Thomas Cook, known as the ‘father of modern tourism’, exemplified an optimism about the growth of tourism in the 19th century. It is an optimism regarding the potential in people, and in technology, that we see less often today.

Horizon is also chosen deliberately. Horizon Holidays was an early, and iconic, pioneer of mass package tourism, based in the UK. Its flights to Corsica in 1950, soon followed by Palma, Lourdes, the Costa Brava and Sardinia were exemplary of the post 1945 package holiday boom. Mass tourism remains maligned in some quarters, and the legacy of mass tourism is often caricatured as bland, crude and destructive.

As Raymond Williams argued, masses are made up of individuals, but often individuality is written out in caricatures of mass behaviour and consumption. That is characteristic of discussions of tourism today, certainly in the universities, and all too often elsewhere too. We’d like to find the individual in the mass, challenge the stereotypes and celebrate the conviviality of tourism.

We are looking realistically, but optimistically, to the future of travel. Any assessment of tourism’s future also requires a reassessment of its past, one that recognises tourism’s role in cultural and economic advancement. We intend to provide much needed balance and, when its needed, a counter to declinism in debates about a vital industry and joyful, very human activity: tourism.

Cook claimed that through experiencing the diversity of the world through travel, we can “o’erleap the bounds of our own narrow circle, and rub off rust and prejudice by contact with others”. It’s a sentiment that applies equally well to discussing and writing about travel, tourism and much else. There is great diversity of opinion – talking to, rather than past, each other benefits all. To that end, we support tolerance of, and openness to, a range of views.

We are very proud to be supported by the Association for Tourism and Leisure Studies, the largest international group for scholars of tourism and other related industries. We welcome pitches from ATLAS colleagues and students from around the world: pithy blog pieces, essays, opinion pieces, reviews … get in touch with your ideas.

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