Package Holidays

Travelling in foreign countries is truly a great experience. Learning about other cultures, religions, cuisines, traditions, meeting new people, discovering landscapes, architecture and places –what can be more exciting?

Throughout the history, people travel all over the world for the variety of purposes. However, it is only in the last fifty years people have been travelling in such huge numbers for pleasure. Until this century only the very rich and leisured people in society had the free time and the money to travel outside their own local area. For instance, it is known that wealthy Romans went to seaside resorts in Greece and Egypt. In the 19^th century the education of the aristocracy was not complete without Grand Tour of Europe’s cultural sites. With the railways and the industrial revolution in Britain working-class people began to travel. A typical family holiday was a day’s trip to the seaside.

Things started to change for ordinary people when in 1860 Thomas Cook of Leicester England organized the first package tour. He offered customers a return trip between Leicester and Loughborough. The first package tour of Europe was organized by Cook in 1855 and some years later he was undertaken world-wide tours, although with small groups. By 1939 an estimated one million people were travelling abroad for holidays each year. By the 1960s cheap package holidays which combined flights, mostly charters, transfers and accommodation provided for most people in the UK to have affordable travel abroad. In the last decades of the 20th century tourism has really taken off. Growing affluence, faster planes and improved facilities mean that more and more people travel abroad every year.

Nowadays everybody can be a traveler and choose a tour according to his taste and purse. There is a big choice of perfect package tours for families, parish, business, school and university groups as well as sport teams, senior, disabled people and others. Travel agencies take care of booking rooms, site visits and routes, specialist tour and guide reservations in castles and museums and other important details to make trips enjoyable and stress-free.