Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism • Hacker News Board

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#241

Post by fiblye » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 1:31 AM UTC

eisa01 wrote: post #117

skohan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about this. I used to live in El Raval, and during August I dreaded even leaving the apartment because I knew I would have to fight crowds even to go to the corner and buy milk. I agree with your general premise, that restricting freedom of movement has not historically been a good thing, but I do also think it's a tragic when a beautiful and interesting place gets absolutely overrun by tourists…

There’s at least one benefit of tourists: you get more and a better selection of restaurants I live in a part of Oslo with a vibrant restaurant scene, and one of the reasons is the extra business tourists drum up

I know I’m about to get ripped off and have a subpar meal when there’s English on the menus. Flavors are almost always subdued and everything normalizes to some weird not quite local cuisine to appease picky travelers. Then there’s always the one exotic thing on the menu that’s made for show and the instagram photos, but the flavor is bland as can be.

The worst thing about overtourism is it makes travel boring. Everything tries to repackage itself as something accessible for 30-something middle class people who don’t want to go to Disney Land but also don’t want to worry about a stomachache or a weird smell.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#242

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 1:35 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #216

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting... here in a relatively touristy part of Melbourne, anecdotally, it's pretty much those backpackers who are working the tables in half of the trendy restaurants and cafes. There's definitive trends on making food 'instagrammable', but the overall quality and competition between all the restaurants is undeniably good. Although now that I think about it, you take somewhere like Lygon street famous for its I…

That's because Australia has incredibly easily accessible tourist working visas. It's what makes it attractive for a broke college kid to bum around in for a few months, in a way that would never happen in Canada, or the United States...

Wages are also far higher than the US or Canada: the legal minimum wage is $19.49/hour, and many industry unions have negotiated higher rates. This means a backpacker can do menial labor and still save meaningful amounts of money to use for travel, even when accounting for the higher cost of living.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#243

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 1:39 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #184

mogadsheu wrote: post #118

I think the answer is clear, if not a bit brutal: raise prices for tourists. Tourism is a luxury, not a right, and if there is a perceived negative externality to Norway from overtourism, it should be mitigated in the market. There will be fewer people who are willing to go to Trolltunga if they are not a Norwegian resident and the price of entry is $200. Sidenote: I lived in Norway for a few years, gorgeous place bu…

Why should travel be the exclusive domain of the wealthy?

Travel involves real costs: flights, hotels, transport. How would you arrange a system where travel is allocated to everyone regardless of wealth?

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#244

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 1:43 AM UTC

tomcooks wrote: post #6

sgt wrote: post #2

Minor correction, the guy's name is Børge Ousland, not Borge.

It's not minor, the implications of such mistakes are enormous (especially in the days of easy copy-pasting, semi-universal support for utf8 on the web, and plenty of ways to do research) on a cultural level. Poor journalism and disdain for what's foreign, the ASCII way. Vae victis.

"Enormous"? No, not really, it's more of a nice to have. As a native speaker of an umlauty Nordic language, if you drop the umlauts, it's virtually always quite easy and in fact almost effortless to work out which words is being referred to from context.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#245

Post by richk449 » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 1:52 AM UTC

munificent wrote: post #178

cletus wrote: post #55

Welcome to the world of, by some measures, "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. There are obviously worse problems to have. But overtourism is a problem that's only going to get worse. This even affects Mount Everest where people are literally dying just to say they stood at the top of the world. And Everest simply can't support the number of climbers now. You see this in US national parks where the o…

> "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them. The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them: http://shirky.com/writings…

> I would love to see more systems engineered to try to balance that. Perhaps a Twitter-like system that capped the number of followers you had.

Is that really better? I think I like the current system. Sure, Everest is ruined, but there are a dozen places nearly as amazing that can be enjoyed with much less crowds. If you want bragging rights, then go to Everest. If you want serenity and beauty, go to the other mountains.

Given the number of people on earth, trying to distribute the people will just lead to everything being destroyed, albeit a little bit slower.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#246

Post by mogadsheu » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #239

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are much more basic rights not being met across the globe before we can afford worrying about everybody having a yacht, a personal jet and close up time with Mona Lisa.

That's not answering the question.

The other options besides increasing price would be:

- lottery (example: powerball)

- waiting list (case: Alcatraz, Coachella)

- application based on xx criteria (case: Antarctica?)

or... a combination of the five (price being #5). In most of these cases, money is still involved. Why? I think it's b/c it takes funding to administer, maintain, and improve the attractions. So maybe pricing isn't the only option.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#247

Post by hairytrog » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:18 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #187

munificent wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "too many" people having too much disposable wealth. I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them. The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them: http://shirky.com/writings…

This is a great point! I've noticed a similar thing with Muir Woods in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are other amazing ancient redwood forests in several other places nearby (e.g. Samuel P. Taylor State Park, Redwood Regional Park, Joaquin Miller Park, the north side of Mount Tamalpais facing Fairfax, and several places along both sides of Skyline Drive along the peninsula -- probably among others that I don't kn…

Why do you have to post about this. Don't ruin the quiet places please.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#248

Post by geomark » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:18 AM UTC

Standing room only at Maya Bay in Thailand. https://static.bangkokpost.com/media/content/20160707/c1_102...

Same effect. Made famous by a Hollywood movie. Now everybody has to say they have been there. It is (was) nice. But there are hundreds of other equally nice beaches and bays in the country.

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#249

Post by geomark » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:25 AM UTC

jaclaz wrote: post #76

Maybe it is not the case at hand in Norway, but what I see around (Italy, Florence) is not as much as "overtourism" but rather "impolite tourism", i.e. tourism by masses of people that for whatever reasons lack the bare minimum of common sense and polite behaviour. The large numbers are of course part of the problem, but it would be minimized if tourists were behaving more properly.

Same problem in Thailand. When mainland Chinese first started coming to Thailand in large numbers there was an outcry about their terrible behavior. After a while the tour operators arranged for them to mostly go places where they don't mingle with the locals. Except the really famous places like Maya Bay got totally overrun - they just couldn't say no to the profits, despite the trashing of what made it so attractive. Eventually the place was shutdown to tourism for some period. https://www.bangkokpost.com/learning/advanced/1029745/phi-ph...

Re: Norway's Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism

#250

Post by timidiceball » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

frereubu wrote: post #43

Whenever I hear about "sustainable tourism" developments like Ousland's, I can't help but think about the huge amount of emissions caused by people getting there in the first place. I bet the vast majority of visitors fly into Tromsø. It feels a bit like painting the walls while the house is falling down around you.

I’ve lived in Oslo for six years now and repeatedly talked myself out visiting Tromsø for a long weekend because of this.

At some point I need to accept that it’s really the primary way to get around the north.