THE REAL COST OF TRAVEL Mass tourism is a relatively recent phenomenon. The tourism industry took off in the middle of the last century and it's been growing ever since. In the last ten years especially, more and more people have been travelling to remote places around the world. It's a wonderful thing to be able to travel to places we had previously only read about or seen on television, but what is the downside of it all? What kind of impact does tourism have on the planet?