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We are all tourists in an increasingly portable world. Tourism has the potential to increase our understanding of other cultures and places. Why then do so many of us try to avoid applying the term "tourist" to our own travels, and why are tourists so often disparaged and resented in the places they visit? For decades tourism has been regarded as a trivial activity, not worthy of serious intellectual interest. In the meantime, it has become one of the largest industries in the world, transforming the places in which we live major towns and cities or the most remote regions of the globe. Tourism is also the most intimate of all industries, bringing people of strikingly different backgrounds into close but also almost invariably transient relationships. Chambers shares many of his own travel experiences and research in this book and invites us to explore the cultural and environmental consequences of our own travels. He offers detailed case studies of tourism in the American Southwest, the Tyrolean Alps, and the Caribbean nation of Belize. A unique feature of the book is Chambers' discussion of the development of Japanese tourism, as an antidote to the prevalent notion that modern tourism was solely an invention of the West.