Your second paragraph is on point. This is why when I travel I go to a new city for a month or more, and I live in exactly the type of places people are deridi

Your second paragraph is on point. This is why when I travel I go to a new city for a month or more, and I live in exactly the type of places people are deriding in this thread (AirBnB) to live more like a local, not in a hotel. I am not there to be a tourist, although certainly my visa is a tourism visa and I'm counted in those numbers. There's a huge difference in ecological impact and cultural impact of package tours where you have ~30 people following one guide with a flag sticking out of their back vs one person spending month+ in a place and minimizing their ecological impact. The one thing I haven't been able to do yet is stop flying, it's required both for work and for pleasure, but I do buy carbon offsets for air travel. I just don't know how to clearly separate the types of activities I'm talking about without it automatically coming off as elitist when these types of discussions happen... it's not really fair, but the reality is that the Western world had enough various constraints that helped make tourism if not perfectly sustainable, relatively so. With Asia coming up we've added literally billions of potential new tourists to the pot and that's just not scalable. It's even very obvious to me, as I try to visit places which are not tourist destinations... and I visit off-season. I don't really care for tourism itself, I want to meet people and discover food. I go to these places to find not English dual-language, but Mandarin Chinese...