George Cazes - Profile on Academy Newsletter Volume 2, No. 2, 1989

George Cazes was a Professor of Geography at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and president of the French Association of Tourism Scientists. Born in 1940, he had spent the past twenty years studying the economic, social and physical effects of tourism development on host regions, in particular on third world countries, this being the subject of his 1983 doctoral dissertation.  He had, in the course of his investigations, made numerous trips to the American zone (French West Indies, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico), the Mediterranean and African zone (Romania, Spain, Portugal, Tunisia, Senegal, Ivory Coast), the Asian zone (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand), and the Indian Ocean (Reunion, Mauritius).  The world Tourism Organization had sent him on teaching and technical assistance missions to various countries (Algeria, Peru, Niger, Chad), and he had carried out several studies for international institutions.

He had both regular and occasional teaching positions in a number of institutions of specialized training, in particular the Centre d'Etudes Supérieures du Tourisme (Paris), the Centre des Hautes Études Touristiques (Aix-en-Provence), l'INFATH-Tourisme-Hôtellerie (Paris), and the Institut supérieur de l'Hôtellerie et du Tourisme (Algiers).  Most of the sixty or so articles which he had published in scholarly journals in France and elsewhere bore on tourism analysis; he had also published four books on the subject (Tourism in France, Tourism Development; International Tourism: Mirage or Strategy for the Future?; and the New Vacation Colonies: International Tourism as Third World Conquest). He was a member of AIEST and founder of RIALTO (International Network for the Analysis of Leisure and Tourism) and of the European Observatory of Tourism and Leisure.