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Geography for Travel Agents 1
This article is excerpted from:
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THE HOME-BASED TRAVEL AGENT
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A Newsletter for Those on the Cutting Edge
of the Travel Distribution System
http://www.hometravelagency.com
GEOGRAPHY
FOR TRAVEL AGENTS: Land Forms
What’s the Zone of Ablation? Didn’t know? Well a 14-year-old
kid who won the 2001 Geography Bee sponsored by "National Geographic"
magazine knew that it’s a region of melting and evaporation in
the lower portion of a glacier. Squirrel that little tidbit of knowledge
away if you’re going to be selling a cruise through Alaska’s
Inside Passage. Who knows? It might come in handy.
The point
here is that, as a travel agent, you don’t need to be a geography
whiz kid, but you do need to know a few basic facts about how this
great big wonderful world is put together. It’s what ICTA (the
Institute of Certified Travel Agents) calls "tourism geography,"
a kind of just-the-basics approach to key things you need to know
to help you better assist your clients and sell the magic of travel.
In a series
of short articles I hope to provide beginners with the kind of basic
information that ICTA thinks people need to know before they can qualify
as a CTA (Certified Travel Agent). Let’s start with land forms.
The biggies are the continents and by common agreement there are seven
of them: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia,
and Antarctica. A travel agent should be able to name these.
If you look
at an atlas or a globe, you will see that some continents are completely
separate from others, in effect, huge islands. Australia and Antarctica
fall into this category. Other continents are connected to each other
but are considered separate entities for a variety of reasons, including
location, culture, and other factors.
North and
South America join each other at the Colombia/Panama border. Thus,
Central America is part of North, not South America, despite the fact
that it shares a language and a good bit of culture with South America.
One way to think of it is that ALL of North America is north of the
Equator and MOST of South America is south of it. (I’ll discuss
the Equator and its significance in a later article.)
Europe, Asia,
and Africa are all part of the same enormous land mass but are considered
separate continents. Europe and Asia are separated by the Ural Mountains.
Asia and Africa are separated at the border of Egypt with Israel and
Jordan.
Another term
that crops up from time to time is "sub-continent." No,
it’s not an underwater continent, but a section of a continent
that is distinct in geography, culture, or both. Most frequently,
you will hear about the Indian Subcontinent, comprising India, Pakistan,
Nepal and a few other smaller countries.
The next land
forms travel agents have to know about are the major land features
of continents, things like mountains, canyons, volcanoes, deserts,
peninsulas, and capes. These are, by definition, large features that
are so distinct, unusual, or beautiful that they attract tourism.
Think of the Rocky Mountains or the Grand Canyon and you’ll see
what I mean. A good exercise is to think of well-known tourist destinations
that go with each of these terms: for example, the Iberian Peninsula,
Cape Cod, the Sahara Desert, Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, and so forth.
You might want to write down the ones you know and then add to your
lists as you discover new ones.
After the
big land masses called continents are the little land masses called
islands. In spite of their relatively small size, islands loom large
in tourism. For one thing when people go to France they don’t
think in terms of visiting a continent, but when they go to Aruba,
they know they’re going to an island. For another, tourism is
the major industry on a lot of islands.
Not all islands
are created equal and there are some special, often local, terms to
distinguish different types of islands. The term "island"
is usually used to describe a piece of land that is entirely surrounded
by water but that is otherwise made of up the same stuff as the continents.
They can have cliffs and mountains and valleys and some of them were
formed by volcanoes (like the Hawaiian Islands).
Atolls are
islands that have been formed by coral growth. They may feature a
small central island ringed by islets or a coral reef and are most
common in the fabled South Pacific.
Cays are small,
low lying islands made of both sand and coral. Sometimes cays are
arranged in "strings", like the Florida Keys. And, by the
way, "cays" is pronounced "keys." The word cay
is used most frequently in the Caribbean islands.
Obviously
there are a lot of other terms that can apply to land masses, as the
kids who enter those geography bees know. But if you get a good handle
on the few terms outlined in this article, you are well on your way
to mastering tourism geography.
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