By 1825, the opening up of the European and American continents to steam rail meant that travel was no longer the preserve of the extremely wealthy. The romantic ideal of the Grand Tour had permeated the public consciousness, and now for the first time, such travel was a possibility for the middle classes as well.

While British beach resorts such as Blackpool began to develop to cater for holidaymakers of all social strata - at Scarborough spa, the wealthy rubbed shoulders with the working classes - former cabinet-maker Thomas Cook was masterminding what would become the world's first package tour.

First, he led groups from his native Leicester around the British Isles, arranging their accommodation and travel, and charging them a single rate. In 1855 he took a group to Paris for the Great Exhibition, and following the success of that tour, he led groups around Europe, to the Middle East, and to America, opening each route as a set itinerary for people to follow.

A new version of the Grand Tour, a kind of proto-gap year, was becoming a necessary part of education for the well-off middle classes, and chaperoned group tours for unmarried young women, unheard-of just decades earlier, were becoming available. The first holidays snaps were starting to appear, too: as cameras became more portable, travels could be more easily documented, and memories preserved.

In 1869 the Suez Canal was completed, opening up the Far East to cheaper and safer shipping. By that time, the middle classes had followed the royal families of Britain, France and Spain to the seaside resorts on the French and Italian Riviera. A long stay in the Alps was a recognised recuperative aid for the infirm or ill, and mountain sports such as skiing were becoming popular as well.

Tourism as we know it today had been born.

10 popular 19th-century destinations

1. Nile River Cruise

For the first half of the century, Nile cruising was limited to wooden sailing vessels known as Dahabiyyas, which were slow. As the era of archaeological discovery in Egypt began to gather momentum, tourists wanting to follow in the footsteps of the Egyptologists – and the looters – were able to charter local steam-vessels. By the late 1880s, as more and more archaeological finds were being made, Thomas Cook introduced larger, more opulent steam-ships. Described by a journalist as "the most luxurious vessels to sail the Nile since Cleopatra's barge", they ploughed the Nile from Cairo all the way to Aswan.

2. Paris via Brussels and the Rhine

Thomas Cook began operating his European tours in the middle of the century, opening the continent up to a whole new market: the middle classes. His first European tour was a wide circle ending with four days in Paris for the 1855 exhibition. After that, the route was open permanently: starting in Brussels, tourists could cruise down the Rhine from Cologne to Mainz then head to Paris by rail via Frankfurt, the casinos at Baden-Baden, Weisbaden castle and Strasbourg. This tour was consistently one of Cook's most popular: by the end of the century, thousands of tourists were making the journey each year.

3. Davos, Switzerland

Davos became famous as a health resort after Alexander Spengler, a German country doctor and political refugee, popularised the notion that the mountain air in the valley carried significant medical benefits, and opened a clinic. As the resort grew in the latter part of the century, it began to see the rise of a new trend: skiing. One of the pioneers of the fledgeling sport was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who on 20 March 1894 became the first Englishman to cross the 2,440m Maienfelder Furka pass above the resort and ski down the other side.

4. Camping in the Holy Land

The Holy Land, which lacked hotels and infrastructure, was accessible to Thomas Cook by way of a camping tour. Luxury, fully furnished and carpeted tents housed the tourists, who were looked after by a large entourage of servants, guides and porters. The whole operation was transported by a train of 130 pack-horses and mules, and took in sites of biblical and geographical importance including Jerusalem, Jaffa, the Dead Sea, Damascus and Galilee, before continuing on to Constantinople, a journey that cost each tourist nearly￡100 - about £10,000 today.

5. Niagara Falls

In 1827 the enterprising hotelier William Forsyth, having just built the luxurious Pavilion Hotel overlooking the Horseshoe Falls, arranged the first of many spectacles at the falls. The condemned schooner Michigan, decorated to look like a pirate ship and filled with "fearsome animals", was sent to its destruction over the Falls. The stunt, which saw two bears escape the boat and swim to safety and a single goose survive the plunge, was witnessed by nearly 10,000 people. The publicity attracted many British travellers touring the US, and the town grew as daredevils attempted more dramatic stunts.

6. The French seaside: Nice, Biarritz and Deauville

In 1854 the Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III, built a palace on the beach at Biarritz. A half-brother of the reigning French monarch Napoleon III, Auguste de Morny, commissioned an architect to create a "kingdom of elegance" near Paris, and Deauville's first villas and grand seafront hippodrome took shape between 1860 and 1864. At the same time, Nice was ceded back to French sovereignty and began constructing grand hotels and a promenade which would be named Anglaise for the English tourists who thronged there. The British, French and Spanish royal families holidayed regularly in these new resorts, and the British upper- and middle-classes followed them in droves.

7. Italy post-Grand Tour

The era of the Grand Tour may have been more or less over, but the middle-class travellers on Thomas Cook's package tours were entranced by the romantic ideal of it. This meant that tours of Renaissance Italy remained consistently popular, with Rome, Florence and especially Venice emerging as favourite destinations. The reputation of the Grand Tour as an experience of cultural and sexual awakening was intrinsically linked with Italy, and most young men of privilege in the 19th century still made the pilgrimage to Venice to complete their education.

8. Fjord cruise

Legend has it that boat trips to Scandinavia started in 1870 as a route to collect blue glacial ice for drinks in top London clubs. Whether this is true or not, sightseers were soon chartering cabins on cargo routes to Norway as word of the beauty of the landscape got around. Thomas Cook started a tourist cruise to the fjords in 1875 called The Midnight Sun, which ran weekly out of Hull and proved to be one of their longest-running itineraries.

9. Bath

For those holidaying closer to home, the spa town of Bath was a consistently popular destination. The Hot Bath and Cross Bath had been rebuilt at the end of the 18th century, and the Great Pump Room built. The Royal Hotel opened in 1846, and the Empire Hotel was complete by the end of the century. The iconic Royal Crescent served mainly as short-stay, vacation residences for most of the 1800s. A six-week stay to take the waters was common medical advice, and the health benefits of the spa were well-publicised.

10. Shanghai

When the First Opium War ended in 1842, Shanghai became a boomtown. Situated at the mouth of the Yangtze, it was perfectly placed as the gateway for the West, and especially imperial Britain, to enter China. It also became a major destination for more adventurous British tourists. When it opened in 1846, the Astor House was not only Shanghai's first hotel, but also the first Western hotel on Chinese soil. At the same time, an international settlement was founded when the British and American districts outside the city merged, while the French maintained their own independent concession district.