For almost all of human history, travelling for pleasure was something only the very rich did, and even they mostly did it under some other pretext. The idea that an ordinary person might spend two weeks a year somewhere else, for enjoyment, with their wages continuing, is roughly a century old in most countries and considerably newer in many.
Every step of how that happened was contested at the time.
Pilgrimage came first
The oldest form of mass travel, and it had all the features of modern tourism except the admission that it was fun.
By the twelfth century, hundreds of thousands were moving along fixed routes to Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Canterbury and Jerusalem, with an infrastructure built entirely for them: hospices, waymarking, guidebooks listing which rivers were safe to drink, badges sold at each shrine, and a trade in relics whose authenticity was, at best, uneven.
Chaucer’s pilgrims are recognisably tourists — travelling in a group, telling each other stories, and only intermittently pious. The Camino still runs, and the modern walkers on it are not doing anything structurally new.
The Grand Tour
From the seventeenth century, wealthy young British and northern European men spent one to four years travelling to Paris, then Italy — Rome, Naples, Venice, Florence — accompanied by a tutor.
The stated purpose was education: classical antiquity, languages, art, and the acquisition of a certain polish. The actual content involved a great deal of drinking, gambling and the acquisition of things other than polish.
What it produced, besides a generation of aristocrats with strong opinions about Palladio, was the first tourist economy: guides, souvenir industries, copyists selling paintings of the ruins, and a market for the “view” as a commodity. Canaletto painted Venice for the British market. The word souvenir entered English through exactly this trade.
The seaside, and the railway
Sea bathing was invented as medicine. Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed immersion in cold seawater for a long list of complaints, and resorts grew up around the prescription — Scarborough, Brighton, Biarritz, Ostend.
What turned that into mass leisure was the railway. A train could move working people cheaply, and from the 1840s excursion trains ran from industrial cities to the coast. Blackpool, Coney Island, Ostend and Trouville all exist in their modern form because of a railway timetable.
Thomas Cook’s first excursion in 1841 was a temperance rally, and within thirty years he was running tours up the Nile. He invented the mechanisms — the hotel coupon, the pre-paid itinerary — that made travel possible for people who could not arrange it for themselves.
The reaction from established travellers was immediate and snobbish, and it has been repeated at every subsequent expansion.
Paid holidays had to be legislated
This is the part usually left out. The seaside excursion was a day trip because working people had no paid time off.
France introduced two weeks of paid annual leave in 1936 under the Popular Front, and the following summer the railways carried an unprecedented number of working-class families to the coast for the first time in the country’s history.
Britain’s Holidays with Pay Act came in 1938. The United States never passed a federal equivalent and still has no statutory minimum paid leave, which is why American holiday patterns differ so markedly from European ones to this day.
Holiday camps — Butlin’s from 1936 — were built for exactly this new market: a week’s full board at a price a factory wage could reach.
The package holiday and the jet
The Boeing 707 entered service in 1958 and the 747 in 1970, and between them they collapsed the cost per seat on long routes.
The package holiday — charter flight, transfer, hotel and food sold as one product — put the Mediterranean within reach of northern European workers in the 1960s and 70s and transformed the coasts of Spain, Greece and later Turkey and Tunisia, economically and physically, within about fifteen years.
It was and is sneered at. It also gave several million people who would never otherwise have left their country a fortnight abroad every year.
Low-cost, and what it did
Deregulation — the US in 1978, the EU through the 1990s — allowed carriers to fly what they liked where they liked at what price they chose. Ryanair, easyJet, Southwest and their imitators unbundled the fare and made a weekend in another country cost less than a night out at home.
That produced the city-break economy, the stag weekend, the second home in Provence, and directly, the overtourism pressures on Venice, Barcelona, Prague and Dubrovnik.
It also produced the aviation emissions problem, which is the unresolved bill for all of it.
The pattern
The same argument recurs at every stage: a form of travel previously restricted to a small group becomes available to a larger one, the previous group complains that the new arrivals are ruining it, and within a generation the new arrivals are the establishment complaining about whoever came next.
The Grand Tourists said it about the railway excursionists. The excursionists’ descendants said it about package tourists. Package tourists’ children said it about backpackers. Backpackers say it about influencers.
None of that means the current problems are imaginary — overtourism is measurable and real. It does mean that any argument which reduces to “there are the wrong sort of people here now” deserves to be examined for what it is actually objecting to.