development of tourism resort

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Spas and Seaside Resorts

The late Peter N. Borsay was professor of history at Aberystwyth University. He authored five books primarily addressing the history of European leisure regimes and seaside resorts. His final book, The Invention of the English Landscape, c. 1700–1939 was completed by Prof. Rosemary Sweet.

Published: 18 December 2023
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Proximity to water—both springs and bodies of water such as lakes and streams, as well as the littoral—was a driving force behind the emergence of a broad range of resort destinations, of varying sizes, serving diverse markets. The health-giving properties attributed to water made the spa’s pedigree considerably older than that of the coastal resort, whose modern European incarnations emerged in Britain and on the continent in the eighteenth century. Thereafter the geography of the resort expanded, and its development was bound up with the growth of mass leisure, the emergence of new transport technologies and channels of distributing tourism products, and other dimensions of the sector’s growth, which implicated labor and leisure together. Resorts and spas were not merely sites of leisure and therapy, but also arenas in which status and sociability were performed. Throughout their history, promotional strategies were marked by efforts to harness a broad textual field to define places in a crowded and competitive destination marketplace, especially as the transnational character of the resort model tended in some respects toward the convergence of the identity of many places.

Two elements drive tourism: the journey and the destination. In practice the two are often wrapped together, with a travel itinerary comprising a string of locations to be stayed at and explored. Historically the principal reason for non-work-related “recreational” travel was pilgrimage, and the most popular “tourist” destinations were religious sites. In the modern era changes in attitudes to leisure have transformed this pattern, with the type, geographical range, and volume of tourist locations extended radically. Among the most important modern destinations are water-based resorts: spas and sites situated alongside rivers, lakes, and the sea. Healing springs are a ubiquitous and global phenomenon and have a long history. Substantial bathing and religious establishments could grow up around them, but many were on a tiny scale and attracted only a local population. 1 The modern spa, largely shorn of its overt religious associations and as much a site of leisure as of health, emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shortly afterward the coastal resort began to develop. Unlike the spa, it had no obvious precedent. Though it may have drawn upon popular traditions of sea bathing, 2 it was very largely an invention of the eighteenth century and has become one of the principal engines of the tourist industry.

Spa and seaside hardly figured in the academic historiography until the later twentieth century. The rise of social and later cultural history changed mindsets, particularly the pioneering research of John Walton and others. The development of tourism studies, and the implications for global history, have increased scholarly interest in recent decades. The focus of much of this research has been the coastal resort, and until recently the history of the spa and its relationship with the seaside resort has been relatively neglected. There are clearly differences between the two types of tourist destination, but the similarities are generally more telling than the differences. Both were committed to water-based therapy, and for visitors the two types of locations were not mutually exclusive but part of a wider system of resorts. When in 1841 A. B. Granville published his guide to what contemporaries knew collectively as “watering places,” it was the Spas of England and Principal Sea-Bathing Places ; similarly, when in 1893 Thomas Linn published his Health Resorts it was as a Medical Guide to the Mineral Springs , and Climatic, Mountain and Seaside Resorts .

The Rise of the Modern Resort

Neolithic peoples visited springs for healing or sacred purposes, and the spiritual dimension of water and its sources has been a continuing feature of their appeal, even in secular societies. 3 Archaeological evidence suggests that public baths were constructed in the city of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley in about 2500 BCE, and that a location with several springs near Woodbridge in Suffolk (England) was visited as a ritual site about 2800 BCE. 4 Ancient Greece and Rome developed sophisticated bathing establishments, serving both medical and social functions. Some of these were based on natural hot springs, many of which also became places associated with religious deities, where contact could be made with the world of the gods. As such they might be considered a form of early tourist destination. The idea of the spa spread beyond the core of the Roman Empire into its peripheries, where native springs, already used by the indigenous population, were transformed into spa complexes such as Vicus Calidus (Vichy) and Aquae Sulis Minerva (Bath). Because some springs were located along the coastline and might flow directly into the sea, as in the case of Therma on the island of Ikaria in Greece, they could be seen today not only as fashionable health spas but also forerunners of the modern coastal resort. The discovery of the archaeological remains of elaborate coastal villas and baths belonging to the Roman elite along the Bay of Naples, such as at Baiae in Italy and Verige Bay on the Brijuni Islands in the Adriatic, suggests the existence of a proto-resort culture. 5 How much of this survived the collapse of Rome is unclear. The elaborate baths, temples, and visitor infrastructure at Bath appear to have fallen into ruins (see chapter by Parker in this volume). 6 However, the healing qualities of natural springs and wells were readily incorporated into the Christian belief system. 7 Peter of Eboli’s manuscript De Balneis Puteolanis (c. 1200 CE) describes the public baths in the area of the southern Italian town of Pozzuoli, the baths were being used in medieval Bath, and the springs at Spa in Belgium were discovered (or rediscovered) in the fourteenth century. 8 The hammam or Turkish bath and Japanese onsen , with their sophisticated bathing cultures, also date back at least to the medieval period. 9 To what extent such places constituted tourist attractions, to which visitors traveled some distance to recreate as well as heal themselves, is uncertain (see chapter by Craig in this volume). However, it was not until the sixteenth century that the modern spa, geared very largely to the medical and social needs of the well off, emerged. The recently invented printing press played its part in this. The virtues of Spa in Belgium were publicized in Gilbert Lymborth’s Des Fontaines acides de la foret d’Ardennes, et principalement de celle de Spa (1559), and in 1571 the Italian Andreae Baccii published his massive treatise De Thermis on the history and healing qualities of various waters, including springs and baths. This period also saw the re-emergence of Vichy and the first signs of the development of English spas as fashionable health resorts. The Civil Wars in Britain temporarily stalled this process, but from the later seventeenth century there was a proliferation of new spas, leading in the following century to the remarkable rise of Bath as the first modern resort town, its population (excluding visitors) growing from around three thousand people in 1700 to thirty thousand by 1800. 10

Early eighteenth-century Britain also saw the emergence of the first seaside resorts (such as Brighton, Margate, Scarborough, Weymouth, and Hastings), initially developed primarily on the south coast of England to service the huge market of London, already by 1700 the largest city in Western Europe with half a million inhabitants, doubling to one million by 1800. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the resort phenomenon fanned out around the entire British coast, reflecting strong regional economic and urban development in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. 11 The late eighteenth century also saw the seaside resort spread to the European Continent (though Scheveningen has claims to be earlier), with locations appearing on the French channel, Belgian, and Netherlands coasts. By the early nineteenth century the phenomenon had stretched along the French coast to Normandy and the Southwest, and the first signs were visible in North Germany and Scandinavia. The first costal resorts in the United States date from this period, located on the Northeast Coast, but it the later nineteenth century saw the development of Florida and the West Coast. Seabathing was in evidence on the Atlantic coast of Spain by 1830, and there were initial indications of the rise of the Mediterranean as a winter climatic resort around this time. However, it was not until the mid- to late nineteenth century that the region really took off and the idea of “the Riviera” was “invented.” The emerging cult of the sun accelerated this process in the interwar years of the twentieth century, a trend that came to full maturity later in the century, especially from the later 1970s, as rising living standards among working-class families in northern Europe, air travel, and the package holiday opened up much of the Mediterranean basin to the seaside industry. The same forces were also encouraging inter- as well as intracontinental tourism, with long-haul flights stimulating pockets of resort development in Florida, the Caribbean, the islands of the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia (see chapter by Pearson in this volume). Today the seaside resort has become a truly global phenomenon. 12 Competition within the expanding international resort system has led to problems for some locations. However, this can be overdrawn. In late twentieth-century Britain some seaside towns undoubtedly faced serious issues of decline, but others have proved and are proving highly adaptable and resilient, exploiting expanding streams of tourist business, such as the opportunity, provided by the growing heritage industry, to sell their own history, like Dreamland (a restored 1920s amusement park) in Margate and the Victoria Quarter in New Brighton. 13

The nineteenth century was the golden age of the European spa. Guidebooks for Europe listed hundreds of locations (Dr Herman Klenke’s Taschenbuch fur Badreisende und Kurgäste of 1875 contains almost six hundred entries), with heavy concentrations in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The number and scale of modernized spas was growing. The officially recognized ones in Spain increased from 30 in 1816 to over 202 by 1899; in the early nineteenth century France had 100 formal spas, but 392 by the end of the century; and even in England, where the historiography, reflecting a later disenchantment with water therapy among the medical profession, has distorted the picture, “the number of specialist spas and water cure resorts” as Jane Adams shows, “expanded in size and number” across the century. The medical profession was vital to promoting and servicing spas. In the twentieth century its skepticism about the scientific value of water therapy, alongside advances in understanding the causes of illness and more effective drug-based treatments, led in some countries, such as Britain and Spain, to a decline in the health function of spas. However, in other countries such as Germany the spa system held up much better (in part due to different approaches to funding health care), and generally a revived interest in recent decades among the public in “natural” medicine and “well-being,” the popularity of spa-like treatments (many at pseudo-spas), and the exploitation of spa heritage have helped counter the negative trend. 14

Health, Leisure, and the Model Watering Place

The most overt cultural characteristic of resorts is their combination of health and leisure regimes. But three caveats are necessary here. First, there is a tendency in the recent historiography to overrate the pleasure aspects of resorts and underrate their health functions. Writing in the 1720s, the English journalist Daniel Defoe famously declared Bath “the resort of the sound, rather than the sick,” and such views have prompted modern historians to question the therapeutic role of spas. In 1982 the influential medical and social historian Roy Porter claimed of Georgian Bath: “‘Taking the waters’ for medicinal reasons was the excuse, but in reality it was a holiday spa. Visitors flocked in to idle away time.” 15 However, health was an important motive for those visiting spas and the seaside; well into the twentieth century, and in some locations into the twenty-first, resorts continued to be built around medico-cultural regimes that reflected this demand. 16 The second caveat acknowledges the reality that the vast majority of the population of resorts was necessarily not engaged in leisure but work. To support the pampered lifestyle of the upper and middle “leisure class” required an army of service personnel (from maids to musicians, pastry cooks to prostitutes), many of them seasonal migrants and women (see chapter by Morgan in this volume). The third caveat is that the focus of resorts on health and leisure should not conceal the fact that many retained, and indeed developed, significant commercial and industrial functions, engaging in trading; fishing; quarrying; water bottling; and the manufacture of textiles, engineered products, pottery, clothing, and luxury goods. 17 However, health and leisure were central to the life of watering places. Though different and potentially conflicting regimes, they were in practice complementary, with appropriate forms of leisure helping to relieve not only physical disorders, but also, and perhaps more importantly, mental ones.

From the late seventeenth century in northern Europe a common model of medical and leisure facilities and services evolved, to which a successful spa had to conform. Not every spa included all the elements of this model—only the larger spas were able to boast all the features—and over time the character of the elements might change. For example, the rise of Romanticism placed growing emphasis on access to the natural environment surrounding a spa, and the introduction of hydropathy in the nineteenth century meant that it was possible for inland locations to deliver water treatment without the presence of a mineral spring, for example the construction of the hydros at Crieff (1868) and Peebles (1878) in Scotland (see chapter by Noack in this volume). Until the 1820s or so seaside resorts were heavily modeled on spas, only after that point developing really distinctive features, such as the specially constructed recreational pier, the first being the Brighton Chain Pier of 1822–1823. Even after the 1820s the two models continued to interact closely with each other.

At the heart of the resort model was the presence of “the waters.” No spa or coastal resort could exist without them. That does not necessarily mean that they were critical to every visitor’s experience, but their influence on the shape and culture of watering places is difficult to ignore. The spring or springs, since many places had multiple sources of water, were the nodal points of spas. It was the sea, and the need to be as close as possible to it, that determined the linear, outward-facing geography and architecture of the coastal resort. Though air quality and climate were important factors in the health regimes of many resorts, especially marine ones, the waters were the common denominator that invested these locations with their therapeutic credentials. Water therapies flourished in a world that lacked the treatments available to modern medicine and built on a very long tradition of healing, with roots in popular medicine, as represented by the holy well, and in classical medicine by humoralism. However, the Reformation and scientific revolution challenged the idea that water possessed sacred or magical powers to heal. The modern spa dealt with this problem by developing a new scientific orthodoxy in which the therapeutic qualities of specific waters were derived from their supposed chemical composition. It was an approach promoted—not without much controversy, as spas and physicians competed with each other for customers—in the innumerable treatises on the subject and the medical sections of the guidebooks. 18 Baths and bathing establishments were the core water facilities at the spas, but with the advocacy, from the late seventeenth century, of the benefits of the internal application of the waters, a new type of facility was developed, the pump room or drinking hall; the Pump Room at Bath opened in about 1705, the “chaste and elegant” Trinkhalle at Baden in 1842. 19 The external application of the waters received a huge boost with the medical claims for the benefit of sea bathing in the early eighteenth century. This did not require the erection of specialist-built facilities, though bathing houses, erected on the sea’s edge and filled with sea water, and floating baths, sea hammams and lidos provided a measure of privacy and security, as did the bathing machine, still in use in the early twentieth century. In the spas the treatments of and technologies for external application became increasingly complex from the mid-nineteenth century, some driven by new cultural fashions, such as the orientalism that underpinned the introduction in the West of the Turkish bath, and specialist institutions, such as the hydro and sanatorium, established to treat large groups of patients in an enclosed environment.

The water facilities available were replicated across spas and seaside resorts, as they eyed what their competitors were offering and vied with each other to attract visitors. This was even more obvious in the case of leisure facilities. All watering places required spaces for public socializing. The baths and pump room provided plenty of opportunity for this, but for purely recreational purposes an assembly room became a standard feature of spa and seaside in Britain (the first dated from 1708 in Bath, and rooms were still being constructed as late as the 1890s in the small Welsh seaside resort of Pwllheli), 20 a role played by the kurhaus in many continental spas. These buildings were multi-entertainment centers (accommodating balls, lectures, gambling, concerts, and the like), but in the larger locations a wide variety of specialist recreational establishments were also introduced, such as a casino, commercial library, coffee house, theater, opera house, winter garden, music hall, bandstand, dance hall, and cinema, not to mention a range of souvenir and luxury shops and innumerable churches and chapels. The provision of leisure was further strengthened by the supply of facilities for physical recreation, something frequently advocated as part of the recuperative process. Promenades and walks, often tree lined and embedded in gardens, were essential, and at the seaside this gave rise to the formal sea-facing “prom” and pleasure pier. Water sports such as swimming, boating, yachting, and fishing were an important part of the seaside experience. Riding and racing facilities were valuable attractions—early and important meetings were established at Epsom, Bath, and Brighton in Britain, and Saratoga Springs became the center of racing in the United States—and by the later nineteenth century, spa and seaside were under pressure to extend their range of sports, including the newly fashionable tennis and golf. 21 Watering places by definition provided access to a natural element. This connection with nature was accentuated in the case of spas by their frequent location in rural and upland areas—in France the major concentrations of spas were in the Pyrenees, the mountains of the Vosges, the Alps, and the Massif Central, and in Australia “the most complete development of mineral springs” was in Victoria’s central highlands, dubbed the “Spa capital of Australia”—and in the case of coastal resorts by their proximity to the most elemental of all natural forces, the sea. 22 Indeed, it was, as Alain Corbin argues, the transformation of the sea into something to be celebrated and embraced rather than feared and shunned that underpinned the rise of the seaside resort. 23 The growth of watering places drew heavily upon the picturesque and romantic movements, with informal walks and rides radiating out into the surrounding countryside, hills, and cliffs, often accompanied by spectacular views. As Andrea Leonardi has written of the nineteenth-century development of the spa of Ischl in the Salzkammergut mountains of upper Austria, “The promenades and the large park created at Bad Ischl appeared to be less a large garden constructed by man, and more simply a stretch of landscape which merged with the surrounding nature.” 24 In many resorts the consumption of nature, spurred on by escalating levels of urbanization, and the long association between nature, place, and health embodied in the notion of the “therapeutic landscape,” became an important part of the package on sale. 25 Not that all resorts catered exclusively or even primarily to this Arcadian fantasy. As Jon Sterngrass argues of Saratoga Springs, the spa “was never a pastoral retreat for quiet self-evaluation but was, rather, a place of jostle, color, and activity.” 26

One area where the spa and seaside models converged closely was in the provision of accommodation for visitors and residents. From early on, high-status multidwelling buildings—classical squares, terraces, and crescents, often with fine views of countryside and sea—were erected in fashionable watering places, added to later by villa-style dwellings. The rise of the grand hotel in the nineteenth century provided many resorts with their trademark buildings that acted as flagships in attracting investors and visitors. Constructed in the most up-to-date architectural style, they were “total institutions,” offering guests a regime of unadulterated leisure and luxury, mimicking the world of the aristocracy and later film stars. Hotels of one sort or another, and the corporate lifestyle they foster, have continued to figure prominently in the profile of resorts, though other less glitzy forms of accommodation have made their mark, from the rows of boarding houses catering for the working-class visitor, to the high-rise flats, chalet parks, and fields of tents and caravans of more recent years (see chapter by James in this volume). 27

What is striking about the spa and seaside models is the features that they shared and the powerful tendency to copy the leaders among their ranks. Places such as Bath, Brighton, and Blackpool in Britain; Vichy, Nice, and Biarritz in France; Baden Baden in Germany; and Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad) in the Czech Republic, were the forges in which the prototypes were shaped. They were also the places in which these models were reformulated as they adapted to changing circumstances. The trend among British spas was to become increasingly residential and service centers rather than places to stay. The emergence of the working-class holiday market in late nineteenth-century Lancashire created a new, and in some respects radically different, variation on the model, constructed to deliver what Gary Cross and John Walton have called in the case of Blackpool and its US counterpart Coney Island, “industrial saturnalia.” 28 The lure of the sun and the rise to prominence of the Mediterranean in the early twentieth century had a similar influence in creating a new type of seaside model. Continental spa and seaside culture was generally more relaxed than that in Britain, seen, for example, in the role of the casino and in less draconian bathing regulations. There were, therefore, major variations on the spa and seaside models. Moreover, there is clearly a risk in adopting a simple diffusion/emulation paradigm and failing to take into account local conditions, traditions, and practices, particularly outside Europe, where religious, therapeutic, and recreational cultures based on water already existed and could influence the character of resort development.

Sociability, Status, and Class

Resorts provided the expectation of and opportunity for a lifestyle of intensive socializing. Leisure regimes and facilities were constructed that propelled the visitors together and prioritized the public over the private sphere. Resorts were not generally places to which people went to hide away, and if they did so they risked being stigmatized as snobs and unsociable. Collective forms of experience were the goal. This was to be seen in the specially constructed social spaces (such as the assembly room, kurhaus , coffee house, piers, and promenades); in the shared daily routines that ensured that everyone was in the same place, at the same time, doing the same thing; and in the corporate forms of accommodation. There were plenty of individual visitors who did not wish to join the crowd or were unable to do so through ill health, and to some extent the growth of Romanticism with its celebration of the individual, facilitated at the seaside by solitary walking along informal cliff paths as opposed to the social walking of the public promenade, encouraged this. But the resort ethos was heavily geared to the shared experience. Visitors constituted a specially constructed but temporary community, described by contemporaries in Georgian Britain as “the company,” with its own norms and customs, to which members were expected to be loyal, but which dissolved at the end of the “season.” John Pimlott likens it to the pseudo-society formed on “a cruising liner or a winter-sports hotel,” with its closed character, forced socializing, and rigid routine. 29 The corporate ethos was policed by a variety of social enforcers. In eighteenth-century British resorts that role was played by a master of ceremonies, the working-class boarding house of the early twentieth century was presided over by the formidable landlady, and the holiday camp had its red coats to marshal the residents. 30

However, sociability only went so far. The idea of “the company” was challenged by powerful forces that undermined its corporate character. This was particularly problematic in the case of fashionable watering places. The concentration of abnormally large numbers of the most wealthy and socially aspirational could lead to a highly competitive environment in which visitors were regularly engaged in a battle for status and influence. The intensity of this competition varied. In a society such as Australia, where the social elite was relatively small and mostly holidayed at the great European resorts, the indigenous spas supported a more “democratic” culture. 31

For those attending prestigious resorts there was more at stake than interpersonal rivalries. Such locations played an important role in the making of elite and class structures, “setting the scene” for what, in the case of Virginia Springs in the United States, Charlotte M. Boyer Lewis calls “the drama of class formation.” 32 Resorts were places where a person’s and family’s position in the social order could be negotiated, and where exchanges of wealth and status could be facilitated, sometimes through the mechanism of marriage. 33 This was particularly important in societies undergoing rapid social change, because of either their fledgling character, as in the case of North America, or, as in the case of older societies, the growth of an increasingly wealthy and numerous middling order or bourgeoisie. 34 This may be why Britain was so important in the forging of the modern spa and seaside resort, with the dynamic expansion of its middling sorts under the early impact of a commercial and industrial revolution. Paradoxically, sociability played a key role in the process. Not only did it dampen down the inherent tensions involved in exchanges of status, it also required visitors of different social classes to interact freely with each other. Had social distinctions been rigidly maintained, exchanges of status would have been obstructed, and the remodeling of the elite would have been hampered, with potentially serious political consequences. Entry into the company was limited to those with the appropriate wealth, accoutrements, and behavioral characteristics. Policing access was a major headache for resort authorities, since fashionable resorts naturally attracted large numbers of social venturers and criminals.

The parallel forces of sociability and status, and the need to hold the two in balance, placed fashionable resorts under a constant stress. This was exacerbated by the gathering pace of economic and social change and the emergence of a class-based society. Within individual resorts fragmentation occurred—the notion of a single visitor community became increasingly difficult to sustain—and a more differentiated system of resorts emerged, catering to different sections of the social order. This was accelerated by the growth in the incomes and numbers of city-based lower-middle-class and working-class people who could afford a period of holiday away from their place of work and habitation. The consequence was the development from the later nineteenth century of a more rigidly class-based system of resorts founded on “social tone”—to use Harold Perkin’s phrase—a process that could be contested and competitive. 35 In Britain this led to the rise of the working-class seaside resort, such as Blackpool. At the same time the middle class not only reinforced their presence at traditionally fashionable resorts such as Brighton, but also sought to avoid the working-class presence, either by retreating to smaller coastal resorts in the more peripheral areas of Britain, such as mid-Wales and the Southwest of England, by continuing to patronize spas, which never acquired a genuinely working-class clientele; or by engaging in travel to exclusive overseas resorts. The later twentieth-century growth in mass overseas travel, the apparent decline of the traditional class-based social structures, the 2008 economic crisis, and large waves of migration as a consequence of political instability have further complicated the picture in ways that make it difficult to predict the future shape of resorts. What does seem certain is that the spa and seaside phenomenon has become too well rooted over the last three centuries to disappear in the foreseeable future (see chapter by Franzel in this volume).

Text and Image

All towns depend to some degree upon their image in selling themselves and their products. But spas and seaside resorts are almost wholly reliant on image for their prosperity. Unlike a port, market, or industrial town, the product is the place. Visitors literally consume the location. However, places do not have an inherent meaning and appeal; it is something that has to be ascribed to them. It is image that invests locations with tourist appeal. Tourist images in their turn are highly dependent on written and visual texts.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries spas and seaside resorts were marketed primarily to the upper and middle classes, the groups in the population with the highest levels of written and visual literacy. Resorts were therefore able to use sophisticated place imagery to reach a customer base that was textually highly literate and was all too willing to engage in the exercise because they knew that their pleasures depended upon being able to “read” and internalize this imagery. The most directly available forms of public text were guidebooks, gazetteers, magazines, and newspapers. At a basic level the inclusion, in accounts of particular watering places, of fashionable locations, and the omission of other spaces, such as industrial areas and slums, structured visitors’ perceptions of resort space. Descriptions of specific places, such as the assembly rooms or the beach, could also include rules about behavior that determined how these spaces were used. Most guides contained details of the purported health qualities of the waters and air, which though clothed in rationalist scientific jargon had limited basis in reality. The efficacy of the waters depended largely on the users believing what they read. Over time the guide literature increasingly acquired an aesthetic dimension under the influence of Romanticism and the “discovery” of nature, with fine views and walks described and celebrated, as the natural environment became a product in its own right. Embedded in many of the guides were small snippets of poetry and literary prose. This practice became increasingly marked in the nineteenth century, partly a consequence of the literati visiting resorts. A number of locations became the setting for fictional accounts. In the case of Bath this is most famously so in Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) and Persuasion (1817); in Baden-Baden the association is with Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Gambler (1866); the French Riviera is portrayed in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934); and the Lido in Venice is depicted in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). These well-known novels were the tip of the iceberg of a whole genre of resort fiction. Though the readers would generally be aware that this was fiction, the depictions of environmental features were real, and the narratives and plots, even if invented, were plausible and sophisticated representations of the social meanings of the spaces described. The result was that many visitors arrived already primed for the experience ahead of them. Because resorts were well supplied with bookshops and commercial libraries, and because the visitors often had plenty of time on their hands to read, there was also the opportunity to move seamlessly, backward and forward, between fiction and reality.

The high levels of literacy among the visitors, the lengthy absence from loved ones, and the lack until the late nineteenth century of electronic means of communication, meant that a good portion of time was spent in letter writing. Much of what we know about the “deep” life of spas and seaside resorts depends on these accounts. Much of what contemporaries knew must also have relied on correspondence. When visitors arrived they would often come with their minds preprogrammed by letters from friends and relatives. For those engaged in producing the correspondence there would be a regular textualization of their experiences, as they recorded—and in the process shaped, structured, and remodeled—the events of the day and evening. This would also be the case, perhaps more so, for those who kept personal diaries. Even the humble hotel guestbook provided the opportunity to encapsulate a holiday experience and transmit its essence to new arrivals. 36

Just as well-off visitors had high levels of literacy in the written and printed word, so they also understood how to read complex visual texts. Paintings, drawings, and reproductions of resort topography and the surrounding natural environment were widely available. 37 In 1800 John Wallis, book, map, and print seller of London, sent his son, also John, to the small but select new coastal resort of Sidmouth in Devon, to open a library and print shop on the sea front from which visitors could purchase views of the resort and surrounding area. Not only would these provide an attractive souvenir of a visit, and something to show off to house guests, but they also shaped the way that tourists perceived and consumed the landscape. Certain painters, and schools of artists, like novelists, became associated with particular resorts and molded the public vision of these locations; Joseph Mallord William Turner painted the south coast resorts of Britain, and the French impressionists and modernists migrated en masse to the Mediterranean in the later nineteenth century, leading to the association of Henri Matisse with Nice and Pablo Picasso with Antibes. But visitors were not only consumers. Painting and drawing were considered polite skills, and many resorts possessed professional artists who could supplement their income through teaching. In this capacity, like letter writers and diarists, visitors were directly involved in textualizing their own and others’ experiences. Many of these amateur efforts would have been poor, and for those involved frustrating, imitations of reality. However, the arrival of photography, and particularly of the portable camera and roll film at the very end of the nineteenth century, allowed even the most inept “artist” to produce accurate holiday snaps and therefore to engage directly in the process of resort visualization. In the early twentieth century camera technology was still relatively expensive. But by the later nineteenth century, for working-class holidaymakers, as well as their middle-class counterparts, there was the cheap, mass-produced picture postcard, disseminating resort images across regional and national boundaries (see chapters by Butler , Schaff , and Young in this volume).

Nationalism, Imperialism, and Transnationalism

Spas and seaside resorts encouraged mobility. Even if many subsequently grew into sites of permanent or semipermanent residence, they were built around a population of migrants, whether of a temporary or permanent character, and whether in the role of consumer (tourist) or producer (service provider). With the seasonal movements of visitors, many across regional and national borders, and with each migrant being a cultural vector, resorts had the potential to erode local cultures and cultivate transregional and transnational identities and norms. The extent of cultural exchange depended upon the nature of the clientele involved and the distance that they traveled. The better off had the capacity to journey farther and acquired cultural capital by doing so. This meant that fashionable spas and seaside resorts were more likely to encourage transnational exchanges than popular resorts, which catered very largely to an indigenous working- and lower-middle-class market, over which they held a virtual monopoly until the rise of the cheap airborne package holiday. The Blackpool model was not easily exportable, though it was influential across the four nations of the United Kingdom. 38 The fashionable resort’s transnational impact was enhanced by three factors. The first was the inclination among resort entrepreneurs to emulate and replicate existing prestigious models; second was the key role that was played by text, especially printed text, with its reproductive capacity, in generating and spreading ideas; and third was the eighteenth-century Enlightenment origins of the modern spa and resort. This encouraged the adoption of a universalist culture that favored metropolitan and international values at the expense of vernacular local ones. The consequence was a tendency for spas and coastal resorts to be engineered to deliver a common set of cosmopolitan institutions and practices. Place emulation, and the transnational implications of this, can be seen in the way that resorts were described and advertised. Biarritz (France) has been portrayed as the inspiration for North Berwick in Scotland (“the Biarritz of the North”), Aberystwyth (“the Biarritz of Wales”), and Copocabana Beach (the “Brazilian Biarritz”), as has Nice for Wiesbaden (the “Nice of the North”), Opatija (the “Austrian Nice”), and Copocabana Beach (the “Nice of Atlantic beaches”). Hepburn Spring has been called “the Carlsbad of Australia,” Pula (Croatia) “the Austrian Portsmouth,” and the Brijuni Islands off Pula “a unique kind of spa, a garden by the sea, a rarity, perhaps only comparable to the Isle of Wight.” 39

The dissemination of a generic resort model was aided by the modern European imperialist project, as it had been in the ancient world by the growth of the Roman Empire. Resorts became a tool for fostering and spreading the “civilized” values of the colonial elite, for protecting the health and curing the ailments of colonizers, and for providing them with a pre- and post-retirement haven. This pertained at home as well as abroad. From the later eighteenth century Bath’s resident population was swelled by retired military personnel and colonial administrators, while in the nineteenth century, as Eric T. Jennings argues, Vichy attracted colonists from throughout the French Empire. 40 How far the European resort model was modified by the impact of local cultures and economies is a key issue and remains as relevant today in the “post-imperialist” world. 41 Though imperialism might have helped spread the European model, it was also closely related to the rise of dynamic nationalism, which was undermining the universalist ethos of the Enlightenment by the later nineteenth century. In the case of spas this gave rise, as Jill Steward and Douglas Mackaman show, to “thermal nationalism,” with an expectation that citizens should patronize their native national or regional spas. The British medical press in the form of the Lancet could write in 1899, “There is no real reason why patients … should take the long journey to the continental spas when equally good results can be obtained at Bath.” After the Franco-Prussian War the French stopped visiting German and Austro-Hungarian spas. In the diverse Austria-Hungarian Empire, different national, regional, ethnic, and linguistic groups began to patronize spas that reflected their loyalties. Hungarians eschewed Austrian resorts; Austrians avoided spas that were known to be frequented by the Jewish middle class. The small but expanding mid-Wales spas of the later nineteenth century attracted different national/linguistic communities, the English gathering in Llandrindod and Welsh speakers in Llanwrtyd, where there were weekly eisteddfodau (a Welsh language cultural festival) at Victoria Wells during the season (see chapters by Zuelow and Jennings in this volume). 42

Enduring Significance and Appeal

The modern spa and seaside town were forged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as sites of health and leisure. They went on to flourish in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were a major influence—perhaps the single most important influence—behind the growing tourist industry that swept across Europe and became a global phenomenon. Powerful models of spa and seaside emerged, closely related to each other, and exerted a strong influence on the form of new resort locations. Though these models changed over time and spawned many variants, they created a resort culture that revolved around complementary regimes of health and leisure and became a key mechanism through which modern society, and in particular its elites and classes, have been constructed and reconstructed. The success of a resort depended not only upon investing heavily in real facilities, but also upon building an image that met visitor expectations and shaped their experiences. Written and visual texts were critical in facilitating this. Resorts were migrant driven. This led to continuous flows of visitors, entrepreneurs, and service personnel, and with them transregional and transnational cultural exchanges. The resort models encouraged an international cosmopolitanism. Though this always had to be mediated through local and regional contexts, was problematized by imperialism, and was threatened by the rise of nationalism in the later nineteenth century, new technologies of travel and communication, allied to a broader process of globalization, have helped sustain the spa’s and seaside’s role in promoting cultural transnationalism.

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2024 Development Update: The Caribbean

Ever popular for tropical island getaways, the region continues to heat up

Words by: Stephanie Chen • Photos + renderings by Four Seasons, Rhian Campbell, Peter Island Resort, Prompt Collective, and Salterra

There is an allure to the Caribbean islands that continues to draw travelers back to its deep azure waters and white sand beaches season after season, making it a prime landscape for hospitality developments. At the end of 2021, the 369-key Ritz-Carlton, Grand Cayman emerged from a $50 million renovation led by New York-based Champalimaud Design, which was followed by the opening of nearly 30 new hotels to date, according to Q4 2023 data from Lodging Econometrics.

Ongoing activity continues to surge in the Caribbean, with Lodging Econometrics data reporting a pipeline of 151 hotels totaling 31,300 rooms. The Dominican Republic currently has the busiest queue with 48 projects under development, among them the Four Seasons Resort and Residences Dominican Republic at Tropicalia , a 60-acre luxury destination situated along the Playa Esmeralda beachfront. Designed by Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld, the 95-key resort with 25 branded residences will debut in early 2026 with a sustainably minded tropical modernist design.

Seafoam green walls set the tone at the Silver Palm Bar at the Ritz-Carlton Grand Cayman

Also on the horizon is Somewhere Else , a resort by Dave Grutman and Pharrell Williams (the duo previously teamed up on Miami’s Goodtime Hotel in 2021) that will make its way to Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas, as well as the Studio Munge-designed Vie L’Ven Luxury Resort & Residences on the island of St. Maarten.

This year alone, the region is positioned for significant growth with 30 projects poised to make a splash, including the under-construction St. Regis Aruba Palm Beach Resort ; Grenada’s Six Senses La Sagesse , which marks the brand’s first Caribbean property; and the soon-to-open JW Marriott St. Maarten Beach Resort & Spa .

Hotel Indigo Grand Cayman

Farouki Farouki is behind the design of Hotel Indigo Grand Cayman, shown in a rendering

Another, the 282-key Hotel Indigo Grand Cayman , is set to open its doors on the famous Seven Miles Beach. Situated on the largest of the three Cayman Islands, it will feature a multi-concept dining hub, an outdoor deck with an infinity pool, more than 7,500 square feet of event space, and the island’s first rooftop lounge.

The property—the handiwork of Farouki Farouki —is a bohemian celebration of the natural landscape and traditions, showcasing handmade pottery and local artwork. “One challenge was tapping into and telling the local story of Grand Cayman in an authentic way,” says Caroline Farouki, partner at the New Orleans-based firm. “One might come to Grand Cayman and miss some of the rich culture that is hiding just below the surface. The land and people are beautiful and storied, and we’re proud of how the design expresses that.”

The island’s relaxed spirit is alive in every part of the hotel. Guestrooms are youthful yet sophisticated with clean lines and an earthy palette reminiscent of caymanite, a local stone, which “juxtaposes the teal of the Caribbean Sea,” says Farouki. Meanwhile, meeting rooms feature an ombré carpet that mirrors the water, with custom woven ceiling panels that nod to traditional thatch weaving. “The spaces feel special, natural, and inviting,” she adds.

Peter Island Resort

A two-bedroom villa at Peter Island Resort in the British Virgin Islands

Over in the British Virgin Islands is Peter Island Resort , which will soon welcome guests once again after hurricane damage forced its doors closed in 2017. The property emerges from its six-year renovation, with interiors by Finnish firm Kudos Dsign Oy and architecture by OBMI , a local firm that oversaw the early iterations of Peter Island’s design in the 1970s. The property “served as a significant milestone in the beginning of tourism in the BVI,” says OBMI CEO Doug Kulig.

Peter Island reopens with 52 new rooms, a new arrival journey, entertainment areas, a yacht club, a pool bar and grill, and renewed wellness amenities. As a reflection of the Caribbean’s vibrant ecosystems, the design palette incorporates muted shades of turquoise, earth tones nodding to the island’s clay and volcanic formations, and pops of coral. Everything, from the stone pathways to handcrafted wooden furniture and woven reed details, “is an intentional nod to the beauty of nature and the rich tapestry of the island’s heritage, creating an immersive and unforgettable experience,” says Pia Litokorpi, founder and creative director of Kudos.

An indoor-outdoor space at the Strand, shown in a rendering, maximizes views of Cooper Jack Bay

Further east across the Caribbean Sea in the Turks and Caicos archipelago, two new developments are touching down this fall, one of which is the Strand in Providenciales. Nestled in the heart of Cooper Jack Bay, the property will open with 41 beachfront villas and residences.

Brought to life by Fort Lauderdale-based studio Modus Operandi and RAD Architecture ’s Miami office, the hotel’s design is kept clean and minimal to draw eyes to the water. Coral stone cladding and pavers in natural sandy tones mimic the rugged coastline, while deep brown pergolas take cues from driftwood, creating “a color palette inspired by the contextual beauty of the land,” says Peter Christensen, project architect at RAD Architecture. The accommodations maximize both indoor and outdoor spaces via large sliding doors that extend living areas out onto views of the bay, along with terraces equipped with outdoor kitchens, plunge pools, and hot tubs.

About 80 percent of the property’s power runs on solar, with many of the buildings designed to conceal panels that harvest and store energy in a Tesla Powerwall. “[We are] striving to be as sustainable as possible without detracting from the rustic elegance,” Christensen adds.

A rendering of Regatta, among several F&B offerings at the upcoming Salterra, A Luxury Collection Resort & Spa in Turks and Caicos

Marriott is gearing up to unveil Salterra, a Luxury Collection Resort & Spa , this fall in South Caicos—an island on the southeastern side of the Turks and Caicos archipelago. This debut will mark the collection’s first property in Turks and Caicos and will comprise 100 guestrooms and suites, a spa with eight treatment rooms, and six distinct F&B concepts.

Located between the ocean on one side and the salt flats on the other, Salterra “takes cues from nature, vestiges of colonialism, and the beauty of erosion and rejuvenation,” says Malcolm Berg, president and design director of EoA Group , who is leading the resort’s design. “Our materials and colors reflect the passage of time—they are deferential to natural patinas, with rust hues and cerulean blues splashing over a canvas of salty whites.” South Caicos was a major 16-century salt export hub, “a history that is reflected in the resort’s design,” Berg points out, “with whitewashed stucco buildings adorned with colorful shutters reminiscent of the buildings where salt was once stored.”

The Ocean Club, Four Seasons Residences, Bahamas

A rendering of a living area in the Ocean Club Four Seasons Residences, set to debut in 2027

Situated close to the resort bearing the same name, the 67-key Ocean Club, Four Seasons Residences in the Bahamas is set to debut in 2027, coinciding with the property’s 60th anniversary.

Featuring architecture by 10SB (formerly SB Architects) with interiors from New York-based Champalimaud Design , the Ocean Club residences will feature an oceanfront swimming pool, private library, rum room, coworking space, children’s playroom, and wellness spas. Residents will also have access to the resort’s amenities, including the Versailles-inspired gardens and Dune restaurant by Michelin-starred chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

“There is a timeless backdrop at the Ocean Club, [but] the specialty areas possess their own identity and a use of color that is stronger than in similar projects we’ve done in the past,” says Winston Kong, partner at Champalimaud Design. The living areas draw inspiration from the Ocean Club’s heritage, where a British colonial style of dark-stained woods and ivory tones are “enlivened with the rich red of sea coral immersed in the ocean’s many shades of blue.” Herringbone wood floors run underfoot, meeting rattan chairs, beaded wood, and sculptural chandeliers.

From the dark, moody library to the bustling F&B areas, “there’s something for everyone, and the greatest strength of the project is the flexibility of space that provides sanctuary for however one might feel,” he says, adding that “people can feel that serenity and tranquility, but also enjoy the conveniences of contemporary life.”

2024 Development Update: Singapore

Apr 15, 2024.

2024 Development Update: Morocco

Apr 02, 2024.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Innovative development of small resort towns: the triad of science, business, and education provisionally accepted.

1 York Entrepreneurship Development Institute (YEDI), Canada

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Urban areas are places associated with the transformation of ideas into practices, social initiatives, and spatial economics. The study aims to assess the triad interaction between education, science, and business as a multiplier on the socio-economic development in the region. The study built a conceptual model of socio-economic space in the context of innovative urban development: the unity of education, science, and business. The statistical analysis allowed the author to substantiate the peculiarities of the local triad. The study revealed correlations in the influence of education, science, and business on changes in the regional system. The paper suggests that the triad of education, science, and business rests on territorial specifics. This feature is the determining factor of innovative development in the field of resort towns. The presented research uses the quantitatively measured influence of the triad as a multiplier by combining values of the unity of education, science, and business. The study found that the mentioned indicator reflects the well-being and quality of the labor resources in the region. On the one hand, the multiplicative influence of the triad is a guarantee of an increase in the well-being level within the borders of the region. On the other hand, it requires adaptation of the innovative development of resort towns to the current growth of the workforce and a decrease in innovative advantages on a local scale. The findings provide policymakers with significant indicators on the way to stabilizing the regional economy and effective decision-making. The study of the interaction between education, science, and business in the context of socioeconomic development can become a crucial tool for formulating policies aimed at stabilizing the region's economy and improving the quality of life of its residents, particularly in resort cities. The obtained results can provide guidelines for the development of innovation support programs and the planning of investment strategies, taking into account the specifics of territorial conditions.

Keywords: Innovation management, knowledge society, resort area, small urban ecosystems, spatial economy, Sustainable cities

Received: 18 Sep 2023; Accepted: 15 Apr 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Ressin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Marat Ressin, York Entrepreneurship Development Institute (YEDI), Toronto, Canada

People also looked at

Diagram description 1 – The development of a tourist resort

Diagram description – the diagram shows the process in which a tourist resort can develop and grow. summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features..

The diagram illustrates different stages of the development of a tourist resort.

At first, new hotels are constructed and employ staff for their operations. Also, they create demand for local businesses and suppliers which in turn support the construction of new hotels. The growth in such businesses and the advent of new hotels then attract other companies to move into the area. Workers from these newly arriving companies and new hotels, with their expense in the local area, increase the area’s tax and revenue which then help expand the job market. The same effect is created when local services and new business comers indirectly generate more jobs for the resort. The financial gain is subsequently used to develop infrastructure, and quality of tourism services as well as advertise for the images of this hospitality industry. When the area becomes well-known, more profits and revenue is expected for reinvesting into building up new hotels. However, in reinvestment into expansion plans, some money is lost through leakages.

In general, the development of a tourist resort follows a complicated process in which components have close and even two-way relationships to improve the area in various aspects. (193w)

The diagram illustrates the links among stages a tourist attraction goes through in its development.

As is clearly shown, after new hotels are constructed, their operations directly generate hospitality jobs. Another aftermath of hotel establishment is the demand for local suppliers which, together with the coming of hotels, attracts other businesses to constellate in the neighbourhood. The expenses of workers in hotels and other companies in the area contribute to increase tax collection which together with businesses in the area indirectly creates more jobs. Noticeably, this addition of jobs and the increase in local income from tax and living expenses have a reciprocal relationship.

The more people spend and pay tax, the more money is poured into enhancing infrastructure and tourism which in turn makes the area become more popular as a tourist hot spot. This yields even more profit for reinvestment to build up new hotels with support from local supply businesses. However, in this construction, some money may be lost through leakages.

Overall, different factors in the development of a tourist resort have mutual relationships that favour the growth of the industry, the supporting services and the local area as a whole. (194 words)

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Tourism revenue increases as Sunseeker Resort fills hotel room deficit

Doherty said Sunseeker Resort has “mitigated the loss of approximately 250 hotel rooms that we lost to Hurricane Ian.”

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EXPLORING THE EVOLUTION OF TOURISM RESORTS

2004, Annals of Tourism Research

This paper examines evolutionary patterns in tourism from an economic geography perspective. It proposes a new theoretical model where endogenous changes to the tourism circuit lead to a dualism in market and spatial structures: powerful conglomerates share the markets with a competitive fringe and core resorts share tourism spaces with peripheral destinations. The model illustrates graphically the interaction of market and spatial forces and studies implications for resort development. The short run analysis examines the relationship among origin regions, core, and peripheral resorts; smooth and abrupt long term patterns are subsequently explored. The paper also gives directions to operationalize the model and suggests themes for future research.L’évolution des lieux de vacances. Ce papier aborde des tendances évolutionnaires en tourisme de point de vue économique-géographique. Il propose un nouveau modèle théorique où les changements endogènes au circuit touristique mènent à un dualisme du marché et des structures spatiales: des conglomérats puissants partagent les marchés avec des petites sociétés compétitives et les lieux des vacances coeur partagent l’espace touristique avec des destinations périphériques. Le modèle illustre graphiquement l’interaction entre les puissances du marché et les puissances spatiales et étudie les implications en ce qui concerne le développement de lieu des vacances. L’étude à court terme traite la relation entre régions d’origine et lieux de vacances cœurs et périphériques; ensuite elle aborde des tendances à long terme douces et brutales. Le papier donne également des directions concernant la mise en place du modèle et propose des futurs thèmes de recherche.

Related Papers

Panagiotis Chatzopoulos , Zoe Georgiadou , Dionissia Fragkou

The product of hotel consists of a combination of services and commodities. The cultural experience is the result of a mixture of these elements. But the location is the one that provides the specific product with characteristics for each unit. The standard of Greek tourism product (3S) was bound to mass tourism for years. Local resources were exhausted by this standard and areas been developed in an anarchistic and uncontrolled way. Εndogenous development can be a proposal to solve the development problems caused by the previous policy. " Amalia " hotels group is one of the oldest hotel chains in Greece and includes six luxury hotels located in different touristic destinations, founded during a period of 35 years. Through this 35years long period, the touristic model has been altered, following the developments in transportation technologies (means, information technology, telecommunication, digital communication), as well as social achievements (working rights, social security). These developments took place simultaneously with the tourist product and differentiated the meaning of travelling and hospitality. The three hotels chosen as case studies in this paper are the following: " Amalia " Hotel of Athens City (1956) a building subsumed into the modernism movement within the frame of holistic design and qualitative tourism. " Amalia " Hotel of Olympia (1979) is constructed in a period in which the turn to mass tourism model was completed. Nevertheless, the hotel remains focused on qualitative tourism, which is the " Amalia " hotel group's strategy. " Amalia " Hotel of Kalambaka (1991) is a building where the architectural design introduces certain elements from the local traditional architecture. During this period the touristic model was transformed from mass tourism product to quality customized tourism product. The methodological tools for this research are the use of archival material (photographs and architectural plans), interviews and PEST analysis method concerning the characteristics of the touristic models, in order to establish a connection between the hotel environment (macro-spatial parameters) and the intertemporal transitions of the Greek Touristic models. These are connected, in our point of view, with the architectural analysis of the case studies, which will reveal the relationship between location, product and model. In conclusion, we consider the adjustment of the local economy according to the characteristics of endogenous development.

Annals of the University of Oradea: Economic Science

Afrodita Borma

Third year PhD candidate at the University of Oradea, under the guidance of Professor Mrs. Alina Bădulescu in the doctoral research project entitled: "Doctoral studies and Ph.D. candidates for competitive research on a knowledge based society", a co-financed project by the European Social Fund through the Sectoral Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007 - 2013, Priority Axis 1. "Education and training in support for growth and development of a knowledge based society" I chose to present this subject in order to demonstrate the connection that exists between tourism and regional development. Having as research topic "Tourism and development in the Euro regional context" I felt it would be appropriate to devote a subchapter in presenting the impact of tourism in regional development. Thus I have analysed a number of specialised papers found at national and international level in order to achieve a synthesis on the approached topic. Author...

Roberto Paolo Vico

Antònia Casellas

SSRN Electronic Journal

Javier Rey-maquieira

Annals of Tourism Research

Jaume Rossello

Ilie Rotariu

the development of scientifically techniques of production and researches in social fields has led to new approaches of history and future of economy and thus of mankind. The post industrial theory was followed by experience economy and its new stage of co-creation. The paper proposes a new draft model under the sign of bio structural theory and entropy one in a holistic approach where the men creative tools lead to a symbiosis of noesic and silicon complexes. In developed countries the disposal free time is the result of the new stage of experience economy as a result of technical progress. The social – economic science allows the control of the development of society for the benefit of capitalist economy. The new scientific applications have started to get into and change the human nature. A holist modus opernadi might allow the unification of different outlooks during the global economies.

Cuadernos de Turismo

Macia Blazquez-Salom

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics

Rossana Galdini

Ecological Economics

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Melbourne mayor: planned margaritaville resort still a ‘go’, 7-story, 146-room hotel in the works since 2018.

Haley Coomes , Digital Content Producer

James Sparvero , Reporter

MELBOURNE, Fla. – It appears interest rates are to blame for holding up the development of the Space Coast’s first Margaritaville. That’s the claim from Mayor Paul Alfrey.

Compass Landing by Margaritaville, which will bring the chain resort, restaurant, and riverwalk to Melbourne, has been in the works for several years. On Monday, Alfrey posted on social media that while the project is still a go, it’s experiencing massive cost escalation. Originally the project was estimated to cost $50 million. Costs are now expected to be approximately $100 million to $120 million.

[EXCLUSIVE: Become a News 6 Insider (it’s FREE) | PINIT! Share your photos ]

“The development team has been waiting for interest rates to come down. However, they really have not,” said Alfrey. “Their team is now weighing their option of a couple of outside financing partners to get work back underway.”

Melbourne City Council members first approved bringing the Jimmy Buffett-themed Margaritaville complex to life in May 2022. According to the original plans, the hotel - located on South Harbor City Boulevard - will feature 146 rooms, multiple restaurants, a panoramic rooftop bar, and a pool area with a tiki bar. The stage area and connecting lawn, spanning about 14,000 square feet, will also be built to accommodate local entertainment and about 1,000 people.

Alfrey added that he will provide updates as the project moves forward.

Casey Runte from Melbourne said he thinks the project will be great for the city.

“I think that it helps revitalize an area that greatly needs it,” he said. “It takes an unused, vacant lot that was previously a waterfront restaurant and marina and makes it a serviceable marina.”

Runte also thinks boaters would enjoy using the marina to dine at the resort. Some other residents have expressed their worries about traffic and an influx of tourists to the city.

Runte said he wasn’t concerned.

“I think Mayor Alfrey has done a wonderful job building the Melbourne community, building up areas that have had crime and homelessness issues, which this is one of them, and make them a safer, more beautiful part of our town,” he said.

Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily :

About the Authors

Haley coomes.

Haley is a digital content producer for ClickOrlando.com and first started as a News 6 producer in October 2014. She's a graduate of Indiana University with a Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism. She specializes in theme parks and lifestyle writing.

James Sparvero

James joined News 6 in March 2016 as the Brevard County Reporter. His arrival was the realization of a three-year effort to return to the state where his career began. James is from Pittsburgh, PA and graduated from Penn State in 2009 with a degree in Broadcast Journalism.

Development of Tourism Resort Areas in Arid Regions

Shaul Krakover 2

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Part of the book series: The GeoJournal Library ((GEJL,volume 4))

On a sequence of population densities, the location of tourism industries seems to represent a bi-nodal pattern: on the one hand, tourism facilities tend to concentrate in the large urban centres and on the other hand they exhibit a tendency towards isolated and sparsely populated areas in the countryside or on small islands. However, while small islands tend to become crowded due to the influx of mass tourism (Benchley, 1982), the isolated environment of arid lands, still remains largely untapped.

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Amiran, D. H. K. : 1977, ’Arid Zone Development: A Case of Limited Choices’, in Mundlak, Y. and Singer, S. F. (eds.), Arid Zone Development: Potentialities and Problems , Cambridge, Mass., Ballinger, pp. 3–17.

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Yitshaki, A. (ed.): 1979, Madrich Israel , (Israel Guide) Jerusalem, Keter Press, Vol. 9 (Hebrew).

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Krakover, S. (1985). Development of Tourism Resort Areas in Arid Regions. In: Gradus, Y. (eds) Desert Development. The GeoJournal Library, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5396-3_17

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Uganda Tourism Board tasked on Speke Resort convention centre

________________________

The Uganda Development Corporation (UDC) has asked government agencies and Ministries to market Speke Resort convention centre in and out of the country.

Promoting the centre as a tourism and conference infrastructure would bring in more foreign earnings and position Uganda with the capacity to host global conferences, UDC executive director, Patrick Birungi, said.

The convention centre hosted the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the G77+ China in January.

While addressing the media shortly after the inspection of the centre, Birungi said the main purpose of the centre was to host the NAM and G77 summit that ended and currently the centre is free but can still serves other purposes.

“The main purpose of this centre was to host NAM and G77+ China summit but currently the centre is not in use. The facility is currently available for meetings, and conferences among other events from both within Uganda and globally,” Birungi said observing the need to attract business to the convention centre.

Uganda Tourism Board, government agencies, private sector, and public sector, please let us market this centre in our various meetings and bring the conference here that we are ready to host here. The seating capacity of the conference hall stands at 3800 people both in the gallery and main hall down.

This is the largest convention centre in the region and none is comparable to it,” Birungi revealed.

He noted that UDC is a partner in the convention centre owning 50% of the shares of the centre and other shares are owned by Meera Investment Limited owned by the Ruparelia Group of companies.

Birungi said that in Commonwealth Resort, the government owns only 25% of the shares.

The chairman of the Ruparelia Group of companies Sudhir Ruparelia said when the construction of the convention centre started in 2023, 99.9% of the people never believed that the convention centre would be completed on time adding this he and some of his family members had to sleep at the construction site to see that the work is done perfectly and completed on time.

“Sheena Ruparelia slept at the construction site for six months. Every day they started the construction at 6:00 am and left at 11:00 pm. I slept at the construction site for four months and my wife and other daughters Meera Ruparelia were also here at the construction site supervising,” Sudhir said adding that the construction of the centre was a big commitment of the family.

Sudhir revealed that within one year, the work design was done and construction commenced he had to import 400 containers of construction, furniture, and chandeliers among others.

“Our neighboring countries are marketing their centres and hope that we can also do the same to see that this centre is marketed to,” Sudhir said.

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COMMENTS

Integrated resort: A review of research and directions for future study
Integrated resort development. In the tourism industry, Ap (1992) proposed the conceptual framework for explaining the impact of residents' perceptions on tourism development based on social exchange theory. According to his argument, residents evaluate tourism development by assessing expected benefits or costs obtained in return for their ...
Tourism destination development: the tourism area life cycle model
Introduction and definition. The tourist area life cycle (Butler, 1980) has been in existence for over four decades since its publication in The Canadian Geographer and was described by Hall and Butler ( 2006, p. xv) as 'one of the most cited and contentious areas of tourism knowledge…. (and) has gone on to become one of the best known ...
The Development of a Sustainable Resort and Indicators
Figure 2 Influence of Stakeholders on sustainable development 3 . 2 Summary of the key sustainability issues for sustainable resort The key sustainability issues [1-5, 9] for resort stakeholders are social, economic and environmental issues. Table 1 shows all factors relevant to the development of sustainable tourism for hotels. 1.Resort staff 2.
The Concept of Resort Regions (Territories) Sustainable Development
The image of the resort begins to play a dominant role in ensuring the current requirements for quality of the living environment, recreation, tourism, and resort areas sustainable development, which should be developed based on regional development strategies.
EXPLORING THE EVOLUTION OF TOURISM RESORTS
The above-described evolutionary processes are not entirely new to the literature. Nonetheless, this paper nests some of the existing models of tourism development and their critiques within a wider context. This is internally consistent and explicitly systemic as it treats different origins and resorts simultaneously.
Resort Development
A long-standing resort development concept conveys a multi-stage life cycle which itself draws from Butler's tourism area life cycle.Though derived originally from other disciplines including regional planning and marketing, the model has become extensively cited by tourism scholars and has provided a reference point for the many empirical studies over subsequent decades in developed and ...
Coastal tourist resorts: history, development and models
The resort development spectrum (a new approach to modelling resort development). Tourism Management, 21, 225-240. PRIESTLEY, G. and Mundet, L. (1998). The post-stagnation phase of the resort life-cycle. Annals of Tourism Research, 25 (1), 85-111. PROSSER, G. (1995) "Tourism destination life cycles: Progress, problems and prospects" Paper ...
Rethinking Resort Development Through the Concept of ...
Research on the evolution, transformation and restructuring of tourist resorts has flourished since the 1970s. Since Butler's (1980, 2006) study, this change has been framed as either a tourism area life-cycle with several stages, or as the restructuring of tourist resorts (Williams and Shaw 1997; Agarwal 2012), but there are also more historically driven attempts in order to understand how ...
Full article: Tourism and Development Theory: Which Way Now?
ABSTRACT. Tourism has long been explored through the lens of development theory. David Harrison was one of the earlier academics to do so, subsequently turning his attention to critiquing the relevance of such theory to tourism, concluding that although much tourism research has been framed within it, development theory has contributed little if anything to knowledge and understanding of the ...
The Resort Development Spectrum (a New Approach to Modelling Resort
Tourism development in resort areas is found to occur in four phases commencing with local tourism and concluding with a fourth phase where the resort develops a strong international profile. A ...
Spas and Seaside Resorts
The health-giving properties attributed to water made the spa's pedigree considerably older than that of the coastal resort, whose modern European incarnations emerged in Britain and on the continent in the eighteenth century. Thereafter the geography of the resort expanded, and its development was bound up with the growth of mass leisure ...
(PDF) Resort development
Sam Cole. View. Show abstract. Beach Resort Evolution: Implications for Planning. R Smith. Victoria Razak. Brian E M King. Brian E M King. PDF | On Jan 1, 2014, Brian E. M. King published Resort ...
Sustainable resort-related tourism growth: Identifying challenges and
Novelty: This study pioneers the investigation of sustainability in resort-related tourism growth in the Philippines using the case of Montalban Rizal and the use of the system model in the ...
The resort lifecycle theory: Generating Processes and Estimation
Since Butler (1980) wrote his original article on destination development, his lifecycle model has been widely discussed, applied, and accepted as a conceptual framework for analyzing the historical progression of resorts from a variety of perspectives (Buhalis 2000).The five stages in Butler's theory are illustrated in Figure 1.A few tourists, simple facilities, unspoiled nature, and ...
2024 Development Update: The Caribbean
Also on the horizon is Somewhere Else, a resort by Dave Grutman and Pharrell Williams (the duo previously teamed up on Miami's Goodtime Hotel in 2021) that will make its way to Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas, as well as the Studio Munge-designed Vie L'Ven Luxury Resort & Residences on the island of St. Maarten.. This year alone, the region is positioned for significant growth with ...
Resort development
Evolving resort development concepts. The manifestation of tourism evolution through the resort development process may be physical and/or conceptual. Those studying or implementing such properties gather inputs from disciplines ranging from design and urban and regional planning to architecture. Historically, resorts are more commonly located ...
PDF Sustainable Development of Small Island Tourism Resort: A Case ...
Therefore, sustainable development in tourism would keep balancing the impact - ensuring conservation is taken into account whilst harvesting the monetary benefits. The purpose of this study is to explore local community attitudes towards tourism development in Egang-egang Resort Bum-Bum Island Semporna. This study will particularly
PDF The evolution of accommodation services in a coastal resort town
the nexus of tourism and small town local economic development. Tourism-led local development as a focus for economic regeneration and the making of post-productivist landscapes has captured the imagination and attention of several scholars with popular recent research foci in alignment with international writings (eg.
Innovative Development of Small Resort Towns: The Triad of Science
Urban areas are places associated with the transformation of ideas into practices, social initiatives, and spatial economics. The study aims to assess the triad interaction between education, science, and business as a multiplier on the socio-economic development in the region. The study built a conceptual model of socio-economic space in the context of innovative urban development: the unity ...
Diagram description 1
Diagram description - The diagram shows the process in which a tourist resort can develop and grow. Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features. Version 1: The diagram illustrates different stages of the development of a tourist resort. At first, new hotels are constructed and employ staff for their operations.
Sunseeker Resort boosts Charlotte County tourism revenue
Charlotte County Tourism Development Tax collections improved with the opening of Sunseeker Resort Charlotte Harbor playing a significant role, said Sean Doherty, tourism director of the Punta ...
(PDF) Resort-oriented tourism development and local tourism networks
In tourism studies, it has been widely recognized that resort-oriented tourism development creates challenges for regional development, mainly due to its enclave nature and lack of regional ...
EXPLORING THE EVOLUTION OF TOURISM RESORTS
At present, asymmetry is an inherent feature of spatial competition among different resort areas (it is best to talk about whole resort areas than individual destinations as neighborhood effects might create network synergies for a number of tourism urban entities; for example, the development of Brighton had originally positive signaling ...
The resort development spectrum
Tourism development in resort areas is found to occur in four phases commencing with local tourism and concluding with a fourth phase where the resort develops a strong international profile. A possible fifth phase of decline, stagnation or rejuvenation is also postulated. The model does not find that growth is automatic or even sequential ...
Melbourne Mayor: Planned Margaritaville resort still a 'go'
MELBOURNE, Fla. - It appears interest rates are to blame for holding up the development of the Space Coast's first Margaritaville. That's the claim from Mayor Paul Alfrey. Compass Landing by ...
Development of Tourism Resort Areas in Arid Regions
Abstract. On a sequence of population densities, the location of tourism industries seems to represent a bi-nodal pattern: on the one hand, tourism facilities tend to concentrate in the large urban centres and on the other hand they exhibit a tendency towards isolated and sparsely populated areas in the countryside or on small islands. However ...
PDF legislature.vermont.gov
legislature.vermont.gov
Shingle Springs tribe discusses next steps for 301 Capitol Mall
Apr 15, 2024. The Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians is still adjusting to the concept of owning 301 Capitol Mall, perhaps the highest-profile vacant lot in the entire Sacramento region. While ...
PDF DEVELOPMENT OF TOURISM RESORT AREAS IN ARID REGIONS
the early stages of the tourism development effort. The four inherent pre-conditions for the development of tourism resorts in deserts discussed in this section appear to be interrelated. The dispersed nature of the desert population requires the provision of concentrated housing solutions. In tum, this make infrastructural prerequisites more ...
Uganda Tourism Board tasked on Speke Resort convention centre
_____The Uganda Development Corporation (UDC) has asked government agencies and Ministries to market Speke Resort convention centre in and out of the country.Promoting the centre as a tourism and ...