Why has international tourism grown, and is it a positive development?
An IELTS Writing Task 2 two-part question essay on the growth of international tourism and whether it is positive, with a band 9 model answer, a plan, and notes on each marking criterion.
Write your answer
Do this before you scroll. The model answer below will make sense as a comparison and not much use as a template.
Task 2 · 40 minutes · at least 250 words
International tourism has grown enormously over the past fifty years. Why has this happened? Is it a positive or negative development?
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How to plan this one
- 1Two direct questions. Each gets a body paragraph and a one-clause answer in the introduction. The commonest failure on this type is answering the first question at length and the second in a sentence.
- 2For "why", give two causes with a mechanism each, not a list of five. Cheaper flights and rising incomes are the honest pair.
- 3For "positive or negative", take a position. "It has both" is a 6; "positive on balance, with one serious cost" is a 7 or above if you say why.
- 4Keep the second paragraph as long as the first. Draw a line under your plan and check the proportions before writing.
Model answer
Written at the top of the band. Read it for the moves it makes, not the opinions it holds: a memorised essay on this topic will not fit the prompt you actually get.
Fifty years ago a foreign holiday was something most families in most countries never expected to take. Today more than a billion international trips are made each year. Two causes explain most of the growth, and the development is, on balance, a positive one, though with a cost that is becoming harder to ignore.
The first cause is that travel became cheap. The arrival of wide-bodied aircraft and, later, low-cost airlines cut the real price of a flight to a fraction of what it was, and online booking removed the agent's margin and the friction of arranging a trip. The second cause is that more people could afford it. Rising incomes across Asia, the Gulf and Latin America created hundreds of millions of households with disposable income for the first time, and a foreign holiday is one of the first things such households buy. Neither cause alone would have produced the growth; cheaper travel met a much larger population able to pay for it.
Whether this is good depends on whom one asks, but the balance is favourable. For the destinations, tourism is often the largest source of foreign exchange and of jobs that do not require capital or advanced education, which is why countries from Sri Lanka to Portugal have built their economies around it. For the travellers, the experience of other places is a genuine education that no classroom offers. The cost is real, however: over-visited cities such as Venice and Barcelona have seen housing priced beyond residents' reach and daily life crowded out, and aviation's contribution to emissions grows with every additional trip.
These costs are concentrated in a few places and are manageable with regulation, whereas the benefits are spread across hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries who would otherwise have far fewer options. That is why the growth has been positive, and why the task now is to manage it rather than reverse it.
Why it scores, criterion by criterion
Task Response
Both questions are answered in the introduction in one sentence each, then developed in one full paragraph each of roughly equal length. The second answer is a genuine position with a reason and a concession, not "both". The conclusion explains why the balance falls the way it does rather than restating.
Coherence and Cohesion
Paragraph two is organised as "first cause, second cause, why they combine", and paragraph three as "for whom good, for whom bad, therefore". Openers like "Whether this is good depends on whom one asks" shift the essay between the two questions cleanly. Reference ("these costs", "that is why") links the conclusion to the evidence.
Lexical Resource
Accurate economic vocabulary without jargon: "real price", "disposable income", "foreign exchange", "capital", "over-visited", "priced beyond residents' reach". Paraphrase of the prompt throughout ("a foreign holiday", "international trips", "the growth"). Collocation is exact ("removed the friction", "crowded out").
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Complex sentences with multiple subordinate clauses are controlled, including a "Neither ... alone would have ... ; ... met ..." structure that carries the causal argument. The contrast "concentrated ... whereas ... spread" in the conclusion is grammatically balanced. No errors, and the short opening sentence of paragraph three sets up the qualification that follows.
Language worth stealing
Each of these carries a trap as well as a use, so the note matters as much as the phrase.
- Two causes explain most of the growth, and the development is, on balance, ...
- An introduction that answers both questions in one sentence. The parenthetical "on balance" flags a weighed position, not a vague one.
- Neither cause alone would have produced ...; A met B
- Shows the causes interact, which is analysis rather than a list. Note the past conditional "would have produced" for a counterfactual.
- Whether this is good depends on whom one asks, but the balance is favourable
- Opens the second answer with a concession and a position in one line. "Whom" is correct after "asks"; "who" is a common error here.
- the task now is to manage it rather than reverse it
- A closing formula for a "positive with costs" verdict. It states what follows from the position, which reads as a conclusion rather than a summary.
More Task 2 practice
Last updated 18 September 2026.