Tourism

Social and technological changes led to an increase in American tourism during the years after World War II. Whether they bathed in the warm sunlight of an idyllic beach, escaped to the serenity of a mountain retreat, enjoyed the hubbub of an urban metropolis, or visited a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon, Americans embraced travel as a part of their lives.

With the end of the war, Americans had more time for leisure and more discretionary income. Many employers provided a week or more of paid vacation time, thus creating opportunities for family trips among an increasingly prosperous population. Moreover, many Americans’ view of their nation and of the world had been broadened by their wartime service in many different parts of the United States and the world. Roughly 1 million American troops and war workers had served in Hawaii alone. During the 1950s, almost 2 million Americans traveled to a foreign country, with many making their first such trip to the nation’s northern neighbor, Canada.

Within the United States and Canada, family road trips experienced new popularity, thanks to changes in automobiles and the roads on which they traveled. The automobile industry’s promotion of station wagons provided a vehicle large enough to serve even large families and their luggage. In 1956, the same year the federal government launched the Interstate Highway Act, one out of every eight cars sold was a station wagon. Completion of the massive highway project dragged out for decades, but better roads began drawing millions of Americans onto the open highway in the 1950s. At the end of a long day on the road, travelers could expect to find reasonably priced and comfortable motel accommodations along the highways. Both Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson’s began seeding franchises across the nation in 1954, and the nation’s stock of hotels doubled during that decade. Unlike motels of the prewar era, which were rustic lodges with few amenities, the new inns offered air-conditioned rooms, free ice, and in-room telephones.

For those who still loved the relaxed pace of rail travel, newly introduced slumber coaches and glass-domed observation cars served as lures, but the area of greatest growth and change in mass transportation was the airline industry. The introduction of tourist-class flights to Europe in 1952 provided expanding opportunities for would-be travelers who were not wealthy. TWA offered the first coast-to-coast flights in 1953, and a year later, airlines surpassed passenger trains to become the top means of mass transportation in the United States. Pan Am inaugurated nonstop flights from New York to London in 1957. In all, the number of American air passengers quadrupled between 1946 and 1957, when 53 million airline tickets were purchased. In late 1958, introduction of jet airliners promised harried tourists shorter travel times.

As interest in tourism grew, the travel industry expanded. Early in the 1960s, group airline fares on chartered flights became a popular way of filling flights at lower costs for consumers, and a single airline—Pan Am—sold 10,000 tickets per week to Americans for flights to the new state of Hawaii. More than one-quarter of American tourists to Hawaii took package tours provided by tourist organizations in 1967, and half of Waikiki’s hotels were booked by travel companies. Travel magazines also experienced new popularity during these years.

Within the United States and abroad, a variety of special interests guided American tourists as they planned vacations. Sports provided travel destinations for many. Some journeyed to watch their favorite teams, while many engaged in athletic activities themselves. Skiing, for instance, drew more than 200,000 enthusiasts per year to Colorado as early as 1953. Entertainment attracted tourists to places like Las Vegas and New York, and THEME PARKS increasingly drew families traveling with youngsters. In 1949, 62 percent of Americans made a vacation trip, and tourist opportunities exploded in the following two decades. Worldwide, tourism grew at a rate of more than 10 percent per year from 1960 through 1974, and among international tourists, Americans were most prevalent.

Further reading: Karen Dubinsky, “Everybody Likes Canadians: Canadians, Americans, and the Post-World War II Travel Boom” in Being Elsewhere, edited by John P. Sisk (Cheney: Eastern Washington University Press, 1994), 320-347; Maxine Feifer, Touris-m in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present (New York: Stein and Day, 1986).

—Alice L. George