people access to consumer goods that were inaccessible to previous generations, including upgraded housing, clothing, food, health care and education. Everything has a price, and in this case it was a thorough standardization of products and ways of life in general. During the first half of the 20th century, this system expanded slowly. The unleashing of the potentials of Fordism and governmental regulations in the early post-war decades created, however, a welfare society that had never been experienced before.
Relaxed international trade restrictions in the Western world as well as the systematic application of science and technology and governmental intervention to secure over-all welfare, caused rapid changes in many aspects of post-war Western societies. Being born under the modest pre-1950 life conditions, the early post-war generation eagerly grabbed the huge consumption opportunities of affluent societies. That everything was standardized and everybody treated uniformly did not bother this first post-war generation, because to them affluence came as a revelation and was Paradise on Earth. Furthermore, they were not used to international travels and therefore preferred the comfort and security of package tours. Their children, on the other hand, took welfare for granted and during the 1960s and 1970s, they began to protest against the uniform, authoritative and materialistic nature of modern societies. In addition, a continuous economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s indicated that the era of Fordism had exhausted its potentials and called for radical reforms. But until c.1990, the fundaments of mass production and consumption remained unchanged and dominated the practice of business, governments and consumption behavior.
On this background, modern mass tourism started in the 1950s and broke through during the 1960s and 1970s.11 The age of mass tourism lies between 1960 and 1990. Package tour operators transported millions of charter tourists from cold Northern Europe to warm Southern Europe. Along the Mediterranean coastline, the pale northerners allowed the sun to tan their skin, giving them a welcome break from a dull everyday and working life. Spain, especially, became a cheap and popular destination, followed by Greece. In the US, people frequented the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as the Caribbean and Hawaii.
Mass tourism stemmed from the following factors:
- The post-war economic boom and wealth
- Still longer vacations, particularly in Western Europe
- Growing international trade
- The revolutionary development of air transportation, the building of numerous airports, communication and computer systems, regular and fast domestic and international routes in the US, Western Europe, across the Atlantic and eventually around the world
- The airlines’ establishment of computerized reservation systems and cheap group tickets for charter trips
- The general distribution of cars
- The establishment of international hotel chains
- The development of a large package-tour industry, taking care of transportation and accommodation for millions of people.
The main actors of the post-war tourism industry were airlines, hotel chains and package-tour companies. Railways, passenger ships and bus firms, electronic cards and car rent companies as well as restaurants and attractions were secondary parties in the large mass tourism industry. Without modern airlines and car industries, the new basic infrastructure and computer technology and the natural and cultural attractions of destination countries, modern mass tourism would not have existed. Except for the European package tour operators, American companies took the lead in all other fields of the international tourism industry.
Mass Tourism in USA
The United States and Western Europe dominated post-war mass tourism. Mass tourism developed differently in these two regions, however. In the US, hotel chains and airlines were the main actors in developing mass tourism, while the package-tour industry and airlines stood behind Europe’s mass tourism. American hotel chains spread around the world in the wake of American businesses and tourists, so that Americans everywhere might feel at home under similar conditions. Franchising made it possible for hotel chains to produce standardized hotel products by reproducing buildings, inventory, feeding, services and management methods, which allowed for economies of scale in purchasing, distribution and booking systems. The fast growth of this franchising principle was an important factor behind the development of American mass tourism.
Unlike the nationally divided Western Europe, the large American continent contained almost every kind of nature and culture, except for the extensive pre-industrial culture of European cities. This made the Americans spend their holidays at home to a much higher degree than the Europeans. Furthermore, a highly developed freeway system, short vacations and tremendous business travelling activities throughout the large continent conduced to the fact that a large domestic American tourism by far overshadowed foreign travel. As a consequence, the car was the preferred transportation means in the United States, whereas European package tours always included a charter flight. American hotels did not arrange package-tours like the European travelling companies did. Instead, motels were built along freeways and city hotels that might be easily reached by car. The package-tour industry therefore never reached the same size as in Europe.
Behind hotel chains and package tour companies, the large American airlines and their booking systems played a decisive role in developing tourism and the tourism industry. Without them mass tourism would never have existed. By way of mergers, American Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines (merging with Pan Am in 1991) dominated completely American air transportation until the liberalization of the 1990s. Airlines did more than fly. They invested in other links of the travel industry’s value chain, including travel agencies, hotels, catering, banking, insurance and car rental. In this way, the American airlines contributed much to the vertical and horizontal integration that marked the American travel and tourism industry. They provided the services for mass tourism, including cheap charter tickets and were an important driver behind the industrial growth. First and foremost, the airlines controlled the large computer-based booking systems that became a nucleus for tourism developments.
Mass Tourism in Western Europe
In Western Europe, mass tourism was based on the rise of a large package tour industry, charter flights, hotel constructions and the development of sunny mass-consuming destinations along the Mediterranean coasts. The package-tour companies organized travel that included transportation, accommodation and extra services such as sightseeing and entertainment. They were sold as a whole package, and by way of mass purchase of charter tickets from airlines or through their own airlines and hotels at destinations, the operators were able to cut prices considerably. Such package tours arranged by tour operators expanded enormously in Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s and to some degree in the 1980s.
In Western Europe, the tour operators played the same role for tourism as hotel chains in the US. By developing cheap package tours, they staged and drove mass tourism. They offered the same kind of security and safety as the American hotel chains by selecting rooms and assuming full responsibility for delivering the promised vacation. In particular, package tours were sold to North Europeans in Scandinavia, UK, Germany and the Netherlands, who longed for the warmth of sunny Southern Europe. The package tours enabled millions of north Europeans to travel in a way that pre-war generations never had the opportunity to do. The reason why packed tours broke through in Western Europe, unlike the US, is also that the European wage earners had much longer vacations than their American counterparts and therefore were able to take longer vacations.
Charter flights were the precondition for cheap package tours. Charter tickets were linked to certain routes and bought at discount prices long in advance of the summer vacation, allowing for a hundred percent load factor. Charter
