Behind the Smile, Second Edition: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism

1. Island Tourism

1. Island Tourism Tourism is travel dedicated to pleasure. Although the Oxford English Dictionary dates the term’s first appearance in print to 1811, the concept of traveling for leisure dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose elites traveled to exotic places around the Mediterranean (Honey 1999). The Romans used the Isle of Capri as a holiday destination in what may be the earliest example of island tourism. Some scholars argue that most early travel was unrelated to leisure; rather, it was aimed at satisfying other needs, such as pursuing opportunities for trade and commerce or seeking spiritual relief in making pilgrimages to sacred sites (Chambers 2000). Perhaps. But there can be little doubt that for many early travelers, such as Greeks and Romans visiting thermal baths, there was often a large element of leisure associated with the trip. We must not fall into the trap of believing that travelers always have a single motive. Even my academic colleagues manage to do some sightseeing while on trips to attend professional conferences. The earliest organized tourism that scholars have paid a good deal of attention to is the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century grand tour, in which Europe’s elite and some wealthy Americans leisurely traveled through Europe. Their tours invariably included visits to Paris and the major Italian cities—Rome, Venice, Florence, and Naples—with other destinations added on. The trip was often undertaken by young men to polish their education and to learn something of European history and culture, which was best found in the Mediterranean region. As Europe’s south had not yet been transformed by industrialization, the tour was viewed as a journey back in time as well as a search for the roots of Western civilization. Essayist Samuel Johnson remarked in the 1770s that “a man who has not been to Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected that a man should see” (Lofgren 1999). It was the grand tour that gave us the word “tourism.” Thomas Cook and the Package Tour British entrepreneur Thomas Cook is often credited with having started the modern-day organized tour. First a missionary and later an active temperance worker, Cook chartered a special train to carry passengers the seventeen miles from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance meeting in 1841. The success of this guided excursion and subsequent organized trips to temperance rallies led to the formation of a travel agency bearing his name. Soon Cook was organizing weekend excursions to British seaside resorts, where the mass arrival of “commoners” and their simple ways horrified the re- fined upper-class visitors, sending them in search of new leisure destinations (Lofgren 1999). By the late 1850s, Cook had gone continental , offering railway tours to southern Europe. Such tours were made possible by rapid innovations in transportation, notably the expansion of railroad and steamship companies, which originally had been built to serve the needs of Europe’s new manufacturing industries (Chambers 2000). Cook and his meticulously groomed staff of tour guides ferried hundreds of thousands of Englishmen, Americans, and Europeans to historical, cultural, and recreational sites. Cook’s tours reduced the amount of effort individual travelers had to spend in planning and undertaking their own holidays, and they were affordable to middle-class families. “It seemed as if Mr. Cook’s helpful agents were everywhere and always ready to arrange hotel accommodations, guided tours, and rail tickets or solve con- flicts whether in Naples or in Smyrna,” notes Ovar Lofgren (1999). His tours also made it possible for many middle-class women to travel, not only with their families but also with just female friends. In short order, Cook had become an institution, laying the foundation for mass travel by offering affordable prices and well-organized tours. His success encouraged a host of emulators on both sides of the Atlantic, and the organized tour became common. Some argue that Thomas Cook’s great contribution was not so much the package tour (before his time, successful pilgrimages had also required similar skills and organization) but his creation of new markets for 2 Island Tourism tourism. There was now a demand for travel opportunities where none had previously existed. Soon travel agencies, transportation companies, hotel chains, and entire governments began to mediate tourism in new ways. As Europe’s elites vacationed farther afield, some went to the Caribbean. The...