World Tourism Day
Take the plunge and visit that place you’ve always wanted to go on World Tourism Day, or look into tourist locations, functions, and events closer to you.
Drive bookings and tourism engagement in September by positioning travel experiences, local attractions, and hospitality services as must-do adventures for wanderlust-driven consumers.
- Bucket-list destination spotlights with booking CTAs
- Local tourism guides and hidden gem recommendations
- Travel deal roundups and early-bird discounts for fall getaways
- User-generated travel stories and destination inspiration posts
Tourism has been a part of the human experience as long as there have been distant places to go and experience.
It was originally the province of the wealthy, with travel being difficult and expensive, but it afforded opportunities to learn new languages, experience different cuisines, and generally see what there was to see.
Tourism can be argued to be traced back to the Shulgi period in Ancient China, when Kings took great pains to protect the roads and build waystations for travelers.
In the Middle Ages travel became even more important for religious reasons, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity all had pilgrimage traditions that required traveling great distances in the interest of health and spiritual improvement.
World Tourism Day was established by The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) to promote sustainable, responsible, and universally accessible tourism. Tourism benefits both the tourist and the locations that they visit, and is one of the major drivers of economic growth.
To this end they’ve put together the Global Code of Ethics for Tourism, to help increase the benefits of tourism while minimizing its impact and protected the people, cultures, and environments of the locations people go to visit and experience.
World Tourism Day is something that has been going for many years now. It was actually the third session of the UNWTO General Assembly whereby it was decided that World Tourism Day would be instituted. This happened in Spain at Torremolinos in September of 1979.
This led to the first World Tourism Day taking place the following year, in 1980. The date was selected so that it would coincide with a vital milestone in global tourism, this being the anniversary of when the UNWTO Statues were adopted on the 27th of September in 1970.
It is also an appropriate choice because it marks the beginning of the season in the southern hemisphere and the conclusion of the high season in the northern hemisphere.