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Strange. Scrolling through all these comments and no one pointed out colonial tourist countries. Like how do you even defend tourism in general when shit like that exists?
Its funny how the blame is on tourists who have to pay exorbitant amounts but not the owners of the property. Its almost like the exploitation of people whether tourists or locals is just the divine nature of our world so it must be the fault of tourists (or immigrants in other places) and never the owning class
In places like south Spain and Greece the “tourist” have outbid the locals and are the owning class.
It’s not like they’re hating on backpackers living in local hostels. It’s hating on the people pricing them out of their own cities. And then renting it out as an Airbnb in the “off season” for 10x the local rent.
There’s even a television show dedicated to this new colonialism https://www.aplaceinthesun.com/
Hot take but tourism economy is the best economy and best quality of life.
Tourism encourages the best values:
- Environment is much safer and local government is held more accountable
- Great career diversity - even low tier jobs are service jobs instead of factory work and high tier jobs are real product business owners not finance or some other bullshit money shuffling.
- Cultural industries like art, bars, history, museums - all thrive under tourism economies
It’s up to communities to learn to manage it but well managed tourist spot is legit one of the best place to be a human in. I lived in tourist towns almost all of my life and it’s the best, especially in seasonal places where you have a low season vibe with communities just chilling and enjoying the rewards of high season.
The real issue stems from corruption where instead of managing this golden goose someone manages to squeeze all of the eggs to their own pocket and leave the rest unmaintained.
And one pandemic and your entire economy is dead
One boat stuck in a canal has had the same effect on other industries.
Historically mass plague has been far more uncommon than shipping catastrophe. To an absurd degree.
Making tourism economies one of the most stable over the longest period of time. They also bounce back faster and more efficiently.
While also being less prone to permanent damage or shifts from a mass upset.
That’s because tourism heavy economies have a tendency to screw over low income locals to favor high income tourists.
I used to live in a Northern Wisconsin town almost entirely comprised of tourism and snow birds for an economy from May to September. Most were people from Chicago and Milwaukee that moved “a little too fast” for someone who lived in the area, so they were easy to spot.
Once school started up, the place was an absolute ghost town. All of downtown completely shut down except one bar. The hotels either shuttered during the winter or operated a single floor of rooms. The population would drop by ~80%.
I loved living in The Great Northwoods of WI, as it’s absolutely gorgeous up there half the year, but I don’t miss standing at the bus stop when it’s -40F wind chills or shovelling out my car to drive somewhere.
Stargazing was incredible in the winter, though.
Whoever made this meme doesn’t live in a city where new houses are bought up to be turned into shitty airbnbs
Hey I got news for you, that’s not just tourist towns.
The tourists love the town for how it was before they got there. We did too…
Europe is like that nowadays. Rents have skyrocketed only from Airbnb and the tourists. Why rent it to a local when a tourist will pay more? Not to mention it ruins the economy. If another covid happens, market will crash, like the one in the USA.
It’s getting tiresome to constantly explain this shit…
Tourism is almost always an extractive activity, kinda like mining only it sells a place’s natural beauty and/or culture built by previous generations rather than whatever is dug out of the ground, and like mining it suffers from it’s own version of the Resource Curse:
- Most of the population isn’t needed to extract that “resource” and there’s no need for those who work in it to be highly educated or have much of a quality of life
- Most of the gains from Tourism end up in a small number number of hands and don’t really trickle down
- Tourism has all manner of destructive side-effects, from actual natural environment destruction and overcrowding to massive realestate bubbles that push out the locals.
- It’s kind of a silver bullet for politicians, especially for the crooked ones, since they don’t really need to invest in the broader population and their welfare to get themselves lots of money from Tourism, be it from thankfull Tourism Industry companies or from the value of their own realestate investments going up thanks to the realestate prices going up as the Demand for space (and, in the era of AirBnB, the actual residential units) from Tourism adds up to the normal demand from people living there, pushing prices up like crazy.
Tourism can be a good thing for most people in the kind of place like a little village in a developing nation with mainly primary sector industries at a subsistence level, because it brings better jobs than subsistence farming or fishing and which reward some level of education (enough to read and write in English), plus it brings money from people from much richer countries, but it’s a totally different thing when we’re talking about established cities in nations which are supposedly developed because there it brings jobs which require lower educational qualifications than most people there have, because of the side effects of Tourism (such as the above mentioned realestate prices and overcrowding) which make it hard for the existing Industries already present there to profitably operate and finally because it isn’t even a path towards becoming a richer nation since the kind of customers it has to attract are those from already rich nations which aren’t crazily ahead in the income scale, so it has to remain cheap enough to attract them hence it’s wealth production abilities is in the main capped because of having to stay below that of those nations - you’re not going to build a modern and advanced powerhouse nation with an industry that sells sunshine and old buildings to foreigned from modern and advanced powerhouse nations whilst employing people with mid-level or lower qualifications: you can bring a developing nation up with it but you can’t use it to push a developed nation all that much up from poor developed nation with Tourism.
People inside the Tourism Industry love it because they personally make money from it and Politicians love it because their “generous friends” make money from it, they themselves indirectly make money from it and they can be completelly total crap at managing a country and Tourism still keeps on generating money because it mainly depends on natural beauty and/or ancient buildings and people with low and mid levels of Education that don’t even need to be locals so the fatcats in nations underinvesting in their people still make lots of money from Tourism.
Weird take.
How is tourism extractive like mining? What is extracted?
You could make the same complaints of any primary industry.
If you think of inflows and outflows to and from a small local economy, in an era where almost every purchase is an outflow to Amazon et al, tourism is an important inflow. Locals cant just keep passing the same $1 around until someone spends it online, you need money coming in.
You can call it “trickle down” economics if you like, but i dont think thats a fair summation. In a small coffee shop, there’s no fat cat corporate owner, but a half dozen people with jobs.
Its absolutely true that in some places airbnb has reduced the number of homes available to locals, but thats not generally true of all tourist destinations. Most jurisdictions where this is / was a significant problem have enacted appropriate laws to mitigate it.
Its not about crooked politicians and their rich friends. A reasonable level of tourism is good for everyone, but too much can obviously cause problems.
Tourism sells local resources.
They just happen to be things like sunshine, beautiful views and old buildings…
Very little of what it sells is the products of people’s work and the part which is the product of people’s work doesn’t require highly specialized skills and is low value, so like mining it can be done with just a fraction of the population and, like mining, by itself it won’t get a country to become a rich country but its income is sufficient so that the local elites and politicians can make a lot of money without having to invest in the kind of activity that requires good management, a highly trained population and good infrastructure, so the tend not to do it.
The only way its better than mining is that it can’t totally trash the local environment because tourists actually go there to enjoy said resources and thus are customers who care about said environment, whilst mining just ships the resources away so customers don’t care about the destruction it leaves behind.
A reasonable level of tourism is good for everyone, but too much can obviously cause problems. [emphasys mine]
Yeah, well, that’s why I mentioned the “Resources Curse” - when a nation mainly sells their resources and doesn’t require local people to be invested in and well taken care of to extract said resources (be it oil, or sunshine), it’s very rare for the people leading the nation to be content with merely “reasonable” levels of Tourism if they themselves, personally, stand to gain from even more Tourism.
I’m from Portugal, specifically Lisbon, and the country is heavilly touristic, now in a second wave. I saw what was done in the south of the country - Algarve, which mainly sells beaches and sunshine - during the first wave and how they overbuilt the place and did so on top of insufficient infrastructure (still now, literally every Summer there are incidents of the sewage treatment plants not being able to handle the inflow of sewage and having to discharge it directly), to the point that it now only caters to low value mass tourism that come over in the cattle-wagon class of low cost flights from places like Britain to get drunk during the night and go to the beach during the day.
Now in this second wave of Tourism in the country, they’re selling the leftovers of grander times as city/cultural tourism, mainly Lisbon and Porto. I can tell you that certain areas of Lisbon which used to be a pleasure to go to are now an overcrowded mess, old traditional neighbourhoods have been pretty much emptied of locals and house prices have shot up so much that the capital city of a country with an average income of €1600 per month - 30th highest income in Europe - has the 7th highest rents (avg: €1700 per month) and it just keeps going up.
(Oh and the funny bit is that all this is actually destroying the specific vibe and cultural character of the place, which is what tourists supposedly come over to experience: instead of the real deal they’re now getting touristified “experiences”, so for example a lot of restaurants in the most touristic areas of Lisbon are now either the generic style you find in most international airports or they’re overboard decorated as “typical” whilst selling overpriced haute cuisine “inspired” by local cuisine but which I can guarantee you is nothing my mother would ever cook or you actually get in a run of the mill restaurant)
Worse, problems like high house prices actually spread out from the heavilly touristic places (so, cities like Lisbon and Porto, as well as the whole region Algarve), so for example this year house prices went up 17% in the whole country.
Unsurprisingly, our current Prime Minister has most of his wealth in realestate, so he just made 17% last year from his “investments”. He loves Tourism as well as other measures (just recently spent billions of taxpayers’ money on a “Help to Buy” scheme) that put Demand pressure in the housing market and “by an amazing coincidence” make the value of his 54 properties go up. Also unsurprisingly, over 1/3 of city hall members in Lisbon have “realestate investor” as their main source of income
Did I mention Portugal is number 30 from top in income in Europe but house prices are much closer to the top than that?
The problem is exactly that Tourism being kept at reasonable levels is highly unlikely to happen in most countries - you need something like Scandinavia-quality governments to have a chance of it - exactly because when relying on it politicians don’t need to manage a country in a competent way when thay can just extract lots of money out of just selling the sights.
I mean, even Amsterdam turned into a shithole until recently (when the locals rebelled and ellected a city hall that cracked down on excess tourism) and The Netherlands still has one of the worst realestate bubble in Europe.
It’s extractive because tourists don’t add or contribute to the reason that place is a tourist destination to begin with and in fact often take away or are detrimental.
Of course they bring money but too many and the start to crush the vibe, ruin the housing market and sometimes cause gentrification pushing out the people who were originally there.
Some people are fine but too many can ruin things pretty quick. In the age of Instagram and accessible travel it doesn’t take much for a small place to get over run in just a few years.
For an extreme example look at the lines to get up to mount Everest.
This is a dramatic generalisation.
There are plenty of tourist destinations that people love because they are over-run with tourists - the very antithesis of your comment.
I’m not really sure how tourists are ruining the housing market on mount everest. As an aside, I suspect the locals are generally pretty happy with the tourism industry on and around mount everest.
Of course there are examples of tourism disaffecting locals, but these cases are really limited. In general, tourism is a great industry for regional centres.
Mate, I grew up in a highly touristic country - Portugal, specifically in Lisbon - which is now on its second wave of being “discovered” as a Touristic place, and the same kind of shit described by the previous posts which happened to Algarve (the region in the south) during the first wave that sold beaches & sunshine is now happening in the second wave that’s selling culture & old-buildings in places like Lisbon and Porto.
I’ve also lived for almost a decade in Amsterdam and the exact same shit was starting to happen there when I left (and it became much worse before the locals rebelled and elected a city hall that cracked down in it).
I’ve also lived in London were the same shit was happening, though slowed than in the other cities (maybe because it’s a much larger city), though they do have the worst housing bubble in the whole of Europe.
I’ve actually seen this shit happen before and am currently seeing this shit happen right now (I’m back in Portugal, though not Lisbon, but my parents still live in the outskirts of it), so am not just pulling wishfull thinking opinions out of my arse.
Methinks you’ve never seen first hand over a couple years how Tourism can destroy the character of a place as locals get kicked out to be replaced by AirBnBs, so old corner grocery-shops don’t have enough customers and end up replaced by stores selling knick-knacks to tourists, how more broadly you see phenomenons like traditional local restaurants being replace by the kind of restaurant you find in international airports or theatrical “typical” restaurants and how all other industries start getting pushed out by Tourism because cost of living (especiallly housing) for people who work in that city is too high for local salaries and the rents of commercial premises get too high.
It’s all fine and dandy when you’re a cottage tourist destination and Tourism is mostly a side-show next to all the other Economic activity there, but when a place becomes a major tourist destination there are all manner of massive nasty side effects of it which amongst other things hinder all other economic activities (as everything becomes much more expensive there, most notably housing) and then your country is 20% dependent on it, ready to be fucked next time a vulcano in Iceland coughs up a proper ash cloud and stops most flights in Europe for a month or, more likely, a big world Economic downturn comes and people cut down on unecessary expenses such as vacations abroad.
As it so happens most tourists go to “major tourist destinations”, which is were Tourism is most damaging, so that experience of the meme is indeed the most common.
This comment was written by someone who doesn’t live in a tourist destination.
This comment was written by someone who doesn’t like the vibe but doesn’t have a rebuttal.
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I’m hard pressed to think of a place which has had it’s character extracted.
Sure, tourism can change places, excessive tourism can harm the culture of a place, but in all but extreme cases I think that’s a pretty hollow argument - culture is always transient. Conservatives always argue against change and external influences.
Whataboutism is to suggest that thing A isn’t really a problem because thing B has other similar characteristics. However, an assertion that A through Z all share the same characteristics is to suggest that an argument against the existence of thing A on those grounds is absurd.
yeah, it’s awesome to live and work in a town and have to rent a temporary place for 3 months in summer cuz your’re priced out of your normal home, and it was rented in advance by tourist paying 4 times normal rent value
I dont understand. Is the landlord kicking you out for three months? How is that legal? What happens with all your stuff?
Pretty much, yes. In tourist towns leases are often short-term leases that only last up to a few months. Landlords want those places available for the tourist season so they can charge a premium to tourists looking to rent a place for a week, and so they only lease up to the start of the tourist season and locals have to find somewhere else to live.
because it doesn’t happen. OP is full of shit.
that’s just lovely! this past summer was the first I didn’t have to change homes, after doing it for three years in a row
to explain better: I had to agree with the situation before hand, so I was not kicked out per se. the fucked up part is that when you’re trying to find a home around here, most of them have this condition that you have to accept
but I guess you knew that too, or are you full of shit also?
People need to realize it’s not the locals that decided to base their economy on tourism at some town hall meeting. Where I live the government moved all the industry to different parts of the country and allowed for huge real estate development that turned the area into tourism based economy. At the beginning it’s just extra jobs and people are happy about it but at some point it starts displacing locals and people start complaining.
This is not unique to tourism but an issue of all economic opportunity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
The outcome should not be to “shun tourists” but to take over the government and replace the incompetent management.
How are people from a single town supposed take over the government? Local governments very often have very limited tools to influence the economy of their town. Roads, railways, airports, energy lines, water treatment plants and many more are managed by national governments. They decide where infrastructure will be expanded and what type of economy will be able to expand in where. Most of the country doesn’t care that some town are overrun by tourist and it doesn’t impact national elections. At some point the only thing the town can do is to start discouraging tourists from coming like some towns in Italy do.
It’s exactly opposite. Local governments have immense control of their own local resources almost everywhere around the world. If worst to come there’s nothing stopping from locals implementing entry tax and managing tourists any way they feel like - all of which have been done before and is being done currently. At the end of the day locals are the ones that get paid the tourist money and thats exactly why tourism is so good because it gives independence and power for towns and cities rather than waiting for central government initiatives.
So… you just ignored everything I said, right? I’m looking at my town:
- highways - planned by central government
- airports - managed centrally
- railway for cargo - planned by central government
- environmental rules - decided centrally
- energy infrastructure - planned centrally
- economic incentives for industry - planned centrally
- internet backbone - build by central government
- water management - financed centrally
The central government financed big passenger airport and high speed passenger train that bring tourists but the energy grid is at it limits not allowing for big investments, there are no cargo trains and no economic incentives to bring industry here. But yes, the town will simply decide to build chemical plants and still mills and it will magically work… The only option given by central government was tourism so of course they build the economy based on that. And yes, now they can control it with entry tax and limiting licenses for hotels but that’s exactly what this post is complaining about. People want less tourist so they complain and expect the local government to do something. It’s not like people loved tourists 20 years ago and now they changed their minds. They tolerated it for as long as they could and are now getting tired.
When the town gets too expensive for locals to live then it’s a problem
So we kick out locals! Problem solved! Who needs locals, right? Profit!
Adding infrastructure adds cost. If you’re adding improvements for added housing, you upgrade internet, sewage, health and safety, replacing old building membranes that eventually break down, hospitals, community centres, libraries, parks, routes for delivery access, this does cost. This is stuff that does benefit the locals. And it’s not only paid for by the locals.
And yet, taxes, cost of living, housing prices, rent also goes up. The one thing that doesn’t is pay. To which the locals have to move to outlying areas and commute.
Tourists may benefit some local business owners (or chains) while having a negative impact on many others.
Take a small fishing or farming village for example, now it becomes popular with tourists. House prices shoot up to what Londoners can afford and as they only use it as a holiday home it becomes a ghost town in winter.
I grew up, and live in a tourist destination. My highschool was trash. Tourists are a nuisance. We have a few big events in town yearly that bring an insane amount of people here and most locals just hide in their house for a week at a time. I would leave but it has the only weather I like. I make really good money(well over 100k) in a non tourist job and can’t afford to buy here.
I fully undetstand the housing problem. Especially with services like airbnb making many apartments unavailable to rent for the locals, but i cant but think how many people make their living from the tourism. For example Hawaii Tourism Authority calculated that visitor spending in August was over 800 million. That means pretty many family got their bread from tourism.
The problem is usually wealth inequality. The residents have to compete with the tourists for resources, but most of what they could get in return gets gobbled up by late stage capitalism. Most people who have a direct relation to tourism to how it benefits them in their lives have no problem with it.
I remember talking to an ice-cream seller in Egypt and he asked me what I do for a living. When I told him I was an engineer he said ‘so am I’. The predatory behaviour of Egyptian street sellers made more sense after that exchange but it never stopped grating. I think the best way deal with it is engage with the people in a friendly way and have a laugh. Most of the time people just need acknowledgement, that goes a long way.
I mean on a macro scale sure but I think most of them just don’t like the stereotypical entitled and annoying tourist they’ve been routinely exposed to. Emotional responses rarely incorporate indirect economics.
Yeah, there are some bigots and dickheads too.
usually.
but
let me introduce you to the native People of the southmost part of Bavaria/Germany … almost Austria.
Example: A Boat-Person of the Beautiful Königssee spent almost all of the ride ranting about stupid dumb dumb tourists… .to tourists. the rants were only interrupted by short lacklustre descriptions of the beautiful nature and rich history… and a forgetable music stop with agressive tip fishing.
Now, this was off season and in german. Well, german - a non native speaker would likely struggle to understand his thick accent liberally spiced with words only they use. Half the people on board have no idea what the angry noise is about. The others don’t complain, they know: yes, this is a perfect example specimen. This is what the average local is like. this man is not rich probably, no, but certainly well off, safe, living surrounded by breathtaking nature and beauty…
And he hates everybody else with every fibre of their being.
I’ve met several people from this specifc small region, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world, who were exactly like this.
maybe their point is to protect this environment. every stranger is a potential danger to it, they dont want to risk. if they value the protection of nature over their livelihood, it can almost be seen as noble. just don’t ask them what they vote for
Don’t worry, those people hate other Germans (“Saupreißn”= Prussian pigs), and visitors from Munich, the capital of Bavaria (“Isarpreißn” = Prussians living at the river Isar) just as much.
There’s a joke about how they call Asian tourists “Saupreißn, Chinesische” (=Chinese Prussian pigs).
Yeah, we don’t like them.
Tourist Town is what happens after your community has been bankrupted and stripped for parts
No shit people are resentful
It’s also what happens when there’s no jobs for 6 months of the year. It’s no surprise that a lot of the seaside towns in the UK are also on the list of the most deprived towns.
Not the tourists’ fault, and hating on them demonstrates a lack of civic pride and not much else. I welcome tourists who come to my city for its niche history and the historic mall and the foofy shops who wouldn’t be in business without them.
fuck civic pride, are you kidding? you’re telling people who have been priced out of their hometowns to shut up and appreciate the surge of shady shops selling tacky trash
shady shops selling tacky trash
You’re referring to your neighbors and community members trying to make a living? It’s not their fault either.
Ah, no one is responsible for their own actions, got it.
It’s everyone’s fault, collectively. We all need to rise up and overthrow the ruling class. To achieve that, we need to actually talk about the problems our current society has without taking it all personally, and reflect on how the structure of our society has created the problems we have. It’s not about who specifically we have to blame, that’s a distraction.
You want to smash the state with me? Want to be my comrade? First I need you to look around at your own community and say something nice about it and the people who live in it. If you can’t do that, I don’t need you.
I have no problem with the people. I have a massive problem with the society. Criticising one does not mean that I have a personal problem with the people who comprise that society.
It’s all built on exploitation. Tourism is just another kind of exploitation. So, no, I think by telling people they should be thankful for their oppression, you were doing a shitty thing. That doesn’t mean you’re a shitty person, I just want you to reflect instead of brushing concerns under the rug.
Being “nice” won’t get us to where we need to be. Solidarity and class consciousness will.
It kinda is though, people who buy holiday homes are directly responsible for pushing up the price to the point that local people can no longer afford to live there. Then they don’t even live in those holiday homes so the local economy is fucked. Why hire any workers for 9 months of the year when your customers are only there for 3 months of the year?
