Holiday

• Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement)
• Passover
• Rosh Hashanah (Spiritual New Year)
• Purim (Based on the events in the Biblical book of Esther)
• Sukkot (The Feast of Tabernacles)
• Hannukah (also: Chanukah; the Feast of Lights)
• Tu B'shevat (New year of the trees)
• Purim
• Yom HaShoah (Holocaust remembrance day)
• Yom Ha'atzma'ut (Israel independence day)
• Shavuot (The Feast of Weeks)
• Tisha B'Av

Christian holidays

• Christmas (Birth of Jesus Christ)
• Holy Thursday (Celebration of The Last Supper)
• Good Friday (Death of Jesus Christ)
• Easter (Resurrection of Jesus Christ)
• Ascension Day (Ascension of Jesus Christ into Heaven)
• Pentecost (Descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Jesus Christ)
• Whitsun
• All Saints Day
• (see liturgical year for a more complete list)

Islamic/Muslim holidays

• Ramadan
• Eid: date determined by the lunar calendar and observation of the moon
  • Eid al Fitr, Lesser Bairam
  • Eid al Adha, Greater Bairam

Hindu holidays

• Rama-Lilas

National holidays

Others

Many other days are marked to celebrate events or people, but are not strictly holidays as time off work is rarely given.

• April Fool's Day (April 1)
• Barbes Diena (December 1 Ancient Latvia)
• Boxing Day (December 26)
• Earth day (April 22)
• Father's Day (3rd Sunday in June)
• Grandparent's Day (Sunday after September Labor Day - proclaimed by Jimmy Carter in 1978)
• Groundhog Day (February 2)
• Halloween (October 31)
• Loyalty Day (May 1 United States)
• Mole Day (October 23)
• Mother's Day (2nd Sunday in May in North America, fourth Sunday in Lent in Europe)
• Mother-in-Law's Day (4th Sunday in October)
• Pi Day (March 14)
• Pi Approximation Day (July 22)
• Programmer's day (256th day of the year)
• Sweetest Day (third Saturday in October)
• Valentine's Day (February 14)
• Worker's Day or May Day (May 1, most countries - United States and Canada are prominent exceptions)

External links

Geography

Demographics

King George III is widely acknowledged as the first "tourist", who took regular holidays to the seaside town of Weymouth when in poor health.

"Tourism", like any other form of economic activity, occurs when the essential parameters come together to make it happen. In this case there are three such parameters:

1. Disposable income, i.e. money to spend on non-essentials
2. Time in which to do so.
3. Infrastructure in the form of accommodation facilities and means of transport.

The word tour gained common acceptance in the eighteenth century, when the Grand Tour of Europe became part of the upbringing of the educated and wealthy British nobleman or cultured gentleman. Grand tours were taken in particular by young people to "complete" their education. They travelled all over Europe, but notably to places of cultural and aesthetic interest, such as Rome, Tuscany and the Alps.

Most major British artists of the eighteenth century did the "Grand Tour", as did their great European contemporaries such as Claude Lorrain. Classical architecture, literature and art have always drawn visitors to Rome, Naples, Florence.

The Romantic movement (inspired throughout Europe by the English poets William Blake and Lord Byron, among others), extended this to gothick countryside, the Alps, fast flowing rivers, mountain gorges, etc.

The British Aristocracy were particularly keen on the Grand Tour, using the occasion to gather art treasures from all over Europe to add to their collections. The volume of art treasures being moved to Britain in this way was unequalled anywhere else in Europe, and explains the richness of many private and public collections in Britain today. Yet tourism in those days, aimed essentially at the very top of the social ladder and at the well educated, was fundamentally a cultural activity. These first tourists, though undertaking their Grand Tour, were more travellers than tourists.

Tourism in the modern sense of the word did not develop until the nineteenth century; that was leisure travel, which today forms the larger part of the tourist industry.

Again the leisure industry was a British invention, for sociological reasons. Britain was the first European country to industrialize, and the industrial society was the first society to offer time for leisure to a growing number of people. Not initially the working masses, but the owners of the machinery of production, the economic oligarchy, the factory owners, the traders, the new middle class.

Leisure travel had developed as an offshoot of cultural tourism, partly as health tourism. Some English travellers, after visiting the warm lands of the South of Europe, decided to stay there either for the cold season or for the rest of their lives, but this was a very minor development.

It was not until the nineteenth century that leisure tourism really began to develop, as people began to "winter" in warmer climates, or to visit places with health-giving mineral waters, in order to relieve a whole variety of diseases from gout to liver disorders and bronchitis.

The British origin of this new industry is reflected in many place names: At Nice, one of the first and most well established holiday resorts on the French Riviera, the long esplanade along the sea front is known to this day as the Promenade des Anglais; and in many other historic resorts in continental Europe, old well-established palace hotels have names like the Hotel Bristol, Hotel Carlton or Hotel Majestic - reflecting the dominance of English customers to whom these resorts catered in the early years.

Even winter sports, as a leisure activity rather than as a means of transport, were largely invented by the British leisured classes. It was English tourists who invented winter sports at the Swiss village of Zermatt (Valais).

Until the first tourists appeared, the villagers of Zermatt just thought of the long snowy winter as being a time when the best thing to do was to stay indoors and make cuckoo clocks or other small mechanical items.

Organized sport was already well established in Britain long before it reached other countries. The vocabulary of sport bears witness to this: rugby, football, and boxing are all British sports, and even Tennis, originally a French sport, was formalized and codified by the British, who invented the first national championship in the nineteenth century, at Wimbledon. Winter sports were a natural answer for a leisured class looking for amusement during the coldest season.

Mass tourism did not really begin to develop, however, until two things had occurred.
a) improvements in communications allowed the transport of large numbers of people in a short space of time to places of leisure interest, and
b) greater numbers of people began to enjoy the benefits of leisure time. The biggest development of all was the invention of the railways, which brought many of Britain's seaside towns within easy distance of Britain's large urban centres.

The father of modern mass tourism was Thomas Cook who, on July 5, 1841, organised the first package tour in history, by chartering a train to take a group of teetotalers from Leicester to a rally in Loughborough, some twenty miles away. Cook immediately saw the potential for business development in the sector, and became the world's first tour operator.

He was soon followed by others, with the result that the tourist industry developed rapidly in early Victorian Britain. Initially it was supported by the growing middle classes, who had time off from their work, and who could afford the luxury of travel and possibly even staying for periods of time in boarding houses.

However, the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 introduced, for the first time, a statutory right for workers to take holidays, even if they were not paid at the time.

The combination of short holiday periods, travel facilities and distances meant that the first holiday resorts to develop in Britain were towns on the seaside, situated as close as possible to the growing industrial connurbations. For those in the industrial north, there were Blackpool in Lancashire, and Scarborough in (Yorkshire). For those in the Midlands, there were Weston-super-Mare in Somerset and Skegness in Lincolnshire, for those in London there were Southend-on-Sea, Broadstairs, Brighton, Eastbourne, and a whole collection of other lesser known places. But for a century, tourism remained a national industry, with foreign travel being reserved, as before, for the rich or the culturally curious. A minority of resorts, such as Bath, Harrogate and Matlock, emerged inland, a trend boosted by the emergence of the Dutch company Centre Parcs.

Similar processes occurred in other countries, though at a slower rate, given that nineteenth century Britain was far ahead of any other nation in the world in the process of industrialisation. Billy Butlin developed low-cost holiday camps with chalet-style budget accommodation and mass catering near many attractive beaches. Other companies, such as Pontins followed his example, but their popularity waned with the rise of package tours and the increasing comforts to which visitors became accustomed at home.

In the USA, the first great seaside resort, in the European style, was Atlantic City, New Jersey.

In Continental Europe, early resorts included Ostend (for the people of Brussels), and Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais) and Deauville (Calvados) (for Parisians).

Even so, increasing speed on railways meant that the tourist industry could develop slowly, even internationally. By 1901, the number of people crossing the English Channel from England to France or Belgium had already passed 0.5 million per year.

Other phenomena that helped develop the travel industry were paid holidays:

• 1.5 million manual workers in Britain had paid holidays by 1925
• 11 million by 1939 (30% of the population in families with paid holidays)

Tourism has become a multi-billion pound international industry, and one that is growing in developed countries (source countries) at a rate considerably faster than annual growth levels.

Receptive tourism is also growing at a very rapid rate in many developing countries, where it is often the most important economic activity in local GDP.

Mass tourism has been stagnating and declining in recent years. The Costa del Sol and the Baleares, which attracted millions of tourists annually during the 1980s and 1990s, and other resorts such as Cancun have seen declining tourist numbers as they have become seen as untidy or ugly or simply lacking in kudos due to their past popularity. The mass tourist economy has also been hit badly by terrorism, with specific attacks on destinations such as Bali and Kenya. For the past few decades other forms of tourism have been becoming more popular, particularly:

• Ecotourism: Sustainable tourism which has minimal impact on the environment, such as safaris (Kenya) and Rainforests (Belize), or National Parks.
• Cultural Tourism: Usually urban tourism, visiting historical or interesting cities, such as London, Paris, Prague, Rome, New York etc.
• Heritage Tourism: Visiting historical or industrial sites, such as old canals, railways, battlegrounds etc.
• Health Tourism: Usually to escape from cities or relieve stress, often to "health spas".
• Sport Tourism: Particularly skiing.

• Tourism in Albania
• Tourism in Australia
• Tourism in Austria
• Tourism in the Baltics
• Tourism in Belgium
• Tourism in Brazil
• Tourism in Bulgaria
• Tourism in Canada
• Tourism in The Caribbean
• Tourism in China
• Tourism in Czech
• Tourism in Denmark
• Tourism in England
• Tourism in Egypt
• Tourism in Finland
• Tourism in France
• Tourism in Germany
• Tourism in Greece
• Tourism in Hawaii
• Tourism in Hong Kong
• Tourism in Hungary
• Tourism in India
• Tourism in Ireland
• Tourism in Italy
• Tourism in the Netherlands
• Tourism in Norway
• Tourism in Poland
• Tourism in Portugal
• Tourism in Puerto Rico
• Tourism in Russia
• Tourism in Scotland
• Tourism in Seychelles
• Tourism in Singapore
• Tourism in Slovenia
• Tourism in Spain
• Tourism in Sweden
• Tourism in Ukraine
• Tourism in the USA
• Tourism in Wales