What could the next 40 years hold for global tourism?

Over the past 40 years, tourism has developed to become a sector of global economic, social and environmental significance. This paper provides a retrospective overview of the massive expansion and evolving geography of international and domestic tourism over the last 40 years, including the factors that enabled and challenged this growth, in order to contextualize a discussion of what the next 40 years may hold for global tourism. Social, technical, economic, environmental and political dimensions influencing tourism over the past and future 40 years are identified, together with a synthesis of available long-range scenarios of tourism futures to 2050. Comparisons with selected non-tourism scenarios suggest that current assessments of tourism futures are limited in scope, and that the tourism sector may have much to learn from scenario building and forecasting from other economic sectors and analyses of global grand challenges. Reconciling anticipated tourism growth with the sustainability and development imperatives of the next 40 years are discussed.