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Most of those places were doing just fine before becoming tourist destinations. This “economy” you speak of is just the profit margins of hotel chains. It very seldom benefits the people living there.
No, no suelte’ la bandera ni olvide’ el lelolai, que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái
But now that they’ve let it into their economy, it has grown like a parasite the type of which cannot be removed without also killing the host.
Would you look at a parasite any other way?
I think you can safely remove most parasites, if that’s what you mean?
I’m saying the parasite analogy only cements why locals hate tourists.
Ah, ok. Yeah.
If it was symbiotic, it wouldn’t be called a parasite, typically, so yeah.It’s not good, but also it’s too late to do anything about it.
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
Almost all of the places I have lived have been tourism heavy.
- French Quarter, New Orleans
- Park City, Utah
- Kissimmee, Florida (Disney)
- Jackson Hole, Wyoming
- Austin, Texas (not at first, but definitely the later years)
- Destin, Florida
There is one recurring theme. People on vacation are stressed the fuck out, desperate to enjoy their very limited and probably very expensive time off, and impatient. This makes many of them rude and entitled. Many people forget to bring their common sense and their manners when they go on vacation. They also have a propensity to binge on everything including food, entertainment, and especially booze and/or drugs. Locals are under no obligation to take your shit just because you are blowing $10k on a week or weekend vacation (of which you only get two of per year) with the family, and you are having an existential crisis that you hope your expensive vacation might remedy. Some of us are just trying to get a coffee on the way to our daily grind and you have decided to let your kids sample every flavor of ice cream in the shop before only buying a single scoop. If you see people waiting, be nice and offer to let someone else get their order in while your kids make up their minds. It is common courtesy.
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Thats the thing I don’t get with vacations. I am stressed at work so I take a week off to be stressed somewhere else for a week? Don’t get me wrong, there is so much to love about vacations but I never found vacations to be relaxing just because I feel like I am under time pressure to go out and see and do as much as I possibly can in the limited time at the vacation spot.
In contrast taking a week off and just staying at home has been far more relaxing.
And in an ideal world, one which the EU approaches with their “holidays”, we’d have time off to just chill at home and to explore our shared habitat which we call Planet Earth.
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.
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.
Because you seem like a person wanting to learn and not a bot, here is a video by John Oliver, 6 years ago, about the actual local situation in Everest.
The causes will be varied, and the housing market is not threatened in Everest because tourists don’t use houses in Everest the way tourists use houses in Europe (Airbnb), but they’re is always incredible damage in whatever thing, local owners use tourist money, to fuck local workers about, not caring for the Shit and damage left behind. In the case is Everest, that Shit is literal. In other places, that Shit is off-season ghost towns, underfunded schools and local necessities, and corrupt local politicians.
This is just capitalism by design, it’s not unique to tourism. It IS the owner’s fault, not the tourist’s, but the tourist buys the meal that the local no longer can afford, because tourists by definition go be tourists in cheaper countries than their own. Do you understand what that means? The locals that serve the tourists, get so little money in comparison, that it’s not even funny.
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.
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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.
That’s because tourism heavy economies have a tendency to screw over low income locals to favor high income tourists.
Whoever made this meme doesn’t live in a city where new houses are bought up to be turned into shitty airbnbs
I live in a tourist heavy place. My biggest issue is that the influx of tourists is seasonal. During the summer, the number of tourists brings the infrastructure to knees and shops, restaurants and cafés are uncomfortably full. During the off season, maintenance of the roads serms to be of low priority and a lot of the shops, restaurants and cafés reduce their opening time or even close, and the town center becomes a ghost town.
So no hate towards tourists, but the inconsistency of this place is very annoying.
It does definitely show just how much the local businesses rely on this kind of income
See also:
- locals who live in a college town every time they see a student
- locals who live near an international airport every time a plane flys over
- locals who live near a military base every time something goes boom
- locals who live near pretty much any industry town every time anything from that industry annoys them
Its weird with military bases. I used to work on one and got regular emails about scheduled EOD explosions, and somehow i never heard a single one.
Except for the first time! It was a loud one.
It is possible they were there before the base is built so they do have a reason to complain.
But if they are complaining while benefitting from it(better access to amenities as a result) then yeah, they really need to be more realistic about their expectations and how the world works.
Also:
- People move near a racetrack.
- People complain about the racetrack.
- Racetrack gets shut down.
- People complain about all of the lunatics racing on public roads.
It’s almost like the “economy” has fuck-all to do with quality of life and a couple business owners getting rich isn’t worth commodifying your home!
And? Reasonably so. Tourists are annoying af
If your entire economy is based on tourism, and you want to get rid of the tourists, you are saying that you really want to get rid of your own job. Not usually a wise decision.
Tourists when they enter a place: Clearly the whole economy is based on Tourism :)
The tourists love the town for how it was before they got there. We did too…
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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
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
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.
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?
