12 ms·

‘Overtourism’ Worries Europe. How Much Did Technology Help Get Us There?

107 points by tango24 8y ago

da_murvel 8y ago
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.
protomyth 8y ago
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.
growlist 8y ago
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. As for overtourism - it's a nice problem to have.
distant_hat 8y ago
"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.
harperlee 8y ago
At least part of it was caused by the cheapness of flights - which also brings tourists with less disposable income to leave behind.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Or maybe allows tourists to have more disposable income to spend, not having to divert it to paying for travel?
- slg 8y ago
  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.
  - orbitur 8y ago
    When did the TSA make flying safer and cheaper?
    - maccard 8y ago
      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)
- dddw 8y ago
  ^ this indeed.
Bucephalus355 8y ago
A lot. 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.
CoolGuySteve 8y ago
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.
- almost_usual 8y ago
  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.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    Not necessarily, because you might have 30 near-equivalent spots that people can be spread out into
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      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.
- tozeur 8y ago
  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.
mudil 8y ago
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.
- samsonradu 8y ago
  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.
overcast 8y ago
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.
- the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
  > 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.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    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.
  - overcast 8y ago
    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.
jimbokun 8y ago
"He noted that in 1960, when the jet age began, around 25 million international trips were taken. Last year, the number was 1.3 billion." I honestly did not expect the number to be that high. So a double digit percentage of all humanity travels internationally, every year.
- detaro 8y ago
  It might very well be enough for double-digits still, but there's a distribution: Many people take multiple trips per year.
- lainga 8y ago
  Could be, but I think that number includes people taking multiple trips each. Think businessmen.
  - borkt 8y ago
    Also the schengen zone
  - newen 8y ago
    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.
    - skohan 8y ago
      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.
kartan 8y ago
> “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. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days
- bogomipz 8y ago
  >"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." [1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_...
- dbs 8y ago
  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.
borkt 8y ago
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
droidist2 8y ago
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.)
autokad 8y ago
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'.
- skohan 8y ago
  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.
- pjc50 8y ago
  There's a big difference between tourists and permanent migration.
  - autokad 8y ago
    I'm not talking about that, but if they don't want you visiting, they sure as heck don't want you staying.
    - Piskvorrr 8y ago
      Nope. Nope nope nope. 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).
zwkrt 8y ago
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."
- IkmoIkmo 8y ago
  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.
stevenking86 8y ago
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!
- growlist 8y ago
  Not sure I quite agree with this - Scotland for example is facing problems in a number of non-urban areas due to growing tourism.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
kashyapc 8y ago
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.
- johntiger1 8y ago
  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
  - kashyapc 8y ago
    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.
    - skohan 8y ago
      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.
      - kashyapc 8y ago
        /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.
narag 8y ago
"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.
FigBug 8y ago
> Seventy-five years ago, tourism was about experience 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.
- tim333 8y ago
  That's not true - Sanremo did a decent business with Brits getting the train to the med in the late 1800s. Here's a link to the nyt report of Queen Victoria going there in 1888 https://www.nytimes.com/1888/02/25/archives/queen-victoria-at-san-remo.html https://www.nytimes.com/1888/02/25/archives/queen-victoria-a... 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.
- johntiger1 8y ago
  Exactly, I'm getting a huge cognitive dissonance vibe from the authour ("so I was a tourist and I noticed, there are way too many tourists!)
IkmoIkmo 8y ago
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.
- maccard 8y ago
  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.
naveen99 8y ago
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.
InclinedPlane 8y ago
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.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  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.

107 points by tango24 8y ago

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.

protomyth 8y ago

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.

growlist 8y ago

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. As for overtourism - it's a nice problem to have.

distant_hat 8y ago

"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.

harperlee 8y ago

At least part of it was caused by the cheapness of flights - which also brings tourists with less disposable income to leave behind.

saagarjha 8y ago
Or maybe allows tourists to have more disposable income to spend, not having to divert it to paying for travel?
slg 8y ago
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.
- orbitur 8y ago
  When did the TSA make flying safer and cheaper?
  - maccard 8y ago
    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)
dddw 8y ago
^ this indeed.

Bucephalus355 8y ago

A lot. 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.

CoolGuySteve 8y ago

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.

almost_usual 8y ago
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.
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Not necessarily, because you might have 30 near-equivalent spots that people can be spread out into
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    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.
tozeur 8y ago
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.

mudil 8y ago

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.

samsonradu 8y ago
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.

overcast 8y ago

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.

the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
> 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.
- yorwba 8y ago
  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.
- overcast 8y ago
  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.

jimbokun 8y ago

"He noted that in 1960, when the jet age began, around 25 million international trips were taken. Last year, the number was 1.3 billion." I honestly did not expect the number to be that high. So a double digit percentage of all humanity travels internationally, every year.

detaro 8y ago
It might very well be enough for double-digits still, but there's a distribution: Many people take multiple trips per year.
lainga 8y ago
Could be, but I think that number includes people taking multiple trips each. Think businessmen.
- borkt 8y ago
  Also the schengen zone
- newen 8y ago
  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.
  - skohan 8y ago
    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.

kartan 8y ago

> “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. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days

bogomipz 8y ago
>"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." [1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_...
dbs 8y ago
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.

borkt 8y ago

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

droidist2 8y ago

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.)

autokad 8y ago

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'.

skohan 8y ago
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.
pjc50 8y ago
There's a big difference between tourists and permanent migration.
- autokad 8y ago
  I'm not talking about that, but if they don't want you visiting, they sure as heck don't want you staying.
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Nope. Nope nope nope. 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).

zwkrt 8y ago

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."

IkmoIkmo 8y ago
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.

stevenking86 8y ago

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!

growlist 8y ago
Not sure I quite agree with this - Scotland for example is facing problems in a number of non-urban areas due to growing tourism.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

kashyapc 8y ago

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.

johntiger1 8y ago
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
- kashyapc 8y ago
  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.
  - skohan 8y ago
    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.
    - kashyapc 8y ago
      /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.

narag 8y ago

"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.

FigBug 8y ago

> Seventy-five years ago, tourism was about experience 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.

tim333 8y ago
That's not true - Sanremo did a decent business with Brits getting the train to the med in the late 1800s. Here's a link to the nyt report of Queen Victoria going there in 1888 https://www.nytimes.com/1888/02/25/archives/queen-victoria-at-san-remo.html https://www.nytimes.com/1888/02/25/archives/queen-victoria-a... 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.
johntiger1 8y ago
Exactly, I'm getting a huge cognitive dissonance vibe from the authour ("so I was a tourist and I noticed, there are way too many tourists!)

IkmoIkmo 8y ago

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.

maccard 8y ago
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.

naveen99 8y ago

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.

InclinedPlane 8y ago

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.

lotsofpulp 8y ago
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.