Iran’s golden age of tourism: the development of the travel industry in the late Pahlavi period (c. 1960-1979)

ABSTRACT This article examines the development of Iran’s tourism sector in the two decades before the revolution of 1979. In this period, the number of tourists visiting Iran each year grew from fewer than 80,000 in 1962 to nearly 700,000 by 1977, and as a result, tourism became an increasingly important sector of Iran’s economy. The article assesses the factors that contributed to the growth of the industry and investigates the extent to which this growth was the direct result of policies enacted by governmental organisations, in particular the Sāzmān-e Jalb-e Sayyāhān (Tourist Organisation), the Plan Organisation and Iran Air. Because Iran’s tourism industry was so underdeveloped in the 1960s, one of the primary tasks of Iran’s tourism planners was to market Iran around the world as an attractive tourist destination. The article evaluates the various advertisement strategies the government employed to attract tourists, particularly tourists from the more lucrative markets in Europe and the United States. It utilises a variety of primary sources in Persian and English, most importantly the three-volume Asnādi az Sanʿat-e Jahāngardi dar Irān (Documents on the Tourism Industry in Iran), which contains a wealth of material on tourism in Iran from 1922 until 1978.