The terms “tourism” and “travel” cannot be identified. Firstly, the trip can be short, without an overnight stay, and tourism necessarily involves spending the night outside the house. Secondly, travel is often carried out for the purpose of earning money or changing your place of residence. Tourism cannot pursue such goals, it assumes the opposite — spending money earned by a tourist at home.
It is quite difficult to give a brief and at the same time complete definition of the concept of “tourism”, due to the variety of functions performed by it and a large number of forms of manifestation. According to the definition adopted by the UN in 1954, tourism is an active recreation that affects the strengthening of health, physical development of a person, associated with movement outside the permanent place of residence. In the materials of the World Conference on Tourism, held by the WTO in 1981 in Madrid, the following definition is given: tourism is one of the types of active recreation, which is travel made in order to explore certain areas, new countries and combined in a number of countries with elements of sports. In 1993, the UN Statistical Commission adopted a broader definition: tourism is the activity of persons who travel and stay in places outside their usual environment for a period not exceeding one year in a row, for recreation, business and other purposes.
There are other definitions, and each of them reflects certain aspects of the diverse world of tourism.
The variety of definitions is associated with the duality of the inner nature of tourism itself. On the one hand, tourism is a special case of travel, on the other — the activity of producing a tourist product. In principle, both travel and the production of tourist products are activities. However, production is an economic activity and its purpose is to make a profit, and travel is always movement in space. It is quite difficult to find a line between the goals of travel and the goals of tourism, so it is worth distinguishing between these concepts.