Outlook: Tourism Trends in the coming decades

Trends beyond the control of the Tourism Industry:

- Demographic Trends:
 (Slowing) Growth of world population

Global population clock: http://math.berkeley.edu/~galen/popclk.html

The population of the World in January 1957: 2,850,000,000 (app.)

The population of the World in January 1987: 5,025,000,000 (app.)

The population of the World in January 2010: 6,865,000,000 (app.)

1980s highest increase rate of human beings per year, more than 80 million/year

Current growth rate app. 70 million per year (eq. app. 2 per second)

Example Sri Lanka: Malaria prevention preceeds modernization

  Growing percentage of old people in industrialized countries between 2010 and 2050

 France and India as of 1984

Why is an aging society a problem?

- Social Trends:
 Urbanization

 Women liberation

 Cultural diversity within growing standardization

- Economic Trends:
 Globalization

 More even distribution of wealth, even so the very rich become richer fastest

- Political Trends:
 Freedom (including freedom of travel) increases but slowly     

 Safety hyped up as issue

- Ecological Trends:
 Increase in Pollution, decrease in Biodiversity

 Climate Change

Trends within the control of the Tourism Industry:

- Changes in demand structure
 Travelling as part of a taken-for-granted, lifelong activity
 Relaxation -> Experience
 Two weeks holiday -> City Breaks and Sabbatical Year Trips
 Multioptional, sophisticated customers
 Multi-cultural customers, tourism stops being a one-way traffic
 Asia becoming the biggest source market for international travel

- Changes in supply structure
 Increased diversity of offers
 Further advances in IT
 Energy-saving measures

 Risks:
 - Environmental degradation
 - End of cheap transport because of lack of cheap energy sources 
 - Swing of customer demand towards "inner" leisure travel and virtual business travel