For example, some people prefer simple beach vacations, while others want more specialised holidays, quieter resorts, family-oriented holidays, or niche market-targeted destination hotels. Tourists have a wide range of budgets and tastes, and a wide variety of resorts and hotels have developed to cater for them. There has been an up-trend in tourism over the last few decades, especially in Europe, where international travel for short breaks is common. In the United States, the first seaside resorts in the European style were at Atlantic City, New Jersey and Long Island, New York. In Continental Europe, early seaside resorts include: Heiligendamm, founded in 1793 at the Baltic Sea, being the first seaside resort Ostend, popularised by the people of Brussels Boulogne-sur-Mer and Deauville for the Parisians Taormina in Sicily.

Mass tourism developed with improvements in technology, which allowed the transport of large numbers of people in a short period of time to places of leisure interest, so that greater numbers of people could begin to enjoy the benefits of leisure time.

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