User:Tjw111/Tourism

Tourism is travel for pleasure or business; also the theory and practice of touring, the business of attracting, accommodating, and entertaining tourists, and the business of operating tours. The World Tourism Organization defines tourism more generally, in terms which go "beyond the common perception of tourism as being limited to holiday activity only", as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure and not less than 24 hours, business and other purposes". Tourism can be domestic (within the traveller's own country) or international, and international tourism has both incoming and outgoing implications on a country's balance of payments.

Tourism numbers declined as a result of a strong economic slowdown (the late-2000s recession) between the second half of 2008 and the end of 2009, and in consequence of the outbreak of the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus, but slowly recovered until the COVID-19 pandemic put an abrupt end to the growth. The United Nations World Tourism Organization estimated that global international tourist arrivals might decrease by 58% to 78% in 2020, leading to a potential loss of US$0.9–1.2 trillion in international tourism receipts.

Globally, international tourism receipts (the travel item in balance of payments) grew to US$1.03 trillion (€740 billion) in 2005, corresponding to an increase in real terms of 3.8% from 2010. International tourist arrivals surpassed the milestone of 1 billion tourists globally for the first time in 2012, emerging source markets such as China, Russia, and Brazil had significantly increased their spending over the previous decade.

Global tourism accounts for c. 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Emissions as well as other significant environmental and social impacts are not always beneficial to local communities and their economies. For this reason, many tourist development organizations have begun to focus on sustainable tourism in order to mitigate the negative effects caused by the growing impact of tourism. The United Nations World Tourism Organization emphasized these practices by promoting tourism as part of the Sustainable Development Goals, through programs like the International Year for Sustainable Tourism for Development in 2017, and programs like Tourism for SDGs focusing on how SDG 8, SDG 12 and SDG 14 implicate tourism in creating a sustainable economy.

Tourism has reached new dimensions with the emerging industry of space tourism as well as the current industry with cruise ships, there are many different ways of tourism. Another potential new tourism industry is virtual tourism.

Space tourism
The space market has been around since 19790, however, there has been a limited amount of orbital space tourism, with only the Russian Space Agency providing transport on its Soyuz and the Chinese Shenzhou being the only two spacecrafts suitable for human travel. In April 2001, Dennis Tito, a customer of the Russian Soyuz became the first tourist to visit space. In May 2011, Virgin Galactic launched its SpaceShipTwo plane that allows people to travel 2 hours space at the advertised price of $200,000 per seat. A challenge that the commercial space tourism industry faces is to be able to have fundings from private investments needed to lower the cost of access to space in addition to being able to encourage both private and public sector support to increase capacity to allow commercial passengers. With space tourism still being new concept, there are many factors that needs to be considered for the industry. From its actual demand to its risk factor to its liabilities and insurance issues, there are still a lot of research that needs to be conducted. A 2010 report into space tourism anticipated that the industry is expected to grow by 18% - 26% per year during 2020 to 2030.

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic lock-downs, travel bans, and a substantial reduction in passenger travel by air and sea contributed to a sharp decline in tourism activity. The World Tourism Organization (WTO) reported a 70% decrease in international travel in 2020, where 165 of 217 worldwide destinations completely stopped international tourism by April 2020. Since every country imposes different travel restrictions, it makes traveling plans complicated and often too difficult to figure out, thus the willingness to travel for the general population decreases. It is estimated that the United Staes lost 147 billion U.S. dollars in revenue from tourism between January and October of 2020. Spain had the next highest loss of revenue at around 46.7 billion U.S dollars, and countries in Africa collectively lost about 55 billion dollars during April and June of 2020.

Negative Impacts
Nearly all sectors within the tourism industry were significantly impacted by the pandemic. Airlines had large losses of revenue due to reduced number of passenger with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimating airline revenue loss to be around $314 billion in 2020. There was a 80% reduction of flights compared to the year 2019. In the food industry, many restaurants had to close which caused a ripple-effect to its related industries such as food production, farming, shipping, etc. As for the hotel industry, by June 2020 most of the hotels rooms were empty throughout the United States of America.

Positive Impacts
Virtual tourism is an emerging market that is popularized as an alternative solutions to in person tourism during the pandemic. Since many places like museums want to restrict crowdedness, virtual tours are set up to still provide visitors the experience without posing any health risks. This creates new business models and provide new and inventive opportunities for the tourism industry. However, there is fear that virtual tourism cannot provide the same sensation for people if those activity were done in person.