the Second World War, national travel publishing houses emerged in all developed countries, covering many parts of the world in their domestic language, for example Politiken in Denmark.19 Large international guide book publishers such as Fodor’s, Lonely Planet, Michelin and Rough Guides, have marketed guide books that cover most parts of the world.20 Fodor’s and Rough Guides are now part of two global media conglomerates, Bertelsmann and Pearson, respectively, just as other national guide book publishers are normally owned by large media corporations. This is part of the global consolidation process across any source of information and media.
A separate industry of maps is added to the industry of guide books.21 These maps build on the works of scientifically based national institutions that are responsible for exact and detailed mapping of the individual country and who publish maps of their own, too. Internationally leading map corporations are for example French Michelin.22 Just like guide books, maps have also been invaded by the Internet. Free maps of any global destination may be found on the Internet (for instance by Google) and this has made the map industry come up with new strategies and business models. Finally, electronic maps have found their way into cars, enabling the driver to guide him to his destination.
Current weather forecasting information is a natural part of all travel preparations as well as during the vacation itself. Tourists are informed by way of the Internet and other media that continuously are updated by international, national, and local weather report stations, based on meteorological organizations through out the world.23 Skiing resorts even provide webcams to inform tourists of weather and skiing conditions.
Travel
Transportation is the largest sub-sector of the tourism industry. Of all transportation means, private cars are the most widely used way of domestic transportation for American tourists as well as for West European tourists.24 In most cases, the tourist therefore uses his car instead of transportation companies. The expanding post-war car industry, petrol industry and freeway system have added much to the growing tourism industry. While cars dominate domestic transportation, airlines are the preferred way of international travelling. Less important are railways and ferries, and even more so busses. In economic terms, total global passenger transportation spending in 2005 was at least $2500 billion, of which the United States and Western Europe each shared one-third.25 Perhaps one-third of all transportation spending may be accounted to tourism.26 Most spending is attributed to cars, but an increasing share is spent on airlines. Because the car is a common daily transportation means, probably a higher share of spending on air transportation is attributed to tourism than private car transportation.
Although cars and airlines dominate passenger transportation, the large American and European national railway companies, such as Amtrak, Deutsche Bahn, French SNCF and British Arriva are all active suppliers of travel, including cooperative arrangements with other parts of the tourism value chain. For example, SNCF cooperates with the large international hotel and service chain Accor.27 Shipping companies, for example Stena Line and Scandlines cooperate with travel organizers and provide organized tours themselves.28 Worldwide, ferries annually transport more than 1 billion passengers, half the number of airlines.29 Cruise lines are a specialized kind of shipping company that encompass most parts of a vacation from beginning to end (see below). Compared to all these transportation industries, bus companies constitute a small business. Well known are the American Greyhound busses.
While the car industry is more indirectly a part of the tourism industry, airlines is clearly direct providers of tourism services.
The Airlines Industry
While most domestic tourists travel by car, international travel is dominated by airplanes, depending on the size of the country, too. Modern mass tourism depends on the enormous multitude of cars, airplanes and the industries that produce these transportation and energy means as well as a highly developed infrastructure allowing for fast and flexible movements around the world. The automobile industry and even more, the airplanes industry, is concentrated worldwide in a few global corporations, such as GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Peugeut/Citroën and Toyota and the two leading aircraft manufacturers American Boeing and West European Airbus. Transportation means producers are part of the tourism economy that work to make the tourism industry feasible and may be seen as impacts of the tourism industry, i.e. the tourism economy in a wider sense.
Whereas the global airplanes industry is highly concentrated within the Atlantic business community, the majority of the world’s countries have one or more airlines. For historic reasons, one airline dominates in most countries, i.e. the airline that used to monopolize national flights. Alone, USA, Japan and China have more than one large airline. In Western Europe, the core area of international tourism, aviation is still dominated by the previous monopoly companies, led by Lufthansa, British Airways, Air France, SAS, Alitalia and Iberia. Liberalization of the air transportation has only to a certain degree resulted in a consolidation process, mainly because governments have kept ownership of national airlines. Since the late 1990s, however, liberalization, has given rise to new and expanding discount airlines. Ryanair and EasyJet have developed into two of Europe’s largest airline companies, followed by other growing discount airlines such as Air Berlin. The USA aviation industry is also hit by the discount wave, Southwest Airlines being now one of the largest US airlines. The discount attack has threatened to ruin large and traditional airlines in United States and Western Europe. In order to survive, radical reforms have taken place in these airlines, cutting down costs by outsourcing and reorganizing from bureaucratic to flexible and market-oriented organizations.
FIGURE 10 Regional Revenues of the Global Airlines Industry in $bn, 2005
Source: ATW (2006). World Airline Financial Results 2005: www.atwonline.com.
The global airline industry is a gigantic business sector, including about nine hundred airline companies.30 Annually, they transport a continuously growing number of passengers that reached about 2 billion in 2005, served by seventeen hundred airports and a route net counted in millions of kilometers. Until the 1990s, the majority of the global airline traffic took place in or between North America, Western Europe, Japan and Oceania. Within the past decade, the Chinese development has made East Asian aviation expand enormously. The three leading regions of North America, Western Europe and East Asia and Oceania now comprise more than 90 percent of global aviation (Figure 10). Airlines are crucial to international tourism and an important economic sector with global annual revenues of $500 billion. More than half of this income is made by the world’s 20 largest airlines, such as Air France, Lufthansa, British Airways, SAS, and Ryanair in Western Europe, American Airlines, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and Continental Airlines in the US, and Japan Airlines and All Nippon in Japan.31
Even though airlines for historic reasons have been divided into many national companies, they have for decades cooperated on a global scale enabling passengers to fly easily to most parts of the world. As a consequence of standardized tickets and economic sharing organized via IATA (International Air Transport Association), with one ticket you can reach your goal by way of all airlines needed.32 Because discount airlines only sell tickets point-to-point they are excluded from this service.
Although the consolidation of airlines is moving on only slowly, liberalization and globalization have made airlines join in less binding ways. Three global alliances have emerged to achieve benefits of rationalization and improved customer services: Star Alliance, One World, and Sky Team.33 The leading members of Star Alliance include United Airlines, US Airways, Air Canada, Lufthansa, SAS, Varig, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airlines and South African Airways. Included in One World
