Tourism and leisure are more and more important factors in today’s economy. They are responsible for a large part of jobs and have positive spin off effects on the local economies.

Leisure

Leisure has often been defined as a quality of experience or as free time. Free time is time spent away from business, work, job hunting, domestic chores and education, as well as necessary activities such as eating and sleeping. Situationist International proposes that leisure does not evolve from free time, and free-time is an illusory concept that is rarely fully “free”. Economic and social forces appropriate free time from the individual and sell it back to them as the commodity known as “leisure”. Certainly most people’s leisure activities are not a completely free choice and may be constrained by social pressures. For example, people may be coerced into spending time gardening by the need to keep up with the standard of neighboring gardens. Or people go to a party because of social pressures.

Leisure as experience usually emphasizes dimensions of perceived freedom and choice. It is done for “its own sake”, for the quality of experience and involvement. Other classic definitions include Thorsten Veblen’s (1899) of “nonproductive consumption of time.” Different disciplines have definitions reflecting their common issues. For example, sociology on social forces and contexts and psychology as mental and emotional states and conditions. From a research perspective, these approaches have an advantage of being quantifiable and comparable over time and place. Source wikipedia

Tourism

“Tourism is travel for pleasure or business; also the theory and practice of touring, the business of attracting, accommodating, and entertaining tourists, and the business of operating tours. The World Tourism Organization defines tourism more generally, in terms which go “beyond the common perception of tourism as being limited to holiday activity only”, as people “traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure and not less than 24 hours, business and other purposes”.[3]

Tourism can be domestic (within the traveler’s own country) or international. International tourism has both incoming and outgoing implications on a country’s balance of payments.

Globally, international tourism receipts (the travel item in balance of payments) grew to US$1.03 trillion (€740 billion) in 2005, corresponding to an increase in real terms of 3.8% from 2010. International tourist arrivals surpassed the milestone of 1 billion tourists globally for the first time in 2012, emerging source markets such as China, Russia, and Brazil had significantly increased their spending over the previous decade.” Source wikipedia

In 2019, Travel & Tourism’s direct, indirect and induced impact accounted for:  

  • US$8.9 trillion contribution to the world’s GDP
  • 10.3% of global GDP
  • 330 million jobs, 1 in 10 jobs around the world
  • US$1.7 trillion visitor exports (6.8% of total exports, 28.3% of global services exports)
  • US$948 billion capital investment (4.3% of total investment)  
    source: WTTC.org