When walking down the street in your local city, it can be incredibly annoying and frustrating when you are stuck behind thousands of tourists all wanting to know directions to somewhere or walking slowly to take in the sites. However, despite whatever inconveniences there might seem to be from this, encouraging tourism is something which should be taken very seriously.

In the current economic climate, there aren’t too many sectors of our culture which can compare in profitability. If you were to take the UK as a sample and look at an average year such as 2009 (figures have been extra high in the last few years from the Olympics and Jubilee etc.) which was bang in the middle of the recession, you will see that tourism brought in around £115 billion, that is the equivalent of around £1916 for every single resident in the United Kingdom. On top of this, in the next few years an expected 2.9 million of the UK population will work in the tourism industry, roughly one in twenty of us.

Based on those figures alone, tourism is something which needs to be massively encouraged and that means that we all have a civic responsibility next time a tourist asks  for directions on the street, to reply kindly and helpfully with a smile and some extra information if we can.

Whilst tourism is a huge industry within the UK, there are some places which rely almost entirely on it as a source of income for their community. Take Okinawa, situated south of Japan. In the video shown above, it is interesting to note how in a place such as this, the locals go above and beyond to ensure that they do everything they can for tourists and visitors because they know that their livelihood depends on it.

If you were to compare that to the UK and to an institution such as the monarchy which creates over half a billion pounds every year for the British economy, it seems almost illogical and certainly naive that there are so many who would do away with the monarchy and its income. Even if they didn’t follow the royals themselves, the economic advantages of having them is beyond doubt and arguably the UK should take a lesson from the people of Okinawa in taking it upon themselves to promote their own livelihood rather than calling for its demise.

In the world today, everyone needs to come together in encouraging their own economy to do as well as possible and that almost certainly means helping the odd tourist on the street out whenever we can!