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The backlash against overtourism

economist.com

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Re: The backlash against overtourism

#71

Post by jolesf »

pradn wrote: post #37
jolesf wrote: post #3

“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience, It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction afte…

Discussion from another time this quote was brought up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8408870

thank you, that is an interesting perspective... "This is one of those sentences that sounds insightful, but in reality is pretty surprisingly shallow."

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#72

Post by esotericn »

zanny wrote: post #63
esotericn wrote: post #4

Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. We can'…

At least a few of those have evolving technical solutions. We can all travel in a more sustainable way if we can do full body VR immersion wherever we want to go. We don't need cars if we have fleets of autonomous vehicles to pick us up and drop us off wherever we want to be on a whim. We can all live in the country if you don't need to commute either yourself or property to and from where you live (the infrastructur…

I agree with a lot of this.

That said:

> if we can do full body VR immersion wherever we want to go

At this point we're basically post scarcity. You plug yourself into the wall, hook yourself up to the IV and that's that. The rest of your post (and all of mine) becomes irrelevant.

It's pretty much an "all bets are off" scenario. :P

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#73

Post by zanny »

Loughla wrote: post #16

Honest to God, the best take on this theory was actually the Consul's tale in Hyperion explaining why he was against the Hegemony. The degradation of Maui-Covenant is just so very realistic and easy to visualize. Reading that as a child actually led me to travel less than I really want to as an adult. Instead, I enjoy making my small part of the world 'mine' instead of trying to make the rest of the world 'mine'.

It doesn't hurt that you can get a large chunk of the travel experience virtually now. Either watching someone elses travel vlogs (from just phone camera stuff to professional productions on various places) or using something like google maps lets you "tour" the world.

If I want the sensation of being somewhere busy I could just drive an hour and walk main street in my closest city. I'm sure all the shops and attractions there would love to see you more often as much as the ones halfway around the world would.

And the good news is a lot of missing pieces (the grandeur and immersion that comes with being somewhere in person) can be improved on with VR. Really looking forward to virtual tours of places being commonplace within my lifetime.

To be fair its much the same problem remote work experiences. Its mostly subjective experience that people feel is lacking telecommuting more than anything physically being absent. Which makes it a personal thing if you are satisfied with it or not. But it just being an option means many people can experience 99% of something without having the immense marginal costs moving bodies around the planet.

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#74

Post by CaptainZapp »

siruncledrew wrote: post #61
esotericn wrote: post #4

Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. We can'…

Most of the places that are top tourist destinations don't have the capacity to handle such a high volume of people. It's just not how they were designed (and they had no reason to anticipate a huge surge in population and transportation hundreds or thousands of years ago). In order for places we hold dear to avoid being trampled into the ground by people like herds of buffalo, there has to be some sort of gatekeepin…

Botswana does its gatekeeping by maintaining relatively high prices.

In addition: Quotas to the game parks are strictly limited and enforced.

You can go cheaper (but never cheap) by joining an organized camping tour, which is actually a huge plus.

Camping tour groups get assigned places in the middle of the game reserves (they must apply for permits 18 month in advance and leave the sites in pristine condition).

You can visit the parks individually with a reservation, but are only allowed camping in the entrance area.

The kicker is that if you stay in a very expensive lodge, which can be north of 1000$ a night you will never be sleeping in a park, since commercial exploation is illegal.

It is an expensive country for tourists by design. They rather have a small, but well heeled number of visitors. And while people may moan that it's unfair it's probably the best way to drive "quotas". That, and limited supply of the main attractions.

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#75

Post by narag »

maxxxxx wrote: post #56
esotericn wrote: post #4

Mass tourism is being treated as unique when really, we're discovering that everyone cannot have a "good" standard of living. We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so. We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown. We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either. We can'…

"It sucks. But what's the alternative? " Ideally we would stop breeding and keep world population at a certain number. In reality population will probably keep growing and we can only hope that technology will help avert a disaster.

It's interesting that the two comments that touch the overpopulation side are being downvoted. Why? Does the people downvoting care to explain?

There's a huge contradiction here. Either you do "something" to control population or else all the measures to control climate change are stillborn. We are struggling with the current population!

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#76

Post by TangoTrotFox »

Daishiman wrote: post #27
Fuxy wrote: post #14

I found the quote “tourists go home, refugees welcome” quite funny. So what their basically saying is they would rather kick out tourists that bring in and spend quite a lot of money effectively boosting the economy in favour of some refugees the government will have to spend a large amount of money on... and you wonder why the contry's economy is in such a bad shape when the citizens advocate shooting themselves in…

So... it's not all about money. You can refuse to accept money from sources which are really not all that cracked up (because the margins in tourism are not great actually) and accept people for humanitarian reasons. If you're not 14 or completely driven by greed you can understand the reasoning behind this.

On the other hand, you also have to understand that humanitarianism must have limits. The resources of nations are not infinite and individuals that are unable to provide for themselves are a tremendous burden on society. And when you accept people that fail to integrate you risk imperiling the very policies that you hold to be worthwhile. For instance, Sweden will be a phenomenal test case. The Globe and Mail ran an interesting piece on their situation here [1]. 16% of Sweden is now made up of individuals that come from quite different ideological backgrounds in Africa and the Mideast. And those numbers continue to rapidly increase.

The ideal was that as these people are treated with decency and respect and given a life not unlike any other Swede might receive, they would be able to integrate and ultimately just becomes Swedes. But this ideal did not really turn out to be justified. So what will happen to Sweden as these individuals begin to be one of the most relevant voting blocs? It's not a rhetorical question, since I don't think anybody really knows the answer. This scale of migration with people of such sharply contrasting worldviews is something relatively novel in the modern developed world. However, in my opinion Sweden's experiment is more likely to end up being seen as a cautionary tale than a model of humanitarianism.

[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/swedens-ugly-immigra...

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#77

Post by jlangenauer »

robben1234 wrote: post #42

I won't argue about off topic issues, but I don't think mass tourism is killing any sights. Ignorance kills natural sights, over advertisement kills human created sights. Nearby Venice there's so much interesting stuff and small cities, a bit further are big cities. None of them really struggles with tourists as much as Venice. Maybe you'll see a huge line for Firenze Duomo but that's it, streets and other sights are…

Dubrovnik is one of the most awful places I've visited - literally everything is optimised purely to extract money from tourists.

Want to walk around the city walls? That'll be €20! And if over-priced, mediocre restaurants are your thing, there's plenty of them too.

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#78

Post by knieveltech »

Fuxy wrote: post #24
knieveltech wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is good for the economy (short term) and what is good for people (long term) are frequently not the same things.

As far as I'm aware tourism is not a short term thing there will always be tourists coming and leaving this is an constant revenue steam in its own right. So I don't get what you mean.

I am saying that using economic activity to gauge positive impact on society is utterly misguided. Consider: we are currently living in an age of robust economic growth and international trade, historic levels of income inequality, and are in the midst of a global mass extinction event with the very real possibility of climate change rendering human civilization in it's current form impossible.

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#79

Post by ip26 »

The elephant in the room, of course, is that tourism helps people think of themselves as part of something bigger. The National Parks, for example, help drive votes for conservation. If you've never set foot in nature, and you've never left your town, other places and their problems will always be somewhere beyond the horizon.

Re: The backlash against overtourism

#80

Post by CaptainZapp »

robben1234 wrote: post #42

I won't argue about off topic issues, but I don't think mass tourism is killing any sights. Ignorance kills natural sights, over advertisement kills human created sights. Nearby Venice there's so much interesting stuff and small cities, a bit further are big cities. None of them really struggles with tourists as much as Venice. Maybe you'll see a huge line for Firenze Duomo but that's it, streets and other sights are…

One of the greatest cities in northern Italy is Torino.

While medieval and in a certain shabby way as attractive as Firenze they only get a small percentage of the tourists.

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