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 flights broke through at the same time as jet airlines and mass air transportation in the 1960s. Just like American hotel chains, the tour operators mass produced identical products at low costs and prices, according to the predominant Fordistic way of organizing business activities at that time. Two-thirds of the world charter traffic took place in Western Europe compared to just one-third in the United States. This trend continued and expanded during the 1970s and the 1980s when charter flights constituted one-third of total international air transportation. In Western Europe, Spain was the most popular destination of charter tourism, while the Caribbean and Hawaii occupied that position in the US. A third but smaller wave of tourists crossed the Atlantic.
Even though mass tourism developed differently at the two major markets of the world, both were managed in the same way. Both produced the same services to an undifferentiated group of mass tourists. Economies of scale and standardization were achieved by way of hotel branding in the United States and vacation branding in Western Europe. In the US, the hotel brands were, for example, Holiday Inn and Hilton Hotels, while the leading European tour operators included Nouvelle Frontiers in France, Thomson Holidays in UK, Jahn Reisen in Germany, and Tjaereborg Rejser and Spies Rejser in Denmark. Mass production was achieved by way of large airlines and hotels corporations in the United States and the enormous flight and hotel buying power of package tour operators in Western Europe.
Customized Tourism
Since the 1990s, several factors have radically changed the preconditions of world tourism. The world economy has globalized and liberalized, creating a global division of labor and accelerating economic growth and prosperity. Mass production of consumer goods at lowest possible costs is no longer the driving force of business, although productivity is rising more than ever and enabling radical price cuts. Nowadays, people want customized products that adapt to a dynamic age and individual lifestyles and because of globalization and economic growth consumer alternatives are bigger than ever. To meet these changing demands, companies have to change fundamentally from supply-driven to demand-driven organizations and products must be differentiated according to changing demands.
The transformation of business was accompanied and driven by a globalization of competition and markets that created dramatic economic growth and changing conditions of competition and consumption. To stay in business, companies had to organize on a global scale. Economies of scale did not disappear, they were just woven into a global network like system of interrelated organizations. Inside this network, an increasing number of industries emerged and eventually, each industry came to be dominated by a handful of corporations. The revolutionary breakthrough and accelerating developments of information and communication technologies since the 1990s created the tools needed to make globalization come true. Furthermore, the universal digitalization of business and any other social activity brought to life new kinds of goods, services, communications, and business combinations. Especially, the Internet set a new standard that really gave the customer the upper hand and created a buyer’s market.
Hand in hand with the business and technology revolutions that have developed since the late 20th century, radical social and cultural changes have taken place. Increased wealth, higher educational levels, a social dissolution of traditional relations and norms, huge information and communication potentials of the digital age, all this has contributed to bringing about a more individual lifestyle. People want to differentiate according to their personality and will no longer accept to be an anonymous member of a group or the masses. They want more quality in life, too, and each person is eager to decide for himself what is good for him.
As an integrated part of globalized business and individualized markets, the tourism industry was forced to reorganize and adapt their strategies to this changing world. The supply-driven pre-1990 mass tourism had to be customized according to the individual and upgraded demands of new and much more critical and demanding customers.
Modern Tourists
Pre-1990 mass tourists were homogeneous and predictable. They followed the same line along the whole vacation. They felt secure by travelling in numbers, and they took vacations where everything was prepaid and prearranged. Present-day tourists are different. They are spontaneous and unpredictable. They do not follow the same predictable lines either in travel or stay. They purchase different services in different price categories during the same trip.