Living with Tourists

Tourism is the world's largest industry and with predictions it could be worth $15 trillion by the end of this decade, few countries can afford to ignore it. But reactions to hosting tourists vary enormously from place to place.

BBC presenter Ros Atkins grew up in Cornwall where his father was a fisherman and his mother a teacher. When Ros was six, his father got a job with the
UN's FAO and that took the family first to The Bahamas, and then a little later to Trinidad and Tobago.

He has observed a spectrum of such attitudes in those countries - from lingering resentment towards outsiders in his native Cornwall, to an almost obsessive hunger for visitors in the Bahamas.

Trinidad is ambivalent; happy to welcome outsiders but only as equals with its own people while its sister island Tobago seems resigned to being a small player in a big game, with all the problems that entails.

So why should tourism's effects be so disparate? And what wider lessons might we draw from these countries' experiences?

To find out, the BBC packed Ros off on the trip of a lifetime - back to the places he stayed as a child with his itinerant fisherman father.

The relationship between visitor and host is both complex and inevitable. This is an industry that will expand yet further in the next decade. Having made this series I feel I understand far better the impact that's likely to have on people who live with tourists all around them.
Ros Atkins
Talking to top politicians, industry leaders, and tourists themselves, sampling the blazing colour of Caribbean festivals and the chaos of drunken holidaymakers, he uncovers an industry which purports to increase understanding between peoples, but which appears to be encroaching on lives, accentuating inequalities, and straining the most cordial relations between visitor and host.

In programme two, Ros explores the relationship between local culture and tourism.

In the Bahamas, top musicians were flown around the world in the 70s and 80s with the express purpose of encouraging visitors. But the sense that tourism and local culture are on the same side is hard to find even now, even in Nassau.

Which is why it was surprising to find people in all three places now arguing that tourism ignores the importance of culture at its peril. Even in Trinidad, the most ambivalent of places when it comes to tourism, there's a school of thought that tourism may actually help encourage national pride in its cultural heritage.