Tourists The origin of the word “tourist” date back to 1292 AD. It has come from the word ‘tour’. A number of experts have defined the term:“Tourists are the voluntary temporary travelers, traveling in the expectations of pleasure from the novelty and change experienced on a relatively and non-current round-trip”.“Tourist is a person who makes a journey for the sake of curiosity for the fun of traveling”. Tourists are: -Persons traveling for pleasure, health and domestic reason.-Persons arriving in the sea of sea cruise.-Persons traveling for convention. Tourism – the first commercial venture. A religious Englishman called Thomas Cook in 1841 arranged, for a fee, a one –day rail excursion from Leicester to Loughborough for 540 members of a temperance league. Thus the first bona fide travel agent was Thomas Cook. While Cook himself did not make a profit on this first venture, he was a man of vision and was convinced that there was a need for a skilled “travel arranger”. So by 1845 he had become the first full-time travel agent, operating train excursions from Leicester. The next year he chartered a train and steamer for an excursion to Scotland for 330 people. In 1851 Cook arranged ocean steamship travel and accommodations for more than 1,50,000 visitors to the World Exposition in London and in 1856 he operated the first escorted “grand tour” of Europe. Tours to Europe and Middle East were also conducted and, in 1872, the first around the world tour was conducted. Tourism as a Service Industry Tourism as a service industry comprises of several allied activities which together produce the tourism product. Involved in the tourism product are three major sub-industries. They are: -1. Tour operators and travel agents.2. Accommodation sector (hoteling and catering) and3. Passenger accommodation. According to international estimates, a tourist spends 35% of his total expenditure on transportation, about 40% on lodging and food and the balance 25% on entertainment, shopping and incidentals.The product in this case is not confirmed to travel and accommodation but includes a large array of auxiliary services ranging from insurance and entertainment and shopping, demand generation, in addition to the consumer motivation, is also heavily dependent upon powerful persuasive communication both at the macro (country) level and the micro (enterprise) level. The participants in the process of this service business can be illustrated by the figure below. Some of the pointers to nature of tourism as a Service Industry 1. Tourism accounts for nearly 6% of world trade.2. Bulk of tourism business is located in Europe and North America., with 1/8 of the market being shared between the other regions.3. The highest growth rate in tourism in recent years has been in the third world.4. Tourism, like most pure services, because of the character of inseparability, exemplifies a product, which cannot be sampled before purchase; the prospective consumers have to travel to a foreign destination in order to consume the product.5. The major players in the tourism market include a number of intermediary companies. Some [...]