As far as the borders between the countries weaken people have more opportunities to travel all over the world and discover new places ranging from exotic islands to snowy mountains. Certainly, people travelled before as well but it was very difficult and expensive, not to mention, dangerous. Nowadays, to help one to orient among vast amounts of offers and to find what kind of vacation suits you best the travel literature was designed. Travel literature includes writings associated with tourism, such as guide books and reviews, travelogues that are aimed at describing the destination, providing helpful advice for visitors and most often encouraging or convincing visiting the place. Travel essays concentrate on author’s personal experience of visiting some place and the impact it made on them.
Alongside tourism essays and reviews, with fast developing of technologies and telecommunication, a lot of TV and radio programmes are intended to present the information about the world’s countries pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of the destination. TV programmes about tourism are also beneficial as they not only tell about the place but show it, letting you to plunge into the atmosphere of the country.
It’s obvious that every travel writing presents a subjective interpretation of the author. It may lead to embellishment of the real state of affairs in order to attract more tourists to the region. Notably, a typical feature of the travel writings is the use of spoken language to create a natural easy manner of writing and so gain potential travelers favor. It’s also natural for tourist literature to resort to humor and sometimes irony. Apart from personal comments, such kind of literature includes helpful information about the place of destination, such as population, currency and the currency exchange rate of the country, cost of living and public catering, transportation cost, language spoken and so on. This information is very useful when prioritizing you needs and allows to plan everything in advance.
The fast development of tourism may be accounted for the factors , that tourism is a very lucrative sphere of economy for many countries. As well as having positive points, tourism may have undesirable negative consequences. The fact that the tourists step into local people culture sometimes is being missed. Not to forget the fact that with growing popularity of tourism and globalization the governments forget to bother of the preserving the natural habitats of rare species in case tourists’ routes interfere with them.
Some researcher of travel literature point out that the contemporary tourist literature is so close to classical literature that it’s almost novels only not invented. Tourism opinion paper is regarded as a powerful source of commerce. Nowadays, eco-tourism is becoming more and more popular and this tendency greatly affected the tourism literature. From my perspective, promoting eco-tourism in essays and reviews of much renowned and acknowledged tourism writers could be an effecting means to reduce the negative effect of tourism in some countries.
Another huge factor that influences the sphere of tourism and tourism literature is Internet. It’s not a secret that before planning a vacation many people search the internet in order to find more information they want to visit and read the impressions of those who has already been there. One more advantage of the internet is that it gives the possibility to find objective matter-of-fact information that is impossible to find in literature for tourists.
Personally I use online travel agencies as it is less time consuming and more productive. On the other hand, I don’t think that internet could replace the written tourist guides because you can have guide books always at hand that is sometimes difficult with internet.
To conclude I’d like to say that tourism literature is an efficient means for providing useful information about the countries and resorts, supported not only by facts but personal opinion of the author and is an indispensable genre of literature of the XXIth century.