Tourism Boom

In <date>1582</date>, the Temple Grand Synod elected to reduce the cost of travelling on a temple ship by nearly 80%, seeking to increase travel in order to stimulate the economies of several worlds which were suffering economic depression. This meant that the average cost for a family to visit another world dropped dramatically, from around 98kT to only 20kT (Equivalent to 30kT in today's money). This created a much expanded tourism market, inducing upper middle class families to take holidays they previously couldn't have afforded, and indeed encouraging some to put themselves in debt for life just to experience the novelty of a journey that would once have been beyond imagining.

The temple ships were fully booked with tourists who could now afford interstellar holidays for more than 10 months, and for several years afterwards were packed with those who realised that an impossible goal had now become something they could afford once or twice in a lifetime of careful saving. According to history books, the Tourism Boom is officially the period from <date>1582 to 1550</date>, many people use the term to refer to the time until the end of the century, during which time many new Tourist Attractions were still growing in response to the increase in travel.

This also created a more pressing need for a stable independent currency for travellers to use, and resulted in the Lambdacridian T surpassing the many loosely-linked Dollar variants as the standard currency for use on board temple ships.