Small is beautiful. This has been the prevailing mood in tourism over the past decade. We want boutique hotels, cozy bed-and-breakfasts, family-run restaurants serving local fare, city breaks, modest rental cottages, cycling holidays. We shun the sweeping all-you-can-eat hotel buffets, multinational hotel chains, giant cruise ships, carpets of sun loungers on the beach. We seek the isolated and unspoiled and we reject the overdeveloped and congested.
But there is growing evidence that the "big is best" model - typified by the skylines of Cancun, Benidorm and Las Vegas - is fast making a comeback. Across the world, major tourism developments are now planned or under construction that defy the fashion for modesty over brashness. Not since the 1970s have we seen such epical tourism projects.
The spark for much of this about-turn is the success of Dubai, the holiday jewel of the Middle East that has risen rapidly out of the deserts of the eastern Arabian peninsula and which, in just over a decade, has become one of the world's highest-profile tourist destinations. This is a place that is building indoor ski runs in the desert, a theme park twice as large as Florida's Disney World, three skyscrapers vying to be the tallest in the world, hundreds of man-made islands in the sea and a six-runway airport. It's a formula that has been a huge success: from a standing start in the early 1990s, Dubai now attracts 6 million visitors a year. And the infrastructure that is currently under construction aims to attract a staggering 15 million by 2010.
A growing number of countries now aspire to recreate their own Dubai, largely through the rapid construction of mega-resorts serving high spenders seeking luxury. High yield, low volume is the business model for these destinations: why have four tourists spending US$200 a night when you can have one willing to spend US$800? Even countries such as Iran are starting to think like this, as evidenced by the building of the US$2.4 billion Flower of the East development on Kish Island - a vast project that, when finished in 2010, will include a seven-star hotel to rival the famous sail-shaped Burj al Arab across the Persian Gulf in Dubai.
Only time will tell the implications such developments will have for local environments and communities. But some campaign groups fear the worst. "According to the International Tourism Business Partnership, the global tourism industry is now worth US$6.5 trillion a year, and is projected to achieve 4.2 percent annual growth over the next decade," says Tricia Barnett, the director of Tourism Concern. "Clearly, developers and governments around the world want to have a cut of this. This latest building frenzy is like the new gold rush and the developments are positively industrial in scale.
"What the tourist will never see, though, is who might have been forcibly moved from their homes to make way for the new resorts and golf courses, how much biodiversity has been lost in their development, how local needs might be sacrificed - such as water - and the extent of the corruption. The tsunami in 2004 unexpectedly and conveniently cleared land that had been longed for by the developers. It's particularly frightening because the enormity of the resorts are often obscured by their luxury. Nowadays, these developments aren't necessarily high-rise and in your face. They can be more subtle than that and are cleverly sculpted over huge acreages of land."
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