noted that: “Technology has changed major sectors over the past 20 years, including media, climate action and healthcare. The World Economic Forum’s Tecnology Pioneers, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary, gives us insight how emerging tech leaders have influenced and responded to these changes.”[11] She reminds us it was only a few decades ago, that the “dot-com” bubble burst and that cell phones usage was almost unknown. Put in another way, a man born in the last decades of the nineteenth century would have understood the main form of transportation to have been the horse and buggy. Yet within that man’s lifetime he would have witnessed men on the moon. Over the past 20 years we have come to understand the incredible power of the smartphone, almost everyone has access to social media, and entertainment choices are not only no longer local but now can be viewed in real time around the world.
We can then expect that travel and tourism will also change as technology progresses and A-I becomes an ever-more important part of our lives. Perhaps the biggest change will be that travel & tourism eventually will no longer be earth-bound. The beginnings of space tourism are already apparent. For example, a New York Times article notes that “Less than a year after Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson kicked off a commercial space race by blasting into the upper atmosphere within weeks of each other last summer, the global space tourism market is skyrocketing, with dozens of companies now offering reservations for everything from zero-pressure balloon trips to astronaut boot camps and simulated zero-gravity flights. But don’t don your spacesuit just yet. While the financial services company UBS estimates the space travel market will be worth $3 billion by 2030, the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to approve most out-of-this-world trips, and construction has not started on the first space hotel. And while access and options — not to mention launchpads — are burgeoning, space tourism remains astronomically expensive for most.”[12] The article then goes on to question how this new form of tourism will impact our solar system’s environment stating: “And as the industry grows, so perhaps will space travel’s impact on the environment. Not only do rocket launches have immense carbon footprints, even some stratospheric balloon flights have potentially significant implications: World View’s balloons are powered by thousands of cubic meters of helium, which is a limited resource.”
The tourism industry, if it is to thrive, will have to become a major player in such issues as its impact on climate and the environment, how it will deal with robotics and artificial intelligence (A-I). Although currently there is a great deal of emphasis on climate change theories, the real need is on environmental change. Tourism not only adds carbon to the world’s atmosphere but creates light pollution, stretches water resources and overtourism can become a major social and political burden. Assuming the earth continues to expand its population at a greater rate than its sustainable resources will allow, we can expect locales around the world to create travel taxes and limitations on the number of visitors that a place can absorb. Prior to the Covid pandemic the website “Responsible Tourism” wrote: “overtourism boils down to the simple fact of too many people visiting the same place at the same time and Venice is sadly a prime example. Some twenty million visitors flood in each year; on its busiest days, around 120,000 people visit this city which is home to just 55,000 permanent residents. Many of these tourists stick to the famous landmarks-the Rialto Bridge, St. Mark’s Square -further concentrating numbers into a tiny footprint. This (influx) damages Venice’s fragile buildings, strains its infrastructure, inhibits local people from going about their business, and frankly makes for a woeful visitor experience too. Nobody benefits, not even the tourists.” [13]
The same phenomena were felt not only in Europe but throughout the world. Furthermore, the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle of Quantum Physics teaches us that “Even the light physicists use to help them better see the objects they’re observing can influence the behavior of quanta. Photons, for example — the smallest measure of light, which have no mass or electrical charge — can still bounce a particle around, changing its velocity and speed”[14] If this is true in the quantum world we certainly can apply this principle to tourism and travel. Even in the case of careful people management the simple fact that visitors come to a location changes that location’s reality.
Conclusions
As stated at the beginning of this article, there is no certain way to know what the future will bring to the tourism industry nor how it will interact with society and the physical environment. In fact, we cannot even be certain where tourism will occur, only on our planet, within the other planets of our solar system or in the vastness of space. Science fiction predicts the latter, but only the unfolding of history will teach of the accuracy of future predictions. What we do know is that from the beginning of time, events do not occur in isolation and that travel and tourism will impact everything that it touches. Western languages tend to see the world as unidirectional, starting in the past and racing toward and unknown future. Semitic languages, such as Hebrew tend to see time as circular, pasts come after futures and future events can precede the past. Perhaps this is a more realistic way to see the impact of tourism on the world and the impact of world factors on tourism. What we do today not only is the summation of our past but also our future. It is impossible to make exact predictions on what tourism will be like in the near and distant future, what we do know is that humans will want to travel, to explore and to learn and this desire will interact not only with tourism but with the course of history.
[1] https://www.slaw.ca/2011/07/11/%E2%80%9Conly-a-fool-would-make-predictions%E2%80%94especially-about-the-future%E2%80%9D/ <accessed on April 10, 2023>
[2] Talmud, Yoma 9b, Sanhedrin 11a, Sotah 48b
[3] See The Futurist, Sept,-October 1992, Vol. 26, No. 5 and The Futurist (September – October edition Vol. 36, No. 5 pp.48-51
[4] Throughout this essay there is the unstated assumption that human life and the planet Earth will continue to survive and that humanity will not self-destruct.
[5] Weiner, E. National Geographic: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/why-travel-should-be-considered-an-essential-human-activity <accessed April 13, 2023>
[6] The NYU Dispatch , July 31, 2018. https://wp.nyu.edu/dispatch/2018/07/31/traveling-is-important-for-mental-growth-and-human-happiness/ <accessed on April 13, 2023>
[7] Secretary-General’s Policy Brief on Tourism and Covid-19: https://www.unwto.org/tourism-and-covid-19-unprecedented-economic-impacts <accessed April 14, 2023>
[8] Secretary-General’s Policy Brief on Tourism and Covid-19: https://www.unwto.org/tourism-and-covid-19-unprecedented-economic-impacts <accessed April 14, 2023>
[9] Statista, November 2022, https://www.statista.com/topics/6224/covid-19-impact-on-the-tourism-industry/ <accessed April 14, 2022>
[10] Gilchrist, Karen, CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/11/inflation-and-cost-of-living-crisis-are-not-stopping-people-from-traveling.html <April 14, 2023>
[11] Hillyer, M: https://www.weforum.org/communities/technology-pioneers-community <accessed April 16, 2023>
[12] The New York Times, May 7, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/travel/space-travel-tourism.html <accessed April 16, 2023>
[13] Euro News “Responsible Travel” September 19, 2021, https://www.responsiblevacation.com/copy/overtourism-in-venice <accessed April 16,2023>
[14] Clark, J “How Quantum Suicide Work” https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/science-questions/quantum-suicide2.htm <accessed April 16,2023>