Asta Travel News

Moving beyond traditional state-centered conceptions of foreign relations, Christopher Endy approaches the Cold War era relationship between France and the United States from the original perspective of tourism. Focusing on American travel in France after World War II, Cold War Holidays shows how both the U.S. and French governments actively cultivated and shaped leisure travel to advance their foreign policy agendas. From the U.S. government's campaign to encourage American vacations in Western Europe as part of the Marshall Plan, to Charles de Gaulle's aggressive promotion of American tourism to France in the 1960s, Endy reveals how consumerism and globalization played a major role in transatlantic affairs. Yet contrary to analyses of globalization that emphasize the decline of the nation-state, Endy argues that an era notable for the rise of informal transnational exchanges was also a time of entrenched national identity and persistent state power. A lively array of voices informs Endy's analysis: Parisian hoteliers and cafe waiters, American and French diplomats, advertising and airline executives, travel writers, and tourists themselves. The resulting portrait reveals tourism as a colorful and consequential illustration of the changing nature of international relations in an age of globalization.

Tourism is the world's second largest industry employing on an average one out of twenty adult men and women world-wide and the ratio is one out of ten when it comes to the developed countries like USA. The growing ranks of international leisure travellers are being influenced by business travellers who, are flooding into India as a result of economic liberalisation. It is thus imperative that our professional tourism corps be trained to meet these exacting requirements. Both in public and private sectors, the increasing understanding of these needs is leading to the development of institutes, training centres and academic programmes in tourism management. There is thus a great need for comprehensive professional literature. This two-volume series volume tells readers all that they want to know about tourism -- its history, networks and intricate operations. Volume Two discusses in detail how different tourism sectors operate and market themselves -- travel agencies, tour operators, hotels, restaurants, airlines -- as well as the impact of changing technology on their activities.