IELTS Speaking Part 3: Travel and tourism
Sits right next to the Part 2 travel cards, so the drift back into personal narrative is unusually strong here.
Whether you can treat tourism as an industry with costs and beneficiaries, rather than as something you personally enjoy.
Questions you can expect
Longer answers than Part 1 — thirty to forty-five seconds each. The examiner may disagree with you, which is the format working as intended.
- Why do people travel abroad?
- Does tourism benefit local communities?
- Has cheap air travel changed the way people holiday?
- Should popular destinations limit visitor numbers?
- Do tourists behave respectfully when they travel?
- Is travel a good way to learn about other cultures?
- Will people travel less in the future?
- How does tourism affect the environment?
How to build an answer here
- Ask who benefits and who pays. Almost every question in this theme resolves cleanly once you separate those two groups.
- Distinguish types of tourism — a week in a resort and a month travelling are different phenomena with different effects.
- Concede the economic case before making the cultural or environmental objection. It is the honest order and the higher-scoring one.
- Keep your own trips out of it unless offered as one quick example.
Language this theme needs
Part 3 is scored on whether you can generalise and speculate without overstating. These are the phrases that do that work in this particular area.
the local economy
the standard beneficiary in this theme
overtourism
current, precise, and rarely used by candidates
seasonal work
for the kind of employment tourism creates
at the expense of
for one group gaining while another loses
broaden your horizons
the idiom for travel as education — use once
authentic
and the useful scepticism about what that means
The trap in this theme
Sliding into a description of your last holiday because the theme feels like the Part 2 card you just did.
Part 3 follows your long turn on purpose and the abstraction is the test. If you hear yourself saying 'when I went to…', finish the sentence quickly and get back to the general.
Two of these, answered at band 8
Watch the moves, not the opinions — take a position, hedge it as far as you actually believe it, support it, and give the strongest objection its due. Your views can be the opposite of these and score the same. A memorised Part 3 answer is more obvious than a memorised Part 1 one, because the examiner follows up on what you just said and a script cannot survive the follow-up.
Does tourism benefit local people?
It depends almost entirely on who owns things, which is the part that usually gets left out. Where the hotels, tours and restaurants are locally owned, the money stays and it's straightforwardly good. Where they're owned from outside, the local share is the wages, and the costs — housing, crowding, prices — are entirely local. So the same visitor numbers can be a benefit or an extraction depending on a structure that no tourist can see when they book.
Why it worksNames the variable the question depends on rather than balancing pros against cons, which is a much more analytical structure.
Will people travel more or less in the future?
More, I'd expect, unless the price changes substantially, and I think there's a reasonable chance it will. The demand is clearly there and rising incomes in large countries will add to it enormously. What might cut against it is that flying is currently cheaper than its full cost, and if that's ever corrected the numbers would change quickly. So my prediction would be more travel overall and more of it closer to home.
Why it worksMakes a prediction, states the condition it depends on, and then gives a nuanced answer rather than a single direction.
Other Part 3 themes
Government & society
The theme where a political speech is most tempting and most costly.
Children & upbringing
Age distinctions are the whole game — an answer that treats 'children' as one group has already lost most of its marks.
Language & globalisation
You are being assessed in English on questions about English, which makes the meta-awareness worth using rather than avoiding.
Art & creativity
The least prepared theme in Part 3, which makes it the easiest place to say something genuinely your own.
Education
The most frequent Part 3 area, and the one where personal school memories most often crowd out the actual question.
Work & careers
Full of questions about change over time, which makes tense control as important as content here.
Practise being disagreed with
Oliver pushes back in Part 3 the way a real examiner does — not to catch you out, but because holding a position under mild pressure is exactly what is being scored. That is not something you can rehearse against a list of questions. The first test is free.
This guide is written from the published IELTS Speaking band descriptors, in our own words. For the official wording, see the British Council's band descriptors. MockLive AI is an independent practice tool and is not affiliated with IELTS, the British Council, IDP or Cambridge University Press & Assessment.