We all like to complain about the annoyances and uselessness of the TSA (EDIT: and other post 9/11 security changes) or the cramped seats and extra fees that come with a standard economy ticket, but not enough attention is paid to how much safer and cheaper flying has become over the last few decades.
I don't think OP is saying that TSA has affected safety or cost, merely that flying has gotten cheaper and safer(independent of his statement about the TSA)
Travel now is part of conspicuous consumption as much as a flashy purse is. Displaying that you went to some small French village on your Instagram can generate a fair amount of prestige and envy. Also, unlike purses though, there is a permanent record of your purchase for all to see.
This article resonates with me after my recent vacation to the Amalfi coast. The narrow roadways are clogged with buses and the buses themselves are so full you often have to wait in line for an extra hour to get on one. I definitely wouldn't recommend it.
After Amalfi, we went to a small fishing village nearby and had an experience that was so, so much better. I even got to speak some Italian and buy some homemade grappa from the local shop, which would be difficult in a more 'disneyfied' place.
It would be nice if TripAdvisor or Google had some sort of 'tourist jam' avoidance algorithm, letting you pick places like or near the place you want to go, but slightly off the beaten path.
Or some kind of warning if you're planning to go somewhere during the peak season.
If there was a “tourist jam” avoidance algorithm those places would eventually be crowded as well. Most of these destinations are crowded due to the convenience of tech.
Fair point - if those exist. Current tourist traps are popular because those are the very-interesting and somewhat-interesting spots, as opposed to "there also used to be a medieval city here, now there's a factory, gee that's interesting".
In other words, that's already happening, and it does help, but doesn't scale quite with the demand. There's always diversification ("go see that niche thing if you're into it - old mine, train museum, festival of this and that, power plant, take a bike tour instead"), but the attraction of extremely-popular spots is self-reinforcing.
I actually just finished having dinner in Amalfi (Positano). After spending the past two weeks in a small town of 800 people in Southern Italy, I was shocked to see so many tourists in Positano; I heard more English than Italian. And don’t get me started on the tourist buses that clog up the roads.
Irony warning, I'm writing this from a vineyard in Tuscany.
You do realise that you are part of the problem you are complaining about? Why are you entitled to visit there and nobody else? Regarding the tour buses, as someone who lives in a popular tourist city (Edinburgh) given the choice of a bus full of tourists rocking up every day, or the same number of tourists rocking up in rental cars, I'll take the bus any day. There's nothing worse than navigating narrow streets surrounded by people who can barely drive not knowing where they're going.
I recently had the opportunity to stay for considerable time in a villa on a 100 acre vineyard in the italian countryside. Rode a bike into town every morning and did the days grocery shopping, I was living just like all my italian neighbors where and it was fabulous.
The quick jaunt through Rome and Florence I tacked onto the end of the trip was very loathsome in many aspects. I'd bet you have to go at least 3 miles away from the colosseum in any direction to find food of a higher quality than Olive Garden.
Maybe it's just me, but dealing with subpar food or going hungry for a little while is an acceptable price to pay for getting to see the Colosseum. I know, different strokes and all.
If you'd visited the Vasari Corridor or tried the Uffizi on a Tuesday morning, I think you'd have had a much different experience. Rome is constantly crowded in the same way NYC is, but you can't really expect to have the entire forum to yourself - it's one of the most famous places in the world! Loathsome is the polar opposite of how I feel about visiting either of those cities.
Mind you, you couldn't have expected to have the Forum to yourself for millenia now. Rome seems to have plenty of experience with barbarian hordes (/joke) - or more seriously, how to mix the locals with tourists while remaining a city, not a preserved relic to be gawked at.
I've eaten the best tiramisu in my life at a "vineria" located in Piazza Margana (https://www.google.com/maps/place/Piazza+Margana,+00186+Roma...), I still think of and phantasize about that tiramisu from time to time even though almost 3 years have passed since then. We also found a place with very decent food close to the Pantheon, by "decent" I mean that they had a lamb-dish as good as you'd find in any remote Greek island from the Aegean, and that is a very high compliment. Both those places are inside a 2-mile radius from the Colosseum. But, I agree, there are also countless other places inside of that radius where food is crap, only meant for tourists.
This wasn't my experience of Rome at all, but then I was there in March and it wasn't chock full of (other) tourists. We stayed in an area called Trastevere which was slightly out of the centre and which I'd recommend.
I went to the Amalfi coast recently. It was mind-numbingly crowded, except for the abundant hiking trails, which were virtually deserted and gorgeous. Back in the city the horde was queuing to eat at the Tripadvisor-recommended shit restaurant and taking selfies at "the attractions". It seems to me that they largely missed the whole point of being there.
>It seems to me that they largely missed the whole point of being there.
Honest question, what do you believe the point of being there is for them? Do you think other people might have different reasons for being there than you?
This article resonates with me after my recent vacation to the Amalfi coast. The narrow roadways are clogged with buses and the buses themselves are so full you often have to wait in line for an extra hour to get on one.
Sounds like the experiences I had... in 1999 and again in 2009. The Amalfi Coast has been, is and will continue to be popular with tourists for a reason. It's beautiful and it's a ferry ride away from Capri & the Blue Grotto. Good luck finding something similar to the Blue Grotto.
Nonetheless, the last time I visited Paestum (~2 km. inland in modern times), which may be my favorite archaeological site in the whole country, I was literally the only person there, and there was certainly no issue finding a seat on the nearly-empty train from Naples. It's not that hard to avoid the crowds - just plan visits to major sites for weekdays and try to avoid travelling during the high season.
> just plan visits to major sites for weekdays and try to avoid travelling during the high season.
I visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna some time ago during a weekday in late January, which meant that I got to see some of Velasquez's works (including the exceptional "Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanta_Margarita_Teresa_in_a_...) in a room all by myself. I felt "royal-ish" for those few minutes, as if those famous paintings had been painted by Velasquez especially for me and me only. And then just a couple of rooms away there were a couple of paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, which I also got to see alone, by myself.
I know that what I've written might have sounded wrong with some HN readers but as others have said, tourism is nowadays mostly about experiences and about what one feels. I've used that word ("royal-ish") because Velazquez was (among other things) the painter of the Spanish royal court and in my imagination, as a tourist (not as an art critic) being left alone with his paintings made me feel part of that royal court. I don't see the wrong in that, to be honest.
Ah, got it! English is not my first language and sometimes I lose things in translation. Yeah, Velazquez is definitely more interesting and more refined than Archimboldo, it’s just that I got a soft spot for the latter even though his works might be seen as kietsch-y, can’t really explain why.
> It would be nice if TripAdvisor or Google had some sort of 'tourist jam' avoidance algorithm,
But why, it sounds like it is working perfectly. You would prefer it if a large percent of those people were send to your small town? You are a tourist, you are part of the problem.
I live in Brooklyn and there's the odd Airbnb tourist out here.
They do the same inconsiderate shit as Times Square tourists: block the sidewalk, walk 5 abreast really fucking slowly, stand in the subway doors, leave their huge suitcases in high traffic areas, etc. But the fact that they're not all clustered together like in midtown reduces the frustration factor immensely. I actually don't mind them when they're spread out like this.
edit: Why not comment before you censor with your downvote?
I was there recently and found it pretty empty, but the key was I think that I didn't go into any of the "famous" towns along the coast such as Positano.
Also I think there is a very periodic jump in tourism during specific European holiday periods which are best avoided (Especially for americans the idea that whole countries all have multiple weeks of holiday effectively at the same time is probably easy to forget)
We have seen nothing yet. Chinese tourism is going to go through the roof for the rest of the century. Boeing produces about 40 737s a month, plus other models, and production is only going to go up. Every fifth Boeing is going to China.
This felt very true in Switzerland this winter. We were the only non-chinese in a local bus through Interlaken. Not that I have something against it, just that they sure advertise it well in China. Also chinese street signs are slowly showing up.
If you want to avoid unpleasant tourist traps, go off the beaten path to smaller towns and villages. You'll find a much more beautiful, and genuine experiences talking with real locals, who aren't just trying to sell you overpriced crap. You'll get the real food, and the real place you're visiting. Famous landmarks really don't stick with you like the experiences you get meeting new people.
> If you want to avoid unpleasant tourist traps, go off the beaten path to smaller towns and villages.
That only works until someone with a sufficiently large follower base promotes it on instagram. Instant tourist influx. Many of the tourist traps started out as hidden treasures.
The trick is not to look for "hidden treasures". Don't try to find something special that nobody else has discovered yet. Just go to ordinary places which are nonetheless different from what you're used to.
Sure, someone might promote precisely the completely ordinary place you have selected and cause it to be overrun, but given the number of places you can choose from, that's not very likely.
Of course that only works if you don't travel to see unique and famous sights, but in that case you can never avoid other tourists anyway. If you just want some new experiences, the selection is effectively unlimited.
Actually being one of those influencers, I can tell you that most people in this world don't care what someone on Instagram says. Those that do pay attention are there for the fantasy, and not actually jumping on a plane to a remote location because one of us posted a pretty picture. The rest of the planet is going to see the Taj Mahal, and Fontana de Trivi, because that's what you're "supposed" to do when visiting a foreign land. It doesn't take much effort to find a quiet home outside of a major city, and see what's really going on. There are nearly infinite places on this Earth to go, only a handful are being 'promoted' because they are already popular.
btw, the Taj Mahal is indeed beautiful, but it's a very small oasis in the literally the most vile city(Agra) I've been to in all my travels. Absolute filth. The best thing to do is drive there, see it for an hour, and then drive back to the place you came from.
> That only works until someone with a sufficiently large follower base promotes it on instagram. Instant tourist influx. Many of the tourist traps started out as hidden treasures
Or go really off the beaten & easy path.
I just spent a year traveling North to South in West Africa, I can count the number of tourists I saw on two hands. It is breathtaking and well worth the visit, but it's also very difficult and demanding.
Your suggestion sounds like a recipe for destroying the remaining unspoilt places. On the contrary, I would say: please go to the established tourist traps, or better yet, stay home. The whole concept of tourism is ludicrous.
"Tourism is part of traveling. Surely, you don't think traveling is ludicrous."
I love travel, but no, "tourism" isn't automatically the same thing.
Modern "mass tourism", in particular, consists of taking a big boat or a big bus with a bunch of people who are just like you, to places that local people never go. Then you take a picture, post it somewhere to show off to your friends, then you buy some trinkets and go to the next place.
Setting aside the question of whether or not international travel is sustainable for (say) all of China, this form of travel is ludicrous. You might as well stay home, look at pictures on Instagram, go to a buffet and and visit the mall.
I get what you are saying, but you still meet new people at the tourist traps, in fact I would wager that you are more likely to meet people willing to talk to you in the popular tourist destinations. Having been off the beaten path I can tell you first hand that many locals aren't interested in chatting up foreigners, they have jobs and lives of their own. Not saying it's not an actual experience you could have, but you can have just as fulfilling experiences in unpleasant locations.
I really don't think it's close to double digits. I don't even consider myself as having travelled a lot and I've taken two international trips per year for the last five or so years on average. There should be people who do dozens of international trips a year but there must be a lot of people who do two or three international trips a year.
Like a lot of things it's probably a heavily-skewed distribution. For a large number of europeans it could be a half dozen from holidays alone. For businesspeople in Europe it could easily be dozens of trips per year.
But there's probably huge swaths of the population who have never traveled internationally for economic reasons, or because they live in a large country (like China, the US, India or Russia) which makes that less necessary.
The thing that I'd immediately wonder there is how "international trip" is calculated. It seems most probable that that number is calculated as "number of flights x people per flight". That would however lead to immense inflation. For instance you go on a round trip that involves 2 lay overs both ways, that'd be 6 "international trips." Do that once a quarter and a single person is taking 24 "international trips" in a year.
That sounds like a very American viewpoint. If you look at most of the rest of the world international borders are a lot closer and it's trivial to visit half a dozen countries in a single day. And in some places it's routine to make international trips on a regular basis.
> “You can’t talk about overtourism without mentioning Instagram and Facebook — I think they’re big drivers of this trend,” Mr. Francis said. “Seventy-five years ago, tourism was about experience-seeking. Now it’s about using photography and social media to build a personal brand. In a sense, for a lot of people, the photos you take on a trip become more important than the experience.”
The article falls directly into the "good old days" fallacy. No, people in the past were not looking for "more authentic experiences".
I bought in a flea market a photo album of a trip of some Swedish couple in the 60s. It is awesome. It could be posted picture by picture on Facebook and nobody will notice. Except by details like that the plane tickets, included in the album, were printed by a mechanical typewriter. Also includes tourism flyers, tickets for the theatre, and a menu from a restaurant. Sounds familiar? Because people are people in all places at all times.
I fail to see your point. I too keep travel pictures with stuff like tickets, flyers etc. The purpose is not to build a brand or show off but to better remember the experience later.
I also fail to see what this article is stating. That people are travelling to build a personal brand. Maybe some people but nobody in my circle. Everyone I know travel because they want new experiences. They save little items and trinkets from those experiences to remember them. Not to post them on social media.
To take that thought a step further, posting pictures on social media is the way we remember things now. We certainly don't take photos exclusively to print out and store in offline albums.
Plenty of people do take photos to store offline* and to print out. My parents have a big house filled with photo albums that they have to store. We have a small apartment that makes it impractical to store multiple boxes of photo books of families throughout the years.
* Assuming by offline you mean not-shared, rather than literally offline. Anyone with a smart phone is most likely backing up their photos to iCloud/Google photos.
> I too keep travel pictures with stuff like tickets, flyers etc. The purpose is not to build a brand or show off but to better remember the experience later.
That is my point. In the past, people did the same things, if that does not make them superficial we are neither. We should not judge our contemporaneous travellers so lightly.
It does get a bit disgusting when people are taking selfies with shit eating grins at the WTC memorial. All for the status boost in their corner of the graph.
Most people are fully aware that what happened there is a tragedy. Most people also have an instant-no-thought habit to smile when having a picture taken. Is it really any better for them to take a picture and be solemn? Is that enough or do they need to express deep sadness for these pictures? Would others claim these sad emotions are just for show anyway? And if so, should we expect people to just not take pictures at all at the WTC memorial? And if so, at what point in time can we start taking pictures at a place with our normal happy faces?
People are there. They are happy they are there, even though 'there' (where ever 'there' is) may be a place that causes them to have emotions on the sad part of the emotional spectrum.
Think of funerals. It's a sad place to be (perhaps sadder since the person who died is someone well known as opposed to a lot of unknown people, but I won't judge either way). Family and friends are together, which usually makes people happy. It's a mixed bag of emotions. If someone happens to smile in a picture there it's probably more to do with habit of smiling for pictures or happiness to be with family and friends (perhaps first time in a while) than it is for being happy the deceased is deceased or for social status boosts.
Youre getting downvoted (likely because you didn't explain yourself) but you have a point - 75 years ago was 1943, it was the tail end of WWII and Europe was a literal battleground
Hilter invaded Poland in Sept 1939 and VE-Day was May 8, 1945; so the war in Europe lasted 68 months. 75 years ago the war was 47 months old, or 69% complete. I consider the final 30% of something the "tail end." It's weirdly pedantic and downright antisocial to go around arguing "tail end" means something else, especially when its entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Since the internet is for cats I did some quick Googling and looks like, on average, a cats tail is around 34% of their total length (body plus tail) so saying the final 30% of something is the tail end is objectively accurate. Unless you want to go around arguing that some cats don't have tails.
1943 was the year when German advance was halted and they began to be pushed back by Soviet army.
It's right in the middle of the war if you look at the map instead of calendar.
You can look back to the early days of tourism when gentlemen going on their "grand tour" often commissioned paintings of what they'd visited so they could show off how cultured they were.
That's the point! With the subpoint that it scales...badly.
It's not like you can spin up 20 more instances of the historic city center when you get 20x the usual traffic. Result: cities literally divided against themselves, transformed into a tourist-factory-slash-amusement-park that nobody lives in, segregated from the actual living city.
What, me bitter about my hometown being disneyfied? Nooooosir...
While I do have friends who simply travel to build their brand around it (every year in my circles there's a set of "cool" destinations that you post pictures from, where somewhere like Iceland is cooler than Rwanda), I think tourists have and will continue to have the same behavior. As a tourist, you have a limited amount of time to explore. Sure you can "go off the beaten path", but that represents a risk, and while the experience may be interesting, you could also end up in a boring villa/Airbnb with nothing more than mediocre food and unfriendly people. Wasting your limited vacation time on a subpar experience is a pretty dismal proposition, so most people will take a trip to a place that's easy to navigate as a tourist while still giving enough of the local flavor to impress.
There's something to be said for trying to preserve local flavor while accommodating tourists though, and that's a line each tourist spot will have to find for themselves. Some will probably inevitably become expat party towns, while others will probably strike the right balance.
> The article falls directly into the "good old days" fallacy
This comment falls directly into the "things never change" fallacy.
This fallacy can be applied whenever anyone complains about any change anywhere. Picking one sample piece of anecdotal data from another period that can roughly be lined up with some other vague impressions of today does not refute the claim.
I have no strong opinion on overtourism or the effects on it by social media, but I'm willing to listen to people who discuss it without dismissing them.
> This comment falls directly into the "things never change" fallacy.
That sounds interesting. I looked for it, and I just found references to the "tradition fallacy" that only deals with resistance to change.
Can you provide a link?
> Picking one sample piece of anecdotal data from another period that can roughly be lined up with some other vague impressions of today does not refute the claim.
I provided an anecdote example as a means to be more pedagogic. It is easier to understand concepts from the concrete to the abstract. So you are completely right, my anecdote does not refute the claim.
I guess the oldest quote would be in the bible, as "there's no new thing under the sun". In any case though, I don't really understand the point of using 'fallacy' aside from cases where it's an actual logical fallacy.
You can probably cover every habit of thought and discourse under a banner of fallacy, if you pick out the ways in which they are used badly - since people tend to think badly due to misapplied habits.
That's probably when modern tourism began, in the post-war 50s and 60s. You had a bunch of things coming together: commercial airliners, cruise ships, better highway systems, etc. Disney World launched in the 60s to capitalize on the trend. I agree "people are people" and they don't change as much as we'd like to think...but I do also think that modern tech has made travel more frictionless than ever. You have GPS in your pocket, you can Yelp for good locales and restaurants, you can book flights in minutes, hail rides from an app, Google anything you're confused about, etc... So the number of people travelling nowadays is probably at an all time high.
Fun factoid. Before World War 1 passports, as we know them, did not exist through nearly all of the world. They were a 'temporary security measure' like so many things... It wasn't until 1978 in the USA that entering or leaving the nation requiring a passport was legally encoded (though we'd been using them since the early 19th century). That's why reading of e.g. scientists from before the early 20th century you'll regularly see them being born in one country, educated in another, opening a business in another, and so on.
The reason I'd agree with your timeline is one thing you did not mention -- wealth explosion. Purely recreational international travel is and always has been relatively expensive.
The passports are much, much older then WWI - however railroads in late XIX century made travel requirements more relaxed as the administration were not able to catch up with technology.
Also XIX c. passports were without biometry (ie without photography of the holder).
I'm not sure about overtourism, but just got back from a trip to Europe. Almost the exact same countries as a trip 13 years ago. The difference was AMAZING. Technology has made traveling so easy by comparison it's SHOCKING.
1. No more staring at signs and menus in confusion. Snap a picture with Google translate and viola.
2. Related to #1, no more getting lost using public transit or walking because you can't read street signs. Google Maps with walking directions, transit directions was a LIFE-CHANGER.
3. No more being LIMITED to phrases in your phrasebook. Again, Google translate.
4. No more worries about being taken advantage of by local taxis or figuring out local taxi customs. Uber and Uber clones.
5. No more getting trapped at tourist trap restaurants or overpriced "officially" reviewed restaurants. Google search again.
6. Waze can help you navigate to the most secluded spots, even when the local signs become sparse.
I could keep going...
Actually, it's amazing how much it was Google and local clones of Uber. Yelp and Uber aren't as popular in the countries we visited as I expected.
Honestly it was almost a little too easy, in some ways I didn't feel like I was in a foreign land... I felt at total ease in any neighborhood, because even if no taxis were around, just hail a ride.
Rented a car multiple times and drove around because Waze was great everywhere if Google Maps broke down.
Overall I LOVED that technology has made experiencing a foreign country almost trivially easy.
Technology absolutely lowers many barriers to travel.
The difference between this trip and my last trip was unbelievable.
Is foursquare still popular? I just moved to Estonia (American from SF) and I feel like I see many more people using general Google reviews than foursquare or Yelp
6. Waze can help you navigate to the most secluded spots, even when the local signs become sparse.
...and then you can complain on FB how many people are on that supposedly "secluded" spot. Surprise: technological innovation applies to them as well.
Indeed, technology removes many bottlenecks...but as we should know here on HN, all that ever did was expose other bottlenecks elsewhere in the pipeline - and physical scarcity is a far harder bottleneck than knowledge imbalance.
Following walking directions on your phone that are optimized for efficiency makes chance of running into nice places and other suprises off the beaten path less likely.
Likewise for planning each and every meal via reviews.
Google translate might mean that you don't even try to learn the basics of a local language.
You just shielded yourself from most interesting aspects of travel for me - diving deep into unknown, blending with locals, just wandering around without any significant clue where the heck am I. Even simple travelling like you did can be a beautiful adventure, if you don't mind a bit discomfort and uncertainty. These things are what I remember most from travelling. Cruising smoothly through any place and it fades into yet-another-something in memories over time.
Each of us seeks different things in their free time. I for example usually don't turn on phone for days during travelling.
Social media has just distilled this pointless behavior into the purest form possible. The behavior is just like the good old days, but the tools aren't (you'd have to invite people around to show off your photo album persona). There were (and still are) tribespeople that demonstrate this behavior with affluence: living an outwardly great life (by having cows, goats and what-have-you on public demonstration) without substance. Politicians and celebrities are no different.
This exaggeration of this behavior has increased contrast. It is both easier to identify and self-identity people who aren't victim to this pattern. There were never the good old days, speaking in a formal logical manner. However, in the good new days it is easier to identify this bullshit and pry oneself away from it.
Comparing the past to the future is not necessarily a fallacy. If it were, everything would be constant for all time. I hope we can agree that’s not the case.
It’s a matter of scale. The number of people like your Swedish couple was much lower than the number of people like them today. Film wasn’t free like Instagram is.
>"The article falls directly into the "good old days" fallacy."
This type of dismissal - that people discussing change are nothing more than baseless nostalgics, is really becoming it's own tired trope.
The article gives quite concrete examples of recent-ish developments that are an annoyance to both other residents and other travelers. Large groups of selfie sticks, outsized queues, neighborhoods bereft of actual locals, etc.
The article also discusses sustainability which is a pretty important topic on a planet with 7.6 billion people. How is that a fallacy exactly? An increasing population and a global expansion of middle class people, two elements that factor a booming tourism industry are very rooted in fact.[1]
>"No, people in the past were not looking for "more authentic experiences"."
Nowhere in this article is that claim even staked. It's also very odd that you then go on to mention a couple who brought back some small keepsakes and mementos from a trip as evidence of this. People keep reminders from local events in their life as well and it has nothing to do with "authenticity."
I've even noticed it in the California wine country. While in decades past the weekend flow was typically from the North Bay to San Francisco, now on weekends we regularly have traffic throughout the day in Santa Rosa. Healdsburg, a town of around 10,000 people has added around 300 hotel rooms this year. We are no where near tourists outnumbering locals, but it is definitely much different than when I was a kid
Well if certain cities don't want them, I'm sure there are many places that would love to have the boost from tourism. Maybe we'll start seeing more tourism advertisement and viral marketing campaigns through social media (pay a trend-setter to come to your city and vlog about it, etc.)
does anyone notice how if other people say something along the lines of: 'we need to stop outsiders from coming here' it gets explained away as something like 'altering the character of historic cities'
whereas if an american says it, it gets explained way as: 'they are a racist protectionist bigot'.
Not really... I absolutely wouldn't mind a Chinese looking individual, bringing and showing his culture, and learning mine, speaking my language, becoming my friend, colleague and neighbour. But I sure as hell get annoyed if a Chinese tourist runs over my feet with his luggage and speaking Chinese back at me when I complain and seeing him leave the country the next day, leaving money in the pockets of a few landlords who prefer him over me, as my street slowly transforms into a corridor of gift shops and regular jobs leave the city.
These are superficial examples but you catch my drift.
In any case, both migration and temporary visitors (tourists) only works in balance. I think virtually everyone recognises that basic truth. But what constitutes balance is a matter of opinion, and some of these opinions are definitely driven by racism.
I'm definitely more of an open borders guy myself, but I don't agree with this characterization. There are plenty of places in the US that used to be completely white, English speaking neighborhoods where you can now spend a few hours and not hear a single person speaking English. It doesn't make one bit of difference to me what language anyone speaks ever and I much prefer the diversity, but I don't think it's accurate to say that immigration doesn't involve people coming and completely changing the nature of a place. It's not always like that, but it's regularly like that.
I agree that the people complaining the loudest often employ ugly arguments, but the crux of both the anti tourism and anti immigration arguments seem to be "There are lots of people in my city who don't look or speak like me and I don't like the way they act." As you said, it's a matter of balance, but I think most of the anti immigration people are closer in opinion to the anti tourism people than the anti tourism people would care to admit. We don't really get to choose how tourists or immigrants behave, they get the same freedoms as locals, and that includes the freedom to be rude with suitcases and speak Chinese unapologetically. Basically everyone is ok with immigrants provided they meet a bunch of qualifications that make them much less foreign, that's not exactly extreme open mindedness. In the US, it's often the people accused of being racist who say they don't mind immigration at all if the immigrants adopt American customs and learn English.
I also don't really see a difference between complaining about a street full of gift shops or complaining about a street full of llanteras.
I'm curios: where do you come down on gentrification? Because in a way the comment you're responding to is describing exactly that: a group with more economic power (in this case tourists) displaces an existing community.
These are complex issues, and I don't pretend to know the answer, but I don't know if it's fair to generalize the professed desire to preserve one's community into the category of xenophobia and racism.
And I completely agree that it's not fair to categorize it completely as xenophobia and racism. I was just agreeing with the guy above that I don't think it's fair that the anti immigrant stance gets categorized that way and the anti tourism stance gets lauded as a sort of preservation.
And while I don't fault the people who want to preserve their communities, once new people start showing up, your options are
1) to require that they adopt your culture and language, which strikes a lot of people as not really ok, especially if you are of the persuasion that cultures are something to be preserved.
I feel like the counter to this is that local communities have a culture that should be preserved too, but I think we all subconsciously rank cultures. Tourists lose to everyone, tech employees lose to almost everyone (but they have enough money that they still move in), and I personally think that there are parts of American culture that maybe Baby Boomers consider intrinsic but a lot of younger people consider "not culture" (like... I don't know... Certain hamburger restaurants, I apologize for the dumb example) and that's where culture rankings get confused and people start getting called racist. There are little towns in the Midwest with cultures that are pretty marginalized (like the whole region being called flyover country) and when these people want to preserve their culture against anyone else's, they are often called racist, mostly independent of their sincerity in wanting to protect their culture. Like Googlers, their culture is less.
2) Or you can just not let in people who have different cultures, which will very often end up being explicitly racist in areas where the population is homogenous.
3) Or you can let in so very few immigrants that they don't change the character of a place, but over a country the size of the US, there's still more than enough immigrants that if they decide they want to live near people with similar cultures they can displace the locals in fairly large towns (note: these are not wealthy people).
4) or you can let in most everyone amd let them act how they want, within some broad bounds, and you get wholesale change in a lot of communities.
As someone from the Seattle area, I've seen parts of Seattle get gentrified, some parts that I knew before, and while I can commiserate with the locals that the rising rent sucks and the character of the places have changed, I also feel like the people moving in are just trying to live their lives. In order to feel the anger that the locals feel, I have to convince myself that the tech employees are somehow worse than me, but I can't. They're just people trying to live someplace cool.
The same thing is happening in Portland, and there are some signs around Portland that are really mean, directed at people moving up from California, and if they were directed at immigrants they would most definitely be xenophobic and racist. Once again, I totally understand the sentiment, the place they grew up is changing dramatically and losing a lot of the character that they loved. But at the end of the day, you can either go with it or you can tell the people moving in that their culture is less than yours so they need to either change or stop coming.
The article I linked above seems like it could be the best suggestion for dealing with this. It seems like we need to do our best to make room for everyone, while also finding a way to preserve local culture without having to make value judgements about whose culture is worth preserving.
Edit: redreading my comment I know that I'm really mixing together gentrification and immigration, but I guess I just don't really se...
Yeah it's an interesting and tricky issue. At heart I'm also in favor of free movement: I'm an immigrant myself after all, I live in a cosmopolitan city and I enjoy being surrounded by diverse cultures.
At the same time, I'm not sure that truly unfettered freedom of movement would create a world which we actually want. For instance, if all border enforcement disappeared tomorrow, I don't see how there wouldn't be a mass immigration from regions at the bottom of the development index toward those at the top. And I would imagine the result of that would be to torpedo the cost of labour, and put stress on the social systems in those developed countries. I would imagine the wealthy would be just fine, but the middle class would be all but erased globally. So while I don't necessarily like the idea of boarders and exclusion, at some level I don't see how healthy and prosperous communities/cultures/societies can preserve their health and prosperity without having some filtering mechanism.
And as far as the options you give, I would agree with you in broad terms that we should strive to allow people to preserve what's unique and interesting about their cultures when they move into our communities (option 4), but the truth is there are a lot of gray areas and there will probably always have to be some of #1 as well.
For example, lets say that there is a population which moves into your neighborhood in Seattle which doesn't believe in vaccinating their kids, and now your kids who go to the same school are at risk of getting the measles. Is that enforcing your cultural superiority to insist that they get vaccinations against their belief system?
Or say there are people moving into your neighborhood who strongly reject homosexuality in their culture, and now your gay friends have to deal with dirty looks when they walk down the street holding hands in their own neighborhood. Should you just accept this as a form of cultural diversity?
So I think what I'm trying to say is that it's a nice idea to say we should open the borders and live and let live, but it's not as simple as that. A lot of us would probably agree that we're happy if people who share mostly the same values as us, and are of a similar socioeconomic strata come and bring their food, music, maybe even their language. But when it comes to real-world migrations I think there are a lot of grey areas, and we all have to draw the line somewhere as far as what should be accept as far as changes in our communities, but there's a lot of disagreement and negotiation involved in exactly where that line should be.
Anyway, like I say I don't know the answers, and it's a topic I struggle with philosophically.
I'm not sure what we disagree on really. As I mentioned, both immigration and tourism only work in balance, I haven't attempted to exclude immigration from a topic that has issues which is sort of the impression you seem to have gotten from me.
What OP did say was, if they don't want you visiting, they certainly don't want you saying. And that may be true for some, sure, but I've said it certainly isn't necessarily true. And it's precisely because for very few people in the anti-tourism movement it's driven by being anti-foreign, it's a question of balance.
That may well be true for anti-immigrant movement, as well. But there's no denying that part of this movement wouldn't accept, view or treat any degree of foreigners as welcome and equal. The same can't be said for people who are frustrated by mass tourism.
There's a great deal of difference, and it hinges on time.
If your plan for visiting is "get the cheapest one-day return flight from Wherever, binge drink all night with your buddies, retch it up en route to airport and sleep on the return flight," all you care about is the cheap booze - literally nothing else matters (yes, this is a significant set of tourists around here).
Then you get the other tourists who actually come for something else spend money in addition to using the infrastructure. That is normal, albeit with major scaling problems (there's the issue - "don't have enough space to put all the tourists coming to see the Major Must-See Sights, as those aren't inflatable"). Those care about the appearance NOW ("people retching on public transport? How revolting!").
And then you get the normal city traffic - with locals, expats, and whoever else actually lives here. And those care about quality of life in long term ("what good is public transport, if it efficiently gets you into a city center that's devoid of actual life, only with a disneylandesque imitation? Will I want to live in such city in 5 years? What do I want to change?").
In other words, the longer you're planning to visit, the more probable it is that you'll be nicer about it, because you'll be expecting similar behavior in return. If you just pass through: eh well, break that window, piss in the street, kick that dog - not likely anyone will catch you within the remaining four hours. Note that this doesn't have any relation to whence the tourists are coming - the behavior correlates very closely with the length of the stay, be it an just-out-of-town sports team (common) or a stag party from the UK (also common).
Yeah this was a big complaint about tourists (especially from certain countries) in Barcelona: they viewed the city as a playground and somewhere to let off steam, and they acted in inconsiderate and disrespectful ways in which they would never act back home. It's like to them Mediterranean culture seemed permissive and relaxed compared to what they were used to, so they made the false assumption that "anything goes" rather than putting in the effort to actually learn and respect the norms of the culture they were guests of.
There's a fundamentally different social contract in Europe from the US. The US is a nation founded on ideals: it's the nation of Manifest Destiny and the immutable rights of the individual. The premise is that anyone from anywhere can "become American" if they buy in to the American system.
In Europe by contrast most nations are defined by their history. There is a certain nativism in European thought that can't really exist in the same way in the US since a vast majority of the population emigrated within the last few centuries, and in many cases much more recently.
I see complaints/worries about overtourism, housing prices in cities, overfocusing on restaurant reviews, and other problems not as arising from the use of Instagram as some people think, but more basically as an unavoidable side-effect of globalization. Basically it used to be harder to find the 'perfect' restaurant, vacation, or house because information was not transferring efficiently. With the internet, a process of arbitrage has commenced, where all people are able to put themselves where they feel they will be happiest based on their economic power. Obviously people living in sleepy picturesque villages in Europe would rather no one visited, but these places are just going to have to deal with it in the same way that San Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc. are. The truth is that some places are nicer to live or visit than others, and if you don't have the money to play the game then you aren't welcome.
Once my wife asked her father how people chose what restaurant to eat at when all you had was a phone book, and his answer was telling: "There just used to be fewer places to go."
Well yes that and, many in the world have gotten ridiculously rich. You don't see middle class tourists from Malawi flooding the Vatican Museums despite them having access to the same information on their smartphones, you do see it happening with Chinese tourists because there's a ton of them who can actually afford it.
I mean, I've traveled to four different continents as a student on minimum wage jobs. A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back. And especially if you're from a rich country, traveling means the odds are in your favour of actually spending less on things like food or local transportation than if you'd just stayed at home for the week.
How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me. Owning a home with a toilet, access to a self-driving shared vehicle and a computer is an actual possibility for the hypothetical 3 billion middle-class people of the future who could afford it. But having an access ticket to Paris, despite 3 billion people being able to afford it, is not going to be feasible, ever. In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.
> A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back.
I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.
> How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me.
It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE, Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company.
> In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.
The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete with locals.
>I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.
Inequality is another issue, but this "overtourism" is because of the massive growth in the global middle class. It used to be only a tiny fraction of Chinese citizens could afford to go overseas. Now hundreds of millions of them can. And Europeans are also able to get around very cheaply now within Europe.
People travel more. I think that's fine, sorry if you lived in a picturesque town, but I think it's fair to share it with the world if you live in a nice place.
Well the 3Bn won't be visiting Paris every year. If they visited it in their lifetime (40 years) then it'd be 75 million per year. Not a small number but definitively feasible.
That's five times the 15m annual visitors today. (not tourists, visitors... for comparison, about 7m people visit the Eiffel tower each year, so it's more like 10x tourists, but let's assume 5x) On the contrary, I don't think that's feasible at all.
The average tourist stays about a week. That means you've got about 1.4m tourists in the city on average, on a population of 2.2m. In other words, tourists as a group are about 60% the size of the local population.
Then consider that tourism follows a sort of bell curve with months along the x axis. A month in July has about 2x the monthly average, so at peak holiday season you're looking at there being more tourists than locals in the city. That's an insane proposition. Similarly, tourism isn't spread out, but rather concentrated, the city centres become uninhabitable.
Then consider the dynamics on the local economy. If you've got 3 billion (or 75 million) people's worldwide income bidding for some real estate, some food etc, against 2 million locals, prices will go through the roof. Local population will atrophy and the city turns into an open-air theme park.
And that's assuming a single visit. I've been to Paris half a dozen times and it's not even a place I ever deliberately thought about wanting or needing to visit. And I'm sure I'll be there another 10 times in my lifetime.
None of this is feasible if you ask me, outside of the extremely limited scope of stating it's strictly logistically not impossible to accommodate these numbers. The sociopolitical and cultural dynamics will break.
It comes down to the world moving faster than the infrastructure was designed to handle.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it's a net good that so many more people can afford to go the Paris, own an internet-capable device, read about happenings on the other side of the world.
Having so much data changed the game, and we're struggling to catch back up.
Optimistically, I do believe it is self-correcting, as more and more people learn that the crowds are too big, and the prices have gone up too much.
> The truth is that some places are nicer to live or visit than others, and if you don't have the money to play the game then you aren't welcome.
Yes, and in the good old days, that niceness was a local property: The rich got the nicest places in the area and the poor got the shittiest places in the area.
I guess when globalisation is fully realized, according to this, the rich will get the nicest places globally and the poor will get the shittiest places globally.
That already happened. A friend of mom, his aunt, owned a house in a bay in Ibiza during the 1960s. She bought it for €150k back in the day (which still was a lot of money back then).
According to this [0] calculator, $150K in 1965 is nearly exactly $12M in todays dollars (not sure how to inflation-adjust euros back into the sixties :-) ).
If you moved the entire population of the Earth to the United States and spread it out evenly, there would only be about 2000 people/square mile (7% as dense as New York City).
So not overpopulation as much as everyone wanting to live in/go to the same handful of places. And now they are all mostly making choices based on the same sets of data (Yelp reviews, AirBnb etc etc).
Personally speaking, the main reason I wouldn’t want to live in any of those places is because of the lack of people — cities and buildings can be designed around the terrain… but if no one else is there, what’s the point?
I traveled around South America while working remotely a few years back. There's almost none of this disneyfication. In Ecuador, Peru, and Chile it was extremely normal to have days with no interactions with anyone who could speak English.
I know that this article is mostly about those who live in the host city, but it does also mention the experience of the traveler. For any travelers looking to avoid these situations, there are plenty of wonderful places to go where there's not disneyfication. I almost just began to list countries out but really: It's almost everywhere other than a few major cities in Europe!
I live in a relatively small (population ~260,000) Western European city. It's really pleasant during most of the calmer months, but come summer (and the festival of nearly ten days), there's 2+ million people visiting during that time. Having been to the festival (which is spread throughout the small city), it simply becomes impossible to stay beyond a couple of hours, lest you get nauseated with the pressure of the crowds. Most locals simply leave the city during that entire festive season.
Serious question: do you notice or feel any of the economic impact of the tourists? It seems like there's a decent side hustle to be made during the summer from all those people
This. If I had an opportunity (like a few very small cities in my country) to basically make 3-6 months rent from renting out my place for two or three weeks during a certain period, then that would be pretty fantastic. I could afford a good holiday every year during that period then.
I live in a city like that. The month of August would pay my mortgage for a year, and pay for a holiday if I Airbnb'ed my home for the month. One of the issues is that everyone else goes away during august, so the prices are hyperinflated. You have to go somewhere (as your home is occupied) so where do you go? You also have restrictions (most likely) on annual leave - is paying my mortgage and a holiday worth having 0 time off for the rest of the year?
I usually have a month off every year in the summer, but whether that means you run out of holiday days that's problematic. Perhaps a compromise would be having a 2-3w holiday in August and keeping the rest of the time off for other parts of the year.
Yeah we both live away from family, so require a few days here and there every year to travel back (holidays, I'll family etc). I hadn't really considered just doing it for 1/2 weeks and trying to combine annual leave with unpaid leave or remote work for the period of time until you and another commenter mentioned it though!
That may work for me, but it's unlikely that both myself and my partner would be able to negotiate it for the entire month. I hadn't considered that we could maybe negotiate something for a shorter period together until now, I may investigate it for next year!
By "you", if you mean the city, I presume so—when I see the cafés, restaurants open almost until 03:00 AM (at least during the ten days of the festival), and probably the local musicians and artists might also make a buck or two from their performances (not to mention people renting out their homes via AirBnB; I don't know how popular that option is here, as I certainly see lots of closed and 'dark' homes at night).
But many locals say that they don't feel like being in the city during summer due to overcrowdedness and they feel like they can't get the day-to-day errands done in the city without going through a sea of people.
It was like this in Barcelona. In August the center is crowded to the point of disfunction; it's like being at a festival or something. I used to live a few minutes from Las Ramblas and I dreaded even going down the block to pick up milk from the corner store during high-season.
/me can relate; I recall that neighborhood (was in Barcelona a couple of times in winter, for conferences).
Here I just bicycle the complete opposite direction from the center to go to "known quiet spots" where we can get errands done. And pleasantly enough, the city has also recently implemented a plan to expand the "no cars" zone in the city, thus it has become even more safer for bikers and pedestrians.
"Europe" isn't worried. Some Europeans are. Some others aren't. In Barcelona there is a three-party war between hotels, leftist council and landlords. Council hasn't allowed to build new hotels in years, for instance.
And one of my recent trips was to walk a bit of the Camino de Santiago which has the oldest known tour guide book published around 1140. Though people have been walking it before Jesus was around.
I still think summer vacation is one of society's worst inventions. It creates so many problems in different fields, like the summer education loss. Overtourism is just one of them.
Could you elaborate on the summer education loss? My understanding is that grades drop across summer/fall breaks, but the (little amouht of) research shows that shortening the breaks doesn't actually resolve the problem.
They didn’t list google maps and google translate.
Once we have live translation speech to speech, the world will see a real reshuffle of populations, not just tourism.
I find it fascinating that people want to fill their lives with "authentic" experiences and then they go out of their way to set themselves up for cookie cutter "zombie" experiences. Cram your vacation into a minimum amount of time. Spend all your time in generic airports, hotels, and tour buses. Take the exact same pictures everyone else does. Blaming all this stuff on millenials and instagram is lame, these same patterns have been common for not just decades but generations.
It doesn't take much to get away from the crowds. It also doesn't take much to have unique, different, more satisfying experiences. Walk more, explore more, don't be so concerned with ticking off the classic "must do" checkmarks, take the time for your vacation to be for you.
It's a socioeconomic class thing. Humans organize themselves into heirarchies, so if the class you're in (or one above) starts doing something that can illustrate their status, and not doing it can separate you, then you are also compelled to do it to keep up.
But once the class below catches up, the class above will change what it is that separates them (by definition since humans are inherently wanting to outdo each other). Once material goods become cheap, the thing that separates people with status from people without is time. Upper class people have time to go on lengthy international vacation, something lower class people can't do even with money.
In my circles, it's not cool to just go to the big sights that mass Chinese and Indian tourists go to. So now a riskier trip with more expenses and planning is required to show status, such as going out on your own backpacking in South America or Safari in Africa or hopping around some islands no one's heard of for scuba diving or hiking in Nepal. The older people opt for luxury in their vacations, showing that not only can they afford to go traveling, but they can go with their whole extended family and rent huge houses in national parks.
But it doesn't have to be explicit thinking of "I'm going to show this other person up", it's just the way humanity works in my opinion. You have a certain network, and you either maintain yourself in it or you fall out of it if you don't continue to do the things that network is doing.
I don't know about Facebook and Instagram being the main "culprits", but rather the fact that it's so much easier to travel today, than it was before. And I'm talking about everything from price to accessibility. You just grab your phone, order a ticket, book a room somewhere, pay up and wait for the departure date to come. Sure, social media helps promoting places and creates an urge to show that you also travel to these ultra amazing locations. But if it was more difficult to travel, people wouldn't be touristing as much either. As I see it, it's a two way relationship where both ends fuel the other.
I am more than happy for the trend to build brand on social media with all the picture they take. It retires the fun practice of them showing everyone a slideshow of their trip. Like 8-track, I am overjoyed at watching slideshows becoming a historical curiosity.
Travel off-season, and if you want to be away from other tourists (I don't buy this traveller/tourist distinction) invest just a little bit of time to find somewhere that's not a hotspot.
"for a lot of people, the photos you take on a trip become more important than the experience.”
Cheap photography is to blame for this more than anything else. I was transiting through Dubai a few years back and spent a bit of time at the Burj Khalifa. There is a fountain at the base that does a performance every so often. The majority of people were not seeing the fountain directly at all, they were watching it through their mobile phones. It was a weird sight. I personally didn't take a video since you can see much better ones on Youtube than the one I'd have been able to take with trying to keep other people's phones out of it.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadTravel now is part of conspicuous consumption as much as a flashy purse is. Displaying that you went to some small French village on your Instagram can generate a fair amount of prestige and envy. Also, unlike purses though, there is a permanent record of your purchase for all to see.
After Amalfi, we went to a small fishing village nearby and had an experience that was so, so much better. I even got to speak some Italian and buy some homemade grappa from the local shop, which would be difficult in a more 'disneyfied' place.
It would be nice if TripAdvisor or Google had some sort of 'tourist jam' avoidance algorithm, letting you pick places like or near the place you want to go, but slightly off the beaten path.
Or some kind of warning if you're planning to go somewhere during the peak season.
In other words, that's already happening, and it does help, but doesn't scale quite with the demand. There's always diversification ("go see that niche thing if you're into it - old mine, train museum, festival of this and that, power plant, take a bike tour instead"), but the attraction of extremely-popular spots is self-reinforcing.
You do realise that you are part of the problem you are complaining about? Why are you entitled to visit there and nobody else? Regarding the tour buses, as someone who lives in a popular tourist city (Edinburgh) given the choice of a bus full of tourists rocking up every day, or the same number of tourists rocking up in rental cars, I'll take the bus any day. There's nothing worse than navigating narrow streets surrounded by people who can barely drive not knowing where they're going.
The quick jaunt through Rome and Florence I tacked onto the end of the trip was very loathsome in many aspects. I'd bet you have to go at least 3 miles away from the colosseum in any direction to find food of a higher quality than Olive Garden.
Honest question, what do you believe the point of being there is for them? Do you think other people might have different reasons for being there than you?
If the path less travelled becomes more accessible, then it stops being the path less travelled.
Sounds like the experiences I had... in 1999 and again in 2009. The Amalfi Coast has been, is and will continue to be popular with tourists for a reason. It's beautiful and it's a ferry ride away from Capri & the Blue Grotto. Good luck finding something similar to the Blue Grotto.
I visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna some time ago during a weekday in late January, which meant that I got to see some of Velasquez's works (including the exceptional "Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanta_Margarita_Teresa_in_a_...) in a room all by myself. I felt "royal-ish" for those few minutes, as if those famous paintings had been painted by Velasquez especially for me and me only. And then just a couple of rooms away there were a couple of paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, which I also got to see alone, by myself.
But why, it sounds like it is working perfectly. You would prefer it if a large percent of those people were send to your small town? You are a tourist, you are part of the problem.
They do the same inconsiderate shit as Times Square tourists: block the sidewalk, walk 5 abreast really fucking slowly, stand in the subway doors, leave their huge suitcases in high traffic areas, etc. But the fact that they're not all clustered together like in midtown reduces the frustration factor immensely. I actually don't mind them when they're spread out like this.
edit: Why not comment before you censor with your downvote?
Also I think there is a very periodic jump in tourism during specific European holiday periods which are best avoided (Especially for americans the idea that whole countries all have multiple weeks of holiday effectively at the same time is probably easy to forget)
That only works until someone with a sufficiently large follower base promotes it on instagram. Instant tourist influx. Many of the tourist traps started out as hidden treasures.
Sure, someone might promote precisely the completely ordinary place you have selected and cause it to be overrun, but given the number of places you can choose from, that's not very likely.
Of course that only works if you don't travel to see unique and famous sights, but in that case you can never avoid other tourists anyway. If you just want some new experiences, the selection is effectively unlimited.
btw, the Taj Mahal is indeed beautiful, but it's a very small oasis in the literally the most vile city(Agra) I've been to in all my travels. Absolute filth. The best thing to do is drive there, see it for an hour, and then drive back to the place you came from.
Or go really off the beaten & easy path.
I just spent a year traveling North to South in West Africa, I can count the number of tourists I saw on two hands. It is breathtaking and well worth the visit, but it's also very difficult and demanding.
I love travel, but no, "tourism" isn't automatically the same thing.
Modern "mass tourism", in particular, consists of taking a big boat or a big bus with a bunch of people who are just like you, to places that local people never go. Then you take a picture, post it somewhere to show off to your friends, then you buy some trinkets and go to the next place.
Setting aside the question of whether or not international travel is sustainable for (say) all of China, this form of travel is ludicrous. You might as well stay home, look at pictures on Instagram, go to a buffet and and visit the mall.
I honestly did not expect the number to be that high.
So a double digit percentage of all humanity travels internationally, every year.
But there's probably huge swaths of the population who have never traveled internationally for economic reasons, or because they live in a large country (like China, the US, India or Russia) which makes that less necessary.
The article falls directly into the "good old days" fallacy. No, people in the past were not looking for "more authentic experiences".
I bought in a flea market a photo album of a trip of some Swedish couple in the 60s. It is awesome. It could be posted picture by picture on Facebook and nobody will notice. Except by details like that the plane tickets, included in the album, were printed by a mechanical typewriter. Also includes tourism flyers, tickets for the theatre, and a menu from a restaurant. Sounds familiar? Because people are people in all places at all times.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days
I also fail to see what this article is stating. That people are travelling to build a personal brand. Maybe some people but nobody in my circle. Everyone I know travel because they want new experiences. They save little items and trinkets from those experiences to remember them. Not to post them on social media.
* Assuming by offline you mean not-shared, rather than literally offline. Anyone with a smart phone is most likely backing up their photos to iCloud/Google photos.
That is my point. In the past, people did the same things, if that does not make them superficial we are neither. We should not judge our contemporaneous travellers so lightly.
Most people are fully aware that what happened there is a tragedy. Most people also have an instant-no-thought habit to smile when having a picture taken. Is it really any better for them to take a picture and be solemn? Is that enough or do they need to express deep sadness for these pictures? Would others claim these sad emotions are just for show anyway? And if so, should we expect people to just not take pictures at all at the WTC memorial? And if so, at what point in time can we start taking pictures at a place with our normal happy faces?
People are there. They are happy they are there, even though 'there' (where ever 'there' is) may be a place that causes them to have emotions on the sad part of the emotional spectrum.
Think of funerals. It's a sad place to be (perhaps sadder since the person who died is someone well known as opposed to a lot of unknown people, but I won't judge either way). Family and friends are together, which usually makes people happy. It's a mixed bag of emotions. If someone happens to smile in a picture there it's probably more to do with habit of smiling for pictures or happiness to be with family and friends (perhaps first time in a while) than it is for being happy the deceased is deceased or for social status boosts.
Hilter invaded Poland in Sept 1939 and VE-Day was May 8, 1945; so the war in Europe lasted 68 months. 75 years ago the war was 47 months old, or 69% complete. I consider the final 30% of something the "tail end." It's weirdly pedantic and downright antisocial to go around arguing "tail end" means something else, especially when its entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Since the internet is for cats I did some quick Googling and looks like, on average, a cats tail is around 34% of their total length (body plus tail) so saying the final 30% of something is the tail end is objectively accurate. Unless you want to go around arguing that some cats don't have tails.
1943 was the year when German advance was halted and they began to be pushed back by Soviet army. It's right in the middle of the war if you look at the map instead of calendar.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art...
It's not like you can spin up 20 more instances of the historic city center when you get 20x the usual traffic. Result: cities literally divided against themselves, transformed into a tourist-factory-slash-amusement-park that nobody lives in, segregated from the actual living city.
What, me bitter about my hometown being disneyfied? Nooooosir...
There's something to be said for trying to preserve local flavor while accommodating tourists though, and that's a line each tourist spot will have to find for themselves. Some will probably inevitably become expat party towns, while others will probably strike the right balance.
You are technically correct.
This comment falls directly into the "things never change" fallacy.
This fallacy can be applied whenever anyone complains about any change anywhere. Picking one sample piece of anecdotal data from another period that can roughly be lined up with some other vague impressions of today does not refute the claim.
I have no strong opinion on overtourism or the effects on it by social media, but I'm willing to listen to people who discuss it without dismissing them.
That sounds interesting. I looked for it, and I just found references to the "tradition fallacy" that only deals with resistance to change.
Can you provide a link?
> Picking one sample piece of anecdotal data from another period that can roughly be lined up with some other vague impressions of today does not refute the claim.
I provided an anecdote example as a means to be more pedagogic. It is easier to understand concepts from the concrete to the abstract. So you are completely right, my anecdote does not refute the claim.
You can probably cover every habit of thought and discourse under a banner of fallacy, if you pick out the ways in which they are used badly - since people tend to think badly due to misapplied habits.
The reason I'd agree with your timeline is one thing you did not mention -- wealth explosion. Purely recreational international travel is and always has been relatively expensive.
Also XIX c. passports were without biometry (ie without photography of the holder).
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport
1. No more staring at signs and menus in confusion. Snap a picture with Google translate and viola.
2. Related to #1, no more getting lost using public transit or walking because you can't read street signs. Google Maps with walking directions, transit directions was a LIFE-CHANGER.
3. No more being LIMITED to phrases in your phrasebook. Again, Google translate.
4. No more worries about being taken advantage of by local taxis or figuring out local taxi customs. Uber and Uber clones.
5. No more getting trapped at tourist trap restaurants or overpriced "officially" reviewed restaurants. Google search again.
6. Waze can help you navigate to the most secluded spots, even when the local signs become sparse.
I could keep going...
Actually, it's amazing how much it was Google and local clones of Uber. Yelp and Uber aren't as popular in the countries we visited as I expected.
Honestly it was almost a little too easy, in some ways I didn't feel like I was in a foreign land... I felt at total ease in any neighborhood, because even if no taxis were around, just hail a ride.
Rented a car multiple times and drove around because Waze was great everywhere if Google Maps broke down.
Overall I LOVED that technology has made experiencing a foreign country almost trivially easy.
Technology absolutely lowers many barriers to travel.
The difference between this trip and my last trip was unbelievable.
...and then you can complain on FB how many people are on that supposedly "secluded" spot. Surprise: technological innovation applies to them as well.
Indeed, technology removes many bottlenecks...but as we should know here on HN, all that ever did was expose other bottlenecks elsewhere in the pipeline - and physical scarcity is a far harder bottleneck than knowledge imbalance.
Likewise for planning each and every meal via reviews.
Google translate might mean that you don't even try to learn the basics of a local language.
Each of us seeks different things in their free time. I for example usually don't turn on phone for days during travelling.
This exaggeration of this behavior has increased contrast. It is both easier to identify and self-identity people who aren't victim to this pattern. There were never the good old days, speaking in a formal logical manner. However, in the good new days it is easier to identify this bullshit and pry oneself away from it.
Guess with howany people the photo albumhas been shared compared to the social media post?
This type of dismissal - that people discussing change are nothing more than baseless nostalgics, is really becoming it's own tired trope.
The article gives quite concrete examples of recent-ish developments that are an annoyance to both other residents and other travelers. Large groups of selfie sticks, outsized queues, neighborhoods bereft of actual locals, etc.
The article also discusses sustainability which is a pretty important topic on a planet with 7.6 billion people. How is that a fallacy exactly? An increasing population and a global expansion of middle class people, two elements that factor a booming tourism industry are very rooted in fact.[1]
>"No, people in the past were not looking for "more authentic experiences"."
Nowhere in this article is that claim even staked. It's also very odd that you then go on to mention a couple who brought back some small keepsakes and mementos from a trip as evidence of this. People keep reminders from local events in their life as well and it has nothing to do with "authenticity."
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_...
whereas if an american says it, it gets explained way as: 'they are a racist protectionist bigot'.
These are superficial examples but you catch my drift.
In any case, both migration and temporary visitors (tourists) only works in balance. I think virtually everyone recognises that basic truth. But what constitutes balance is a matter of opinion, and some of these opinions are definitely driven by racism.
I agree that the people complaining the loudest often employ ugly arguments, but the crux of both the anti tourism and anti immigration arguments seem to be "There are lots of people in my city who don't look or speak like me and I don't like the way they act." As you said, it's a matter of balance, but I think most of the anti immigration people are closer in opinion to the anti tourism people than the anti tourism people would care to admit. We don't really get to choose how tourists or immigrants behave, they get the same freedoms as locals, and that includes the freedom to be rude with suitcases and speak Chinese unapologetically. Basically everyone is ok with immigrants provided they meet a bunch of qualifications that make them much less foreign, that's not exactly extreme open mindedness. In the US, it's often the people accused of being racist who say they don't mind immigration at all if the immigrants adopt American customs and learn English.
I also don't really see a difference between complaining about a street full of gift shops or complaining about a street full of llanteras.
These are complex issues, and I don't pretend to know the answer, but I don't know if it's fair to generalize the professed desire to preserve one's community into the category of xenophobia and racism.
And I completely agree that it's not fair to categorize it completely as xenophobia and racism. I was just agreeing with the guy above that I don't think it's fair that the anti immigrant stance gets categorized that way and the anti tourism stance gets lauded as a sort of preservation.
And while I don't fault the people who want to preserve their communities, once new people start showing up, your options are
1) to require that they adopt your culture and language, which strikes a lot of people as not really ok, especially if you are of the persuasion that cultures are something to be preserved. I feel like the counter to this is that local communities have a culture that should be preserved too, but I think we all subconsciously rank cultures. Tourists lose to everyone, tech employees lose to almost everyone (but they have enough money that they still move in), and I personally think that there are parts of American culture that maybe Baby Boomers consider intrinsic but a lot of younger people consider "not culture" (like... I don't know... Certain hamburger restaurants, I apologize for the dumb example) and that's where culture rankings get confused and people start getting called racist. There are little towns in the Midwest with cultures that are pretty marginalized (like the whole region being called flyover country) and when these people want to preserve their culture against anyone else's, they are often called racist, mostly independent of their sincerity in wanting to protect their culture. Like Googlers, their culture is less.
2) Or you can just not let in people who have different cultures, which will very often end up being explicitly racist in areas where the population is homogenous.
3) Or you can let in so very few immigrants that they don't change the character of a place, but over a country the size of the US, there's still more than enough immigrants that if they decide they want to live near people with similar cultures they can displace the locals in fairly large towns (note: these are not wealthy people).
4) or you can let in most everyone amd let them act how they want, within some broad bounds, and you get wholesale change in a lot of communities.
As someone from the Seattle area, I've seen parts of Seattle get gentrified, some parts that I knew before, and while I can commiserate with the locals that the rising rent sucks and the character of the places have changed, I also feel like the people moving in are just trying to live their lives. In order to feel the anger that the locals feel, I have to convince myself that the tech employees are somehow worse than me, but I can't. They're just people trying to live someplace cool.
The same thing is happening in Portland, and there are some signs around Portland that are really mean, directed at people moving up from California, and if they were directed at immigrants they would most definitely be xenophobic and racist. Once again, I totally understand the sentiment, the place they grew up is changing dramatically and losing a lot of the character that they loved. But at the end of the day, you can either go with it or you can tell the people moving in that their culture is less than yours so they need to either change or stop coming.
The article I linked above seems like it could be the best suggestion for dealing with this. It seems like we need to do our best to make room for everyone, while also finding a way to preserve local culture without having to make value judgements about whose culture is worth preserving.
Edit: redreading my comment I know that I'm really mixing together gentrification and immigration, but I guess I just don't really se...
At the same time, I'm not sure that truly unfettered freedom of movement would create a world which we actually want. For instance, if all border enforcement disappeared tomorrow, I don't see how there wouldn't be a mass immigration from regions at the bottom of the development index toward those at the top. And I would imagine the result of that would be to torpedo the cost of labour, and put stress on the social systems in those developed countries. I would imagine the wealthy would be just fine, but the middle class would be all but erased globally. So while I don't necessarily like the idea of boarders and exclusion, at some level I don't see how healthy and prosperous communities/cultures/societies can preserve their health and prosperity without having some filtering mechanism.
And as far as the options you give, I would agree with you in broad terms that we should strive to allow people to preserve what's unique and interesting about their cultures when they move into our communities (option 4), but the truth is there are a lot of gray areas and there will probably always have to be some of #1 as well.
For example, lets say that there is a population which moves into your neighborhood in Seattle which doesn't believe in vaccinating their kids, and now your kids who go to the same school are at risk of getting the measles. Is that enforcing your cultural superiority to insist that they get vaccinations against their belief system?
Or say there are people moving into your neighborhood who strongly reject homosexuality in their culture, and now your gay friends have to deal with dirty looks when they walk down the street holding hands in their own neighborhood. Should you just accept this as a form of cultural diversity?
So I think what I'm trying to say is that it's a nice idea to say we should open the borders and live and let live, but it's not as simple as that. A lot of us would probably agree that we're happy if people who share mostly the same values as us, and are of a similar socioeconomic strata come and bring their food, music, maybe even their language. But when it comes to real-world migrations I think there are a lot of grey areas, and we all have to draw the line somewhere as far as what should be accept as far as changes in our communities, but there's a lot of disagreement and negotiation involved in exactly where that line should be.
Anyway, like I say I don't know the answers, and it's a topic I struggle with philosophically.
What OP did say was, if they don't want you visiting, they certainly don't want you saying. And that may be true for some, sure, but I've said it certainly isn't necessarily true. And it's precisely because for very few people in the anti-tourism movement it's driven by being anti-foreign, it's a question of balance.
That may well be true for anti-immigrant movement, as well. But there's no denying that part of this movement wouldn't accept, view or treat any degree of foreigners as welcome and equal. The same can't be said for people who are frustrated by mass tourism.
There's a great deal of difference, and it hinges on time.
If your plan for visiting is "get the cheapest one-day return flight from Wherever, binge drink all night with your buddies, retch it up en route to airport and sleep on the return flight," all you care about is the cheap booze - literally nothing else matters (yes, this is a significant set of tourists around here).
Then you get the other tourists who actually come for something else spend money in addition to using the infrastructure. That is normal, albeit with major scaling problems (there's the issue - "don't have enough space to put all the tourists coming to see the Major Must-See Sights, as those aren't inflatable"). Those care about the appearance NOW ("people retching on public transport? How revolting!").
And then you get the normal city traffic - with locals, expats, and whoever else actually lives here. And those care about quality of life in long term ("what good is public transport, if it efficiently gets you into a city center that's devoid of actual life, only with a disneylandesque imitation? Will I want to live in such city in 5 years? What do I want to change?").
In other words, the longer you're planning to visit, the more probable it is that you'll be nicer about it, because you'll be expecting similar behavior in return. If you just pass through: eh well, break that window, piss in the street, kick that dog - not likely anyone will catch you within the remaining four hours. Note that this doesn't have any relation to whence the tourists are coming - the behavior correlates very closely with the length of the stay, be it an just-out-of-town sports team (common) or a stag party from the UK (also common).
In Europe by contrast most nations are defined by their history. There is a certain nativism in European thought that can't really exist in the same way in the US since a vast majority of the population emigrated within the last few centuries, and in many cases much more recently.
Once my wife asked her father how people chose what restaurant to eat at when all you had was a phone book, and his answer was telling: "There just used to be fewer places to go."
I mean, I've traveled to four different continents as a student on minimum wage jobs. A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back. And especially if you're from a rich country, traveling means the odds are in your favour of actually spending less on things like food or local transportation than if you'd just stayed at home for the week.
How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me. Owning a home with a toilet, access to a self-driving shared vehicle and a computer is an actual possibility for the hypothetical 3 billion middle-class people of the future who could afford it. But having an access ticket to Paris, despite 3 billion people being able to afford it, is not going to be feasible, ever. In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.
I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.
> How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me.
It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE, Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company.
> In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.
The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete with locals.
Inequality is another issue, but this "overtourism" is because of the massive growth in the global middle class. It used to be only a tiny fraction of Chinese citizens could afford to go overseas. Now hundreds of millions of them can. And Europeans are also able to get around very cheaply now within Europe.
People travel more. I think that's fine, sorry if you lived in a picturesque town, but I think it's fair to share it with the world if you live in a nice place.
The average tourist stays about a week. That means you've got about 1.4m tourists in the city on average, on a population of 2.2m. In other words, tourists as a group are about 60% the size of the local population.
Then consider that tourism follows a sort of bell curve with months along the x axis. A month in July has about 2x the monthly average, so at peak holiday season you're looking at there being more tourists than locals in the city. That's an insane proposition. Similarly, tourism isn't spread out, but rather concentrated, the city centres become uninhabitable.
Then consider the dynamics on the local economy. If you've got 3 billion (or 75 million) people's worldwide income bidding for some real estate, some food etc, against 2 million locals, prices will go through the roof. Local population will atrophy and the city turns into an open-air theme park.
And that's assuming a single visit. I've been to Paris half a dozen times and it's not even a place I ever deliberately thought about wanting or needing to visit. And I'm sure I'll be there another 10 times in my lifetime.
None of this is feasible if you ask me, outside of the extremely limited scope of stating it's strictly logistically not impossible to accommodate these numbers. The sociopolitical and cultural dynamics will break.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it's a net good that so many more people can afford to go the Paris, own an internet-capable device, read about happenings on the other side of the world.
Having so much data changed the game, and we're struggling to catch back up.
Optimistically, I do believe it is self-correcting, as more and more people learn that the crowds are too big, and the prices have gone up too much.
Yes, and in the good old days, that niceness was a local property: The rich got the nicest places in the area and the poor got the shittiest places in the area.
I guess when globalisation is fully realized, according to this, the rich will get the nicest places globally and the poor will get the shittiest places globally.
Why do we want that future again?
Almost all the examples of “nice places” I’ve seen on this post have been artificial.
1. It takes time.
2. The places need to be intrinsically nice, not "generically pleasing to tourists at this moment" - those wear out quickly.
3. Popularity breeds popularity, so the tried-and-true sites stay popular.
A few years ago, she sold it for €12 million.
[0] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
Globalization or overpopulation.
So not overpopulation as much as everyone wanting to live in/go to the same handful of places. And now they are all mostly making choices based on the same sets of data (Yelp reviews, AirBnb etc etc).
I know that this article is mostly about those who live in the host city, but it does also mention the experience of the traveler. For any travelers looking to avoid these situations, there are plenty of wonderful places to go where there's not disneyfication. I almost just began to list countries out but really: It's almost everywhere other than a few major cities in Europe!
But many locals say that they don't feel like being in the city during summer due to overcrowdedness and they feel like they can't get the day-to-day errands done in the city without going through a sea of people.
Here I just bicycle the complete opposite direction from the center to go to "known quiet spots" where we can get errands done. And pleasantly enough, the city has also recently implemented a plan to expand the "no cars" zone in the city, thus it has become even more safer for bikers and pedestrians.
75 years ago was 1943, there was no tourism in Europe unless you were flying a bomber or driving a tank.
The first jet airliner didn't fly until 1949 which enabled tourism for the common person.
I'm sure tourism was "better" in the old days when only the wealthy could afford to travel.
And one of my recent trips was to walk a bit of the Camino de Santiago which has the oldest known tour guide book published around 1140. Though people have been walking it before Jesus was around.
It doesn't take much to get away from the crowds. It also doesn't take much to have unique, different, more satisfying experiences. Walk more, explore more, don't be so concerned with ticking off the classic "must do" checkmarks, take the time for your vacation to be for you.
But once the class below catches up, the class above will change what it is that separates them (by definition since humans are inherently wanting to outdo each other). Once material goods become cheap, the thing that separates people with status from people without is time. Upper class people have time to go on lengthy international vacation, something lower class people can't do even with money.
In my circles, it's not cool to just go to the big sights that mass Chinese and Indian tourists go to. So now a riskier trip with more expenses and planning is required to show status, such as going out on your own backpacking in South America or Safari in Africa or hopping around some islands no one's heard of for scuba diving or hiking in Nepal. The older people opt for luxury in their vacations, showing that not only can they afford to go traveling, but they can go with their whole extended family and rent huge houses in national parks.
But it doesn't have to be explicit thinking of "I'm going to show this other person up", it's just the way humanity works in my opinion. You have a certain network, and you either maintain yourself in it or you fall out of it if you don't continue to do the things that network is doing.
As for overtourism - it's a nice problem to have.
Cheap photography is to blame for this more than anything else. I was transiting through Dubai a few years back and spent a bit of time at the Burj Khalifa. There is a fountain at the base that does a performance every so often. The majority of people were not seeing the fountain directly at all, they were watching it through their mobile phones. It was a weird sight. I personally didn't take a video since you can see much better ones on Youtube than the one I'd have been able to take with trying to keep other people's phones out of it.