The effect of hospitality and tourism industry on employment rate in oyun local government, kwara state
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Tourism is not limited only to activities in the accommodation and hospitality sector, transportation sector and entertainment sector with visitor attractions, such as, theme parks, amusement parks, sports facilities, museums etc., but tourism and its management are closely connected to all major functions, processes and procedures that are practiced in various areas related to tourism as a system. Also, tourism industry involves the functions of planning, organizing, coordinating, training and monitoring evaluating at all levels (international, national and regional, local). Therefore, tourism integrated into the functional unit of the economy (Simoni & Mihai, 2012). Although people had always travelled not only for leisure purposes or for relaxation, there had also been those who had travelled for entertainment and business purposes, either to a meeting, conference, workshop, event and etc., and these people or tourists had contributed to the growth of the destinations they had visited directly or indirectly, and at large developed the event tourism industry as a whole. One will agree that tourism whether on a large scale or low scale, in no small measure affects the host community. This is particularly evident during the period of the events and sometimes afterwards. Tourism is an economic sector able to offer a significant contribution to the economic growth of a region and to the labour market, and creates employment opportunities directly and indirectly through the supply of goods and the necessary services for tourist activities. Moreover, tourism produces social benefits to the region (i.e. small and medium-sized enterprises’ development, creation of new jobs, improvement of infrastructure etc.). Culturally, tourism is considered as an element of community enrichment; this is attributed to the meeting of different cultures. Also, tourism can positively contribute to the maintenance of natural environment by protecting, creating or maintaining national parks or other protected areas. Defining the tourist industry is difficult. Tourism means different things to different people, because it is an abstraction of a wide range of consumption activities which demands products and services from a wide range of industries in the economy. For example, OECD (1991) observes that “tourism is a concept that can be interpreted differently depending on the context. ‘Tourism’ may cover the tourists, or what the tourists do, or the agents which cater to them, and so on.” Similarly, WTO (1995) defines tourism as “the activities of persons traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for no more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes”, while at the same time WTO (1996) states that “tourism is thus a rather general term, which can refer to the consumption of tourists, to the production units supplying goods and services particularly to tourists, or even to a set of legal units or of geographical areas related in a way or other to tourists.” To summarize in more concise terms, tourism can be defined as a set of socioeconomic activities carried out either by or for tourists. Those carried out by tourists correspond to what tourists do, while those carried out for tourists correspond to what other socioeconomic institutions do to support the needs of tourists. What is worth emphasizing is that tourism so defined is neither a pure demand-side phenomenon nor a pure supply side one (United Nation and World Tourism Organization, 1993). The tourism industry, in common with many other industries, is made up of a number of sectors.
