Final Essay - Freya

Tourism is travels for the purposes of leisure and business. In this day and age, international tourism has become an important industry in the world trade, and this trend is still continuing to rise. A recent survey made by the World Tourism Organization showed that the total export revenue of international tourism reached 946 billion dollars in 2008(WTO, 2010). Yet it is controversial about whether this booming industry is fortunate or not in terms of development, human beings hold various perspectives. Some of them believe that it promotes understanding between countries and development of countries, while the others argue that it only brings discord and damage. Personally, I believe that there are more merits than demerits generated by it.

Granted, tourism redounds to communication between the tourist and local communities. To begin with, it provides an opportunity of direct contact with different cultures. As Saint Augustine once said:” the world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page,” touring is a multi-sensory experience which other entertainment tools cannot bring (tourists can not only see the beautiful scenes and hear the sound, as they do with their laptop, iphone, but also touch the real things and even smell). What’s more, the empirical knowledge obtained during the real journey can help wipe out errors inherent in many people thoughts. For example, taking a trip of China can surely bring a divergent and new apperception of what not every Chinese could do Chinese Kong Fu. Conversely, most of them like doing morning exercises, such as jogging and dance.

In addition, tourism continuously accelerates the vitality of local economy, not only through directly visible consuming but also functioning in indirect aspects (Rose, J. 2002). It is obvious that there will be a rise in the local labor ratio on account of more opportunities of employment in retails, department stores and transportation, etc. In the meantime, the tax revenue also will be augmented rapidly for the local government to re-build and optimize the native infrastructure. The most important point here is that international tourism can strengthen and increase mutual trust in distinct regions.

Nonetheless, tourism also produces some problems. Nowadays, the modem economy drives the pure culture into commoditization due to attracting tourists as many as possible (Smith, M. K. 2006). Thus the modification of indigenous heritage makes everything seem fake to the visitors, while the coming of tourists may be regarded as an invasion upon the lives by many native residents. Moreover, colossal touring population may put a strain on the already stretched resource, and even seriously damage the ecological equilibrium. It signifies that excessive exploration and a lot of indecomposable rubbish led behind by touring people constitute chronic and destructive environmental disaster to tourist spots.

In the final analysis, there is no doubt that tourism brings an amount of chances to different areas in both communication of culture and sustainable development of economy. However, it may also spawn extremely bad influence on the environment and local society. Like a double-edged sword, humankind should use it in a right way, bringing its strengths into full play and diminishing its weaknesses to the least extent. Shortly, as far as I am concerned, it is positive that there are fruitful advantages of tourism currently.

Reference:
Smith, M. K. & Robinson, M. (2006), Culture Tourism in a Changing World, An Imprint of Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Rose, J. (2002), Tourism, http://www.idebate.org/
WTO, http://www.unwto.org/