Tourism is one industry that can truly be called global.

People are now travelling to all corners of the world and even space travel is a possibility for the super rich.

Nor does the headlong growth of international travel show any sign of abating; in 2006, over 850 million arrivals indicated a rise in global travel of well over 80 per cent since 1990.

The growth in airlines, cheaper air travel, more destinations opening up and an increasing number of hotels being built throughout the world, means that tourism has become the world’s biggest, most global, industry.

It is also subject to the global influences that affect many other industries. Rising oil prices increase the cost of air travel and the increasingly vocal sustainability lobby is forcing all governments to consider reducing the carbon footprint of industries and individual companies, thus raising costs and prices.

At the same time, acts of terrorism and civil unrest deter tourists. Or do they? In fact, neither acts of terrorism nor issues of security have significantly affected long-term visitor growth in New York, London and Madrid, all victims of horrific terrorist attacks.

These major issues all have – and, increasingly, will have - an impact on levels of tourism, for good or ill. Yet curiously, it is often local issues that affect tourism and visitor enjoyment more significantly.

In the UK, for example, changes in the fiscal regime leading to tax increases, particularly affecting the hospitality industry and small businesses, will reduce investment in new facilities and make hotel operation more costly. Cutting back government funding of VisitBritain will only weaken its ability to promote Britain overseas, thus increasing the country’s imbalance of tourism payments which currently stands at £18bn and is forecast to rise to £24bn by 2012.

Local authority planning decisions make the construction of new hotels at best more drawn out and expensive, at worst impossible (even with the support of the government, the construction of the third runway at Heathrow will take years to gain approval and be constructed).

The airports themselves, unsure whether they operate an airport or giant retail shopping malls, have reduced air travel to misery through long queues at check-in (not enough airline staff) and equally long queues at security (not enough space for sufficient machines).

Notwithstanding the privately-financed new Eurostar link to St Pancras, infrastructure schemes, particularly new roads and rail tracks, are held back by lack of foresight and funds as well as by planning problems. More people than ever before are travelling by rail on a system that has no fear of raising fares yet baulks at investing in new carriages and infrastructure.

Local authorities, themselves strapped for cash, seek to cut back expenditure on ‘soft’ targets, such as car parks, toilets, gardens, local attractions – so important to the leisure visitor – and are encouraged to follow London’s example and to look to road pricing and congestion charges to reduce traffic levels and raise revenue, thus making it more difficult and expensive for visitors to travel within Britain.

In the UK, as elsewhere, local decisions have just as big an impact on a country’s tourism industry as the global issues that the industry faces. Think Global, Act Local. If only individual governments and local authorities recognised the relevance of this in their approach to tourism!