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E A R LY T O U R I S M B U S I N E S S E S 9

Sunday became a true day of rest, with factories closed and workers not having to tend
crops and animals on a seven-day-a-week basis. This meant that one day a week could be
available for rest or recreation – excursionism, the less-than-twenty-four-hour variant of
tourism, became a possibility. In many countries there was a legal imperative to give
people guaranteed leisure time. In the UK an 1871 Act established Bank Holidays and
within two decades many cities and towns had established formal half-day closing, and the
1901 Factory Act gave six days’ holiday a year to women and young people.

Sufficient earnings to be able to spend money on holidays

This arose in a broader social and particularly economic context. In the late Victorian
and Edwardian eras there was a growth in a movement for extending recreational activ-
ity in the fresh air, and this resulted in the provision of ‘holiday camps’ where such
activity could be undertaken at affordable prices. Most such activity was, however, on a
non-commercial basis. The increasing wealth of nations began to reflect itself in the
increasing economic wealth of their citizens. Again there was often a legal imperative,
for example the 1938 Holidays with Pay Act in the UK.

Cheap and easy means of transport

This manifested itself first in excursionism through the possibility of cheap transport by
boat – Londoners were able to travel cheaply to the new resorts of Margate and Ramsgate
in North Kent, for example, which began to grow from the 1820s. The next significant
development came with the opening of railways. The first ‘inter-city’ route in the UK was
opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Within the next twenty years most of
today’s rail network had been built. Although Thomas Cook is often credited with running
the world’s first railway excursion, the railway excursion was, in fact, an invention of the
then private railway companies themselves. The significance of Thomas Cook’s first organ-
ised excursion was that he was the first to establish a commercial tourism product based
on the transport infrastructure which already existed. For over a century the railway not
only provided the transport infrastructure for most tourism but it was also responsible for
the growth of resorts such as Bournemouth and the Cornish Riviera.
After the Second World War, expectations of international holidays were raised, and
the emergence of jet transport, notably in the form of the Boeing 707, opened up the
possibility of cheap flights of reasonable duration from Northern Europe to the
Mediterranean and from the industrial heartland of the North East of the United States
to Florida, for example.

Commercial organisations producing and marketing tourism products

Although Thomas Cook and his son John Mason Cook were pioneers in developing
guided tours (they were the first tour operators as we recognise them today), they
catered not for the mass tourist but for the natural successors to the Grand Tourists. In
the UK, the Regent Street Polytechnic was a pioneer tour operator and travel agent,
organising overseas tours as early as 1889, and its Polytechnic Touring Association
eventually becoming the ‘Poly’ of Lunn Poly, now part of the international TUI Group.
In the 1930s the ‘holiday camp’, an all-inclusive operation with all entertainment
provided as well as board and lodging, became the major feature of mass tourism in the
UK. The entrepreneurs who spearheaded this movement were once household names –
Billy Butlin and Fred Pontin, for example.
The major emergence of large national tour operators and travel agents began imme-
diately after the Second World War. The first major player in Europe was Club
Mediterranée, with its Belgian founder, Gerard Blitz, operating his first holiday village in
Majorca in 1950. Its early holiday villages were based on very simple accommodation,
with a back-to-nature feel, but under the direction of Gilbert Trigano the company has
grown to become a global player, with a variety of tourism products including ski holi-
days and cruises (Vichas, 1994).