
‘Overtourism’ Worries Europe. How Much Did Technology Help Get Us There? - tango24
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/technology/technology-overtourism-europe.html
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kartan
> “You can’t talk about overtourism without mentioning Instagram and Facebook
> — I think they’re big drivers of this trend,” Mr. Francis said. “Seventy-
> five years ago, tourism was about experience-seeking. Now it’s about using
> photography and social media to build a personal brand. In a sense, for a
> lot of people, the photos you take on a trip become more important than the
> experience.”

The article falls directly into the "good old days" fallacy. No, people in the
past were not looking for "more authentic experiences".

I bought in a flea market a photo album of a trip of some Swedish couple in
the 60s. It is awesome. It could be posted picture by picture on Facebook and
nobody will notice. Except by details like that the plane tickets, included in
the album, were printed by a mechanical typewriter. Also includes tourism
flyers, tickets for the theatre, and a menu from a restaurant. Sounds
familiar? Because people are people in all places at all times.

[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Good_old_days)

~~~
AJ007
I don’t know if it was meant to be a subtle joke, but tourism 75 years ago (in
Europe or otherwise..) seriously?

~~~
lmm
Sweden was neutral. Presumably Swedes would've had their summer holidays as
normal (though staying within the country)?

~~~
progre
There was massive fuel and food shortages in Sweden. I doubt that very many
people had normal vacations.

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zwkrt
I see complaints/worries about overtourism, housing prices in cities,
overfocusing on restaurant reviews, and other problems not as arising from the
use of Instagram as some people think, but more basically as an unavoidable
side-effect of globalization. Basically it used to be harder to find the
'perfect' restaurant, vacation, or house because information was not
transferring efficiently. With the internet, a process of arbitrage has
commenced, where all people are able to put themselves where they feel they
will be happiest based on their economic power. Obviously people living in
sleepy picturesque villages in Europe would rather no one visited, but these
places are just going to have to deal with it in the same way that San
Fransisco, Seattle, Austin, etc. are. The truth is that some places are nicer
to live or visit than others, and if you don't have the money to play the game
then you aren't welcome.

Once my wife asked her father how people chose what restaurant to eat at when
all you had was a phone book, and his answer was telling: "There just used to
be fewer places to go."

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Well yes that and, many in the world have gotten ridiculously rich. You don't
see middle class tourists from Malawi flooding the Vatican Museums despite
them having access to the same information on their smartphones, you do see it
happening with Chinese tourists because there's a ton of them who can actually
afford it.

I mean, I've traveled to four different continents as a student on minimum
wage jobs. A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU
countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three
nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think
about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of
the world and come back. And especially if you're from a rich country,
traveling means the odds are in your favour of actually spending less on
things like food or local transportation than if you'd just stayed at home for
the week.

How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-
class is beyond me. Owning a home with a toilet, access to a self-driving
shared vehicle and a computer is an actual possibility for the hypothetical 3
billion middle-class people of the future who could afford it. But having an
access ticket to Paris, despite 3 billion people being able to afford it, is
not going to be feasible, ever. In that regard I have some major concerns
about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with
our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even
certain cities just isn't one of them.

~~~
awucs
> A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries
> like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts
> in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it,
> spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the
> world and come back.

I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation
budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even
today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that
inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary
over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a
major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did
own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker
in your own country.

> How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the
> middle-class is beyond me.

It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing
economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE,
Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company.

> In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain
> cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to
> prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't
> one of them.

The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it
used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only
makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider
things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got
expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went
somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete
with locals.

~~~
sidibe
>I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole
vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many
people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding
cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane
ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain
yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the
people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a
migrant worker in your own country.

Inequality is another issue, but this "overtourism" is because of the massive
growth in the global middle class. It used to be only a tiny fraction of
Chinese citizens could afford to go overseas. Now hundreds of millions of them
can. And Europeans are also able to get around very cheaply now within Europe.

People travel more. I think that's fine, sorry if you lived in a picturesque
town, but I think it's fair to share it with the world if you live in a nice
place.

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overcast
If you want to avoid unpleasant tourist traps, go off the beaten path to
smaller towns and villages. You'll find a much more beautiful, and genuine
experiences talking with real locals, who aren't just trying to sell you
overpriced crap. You'll get the real food, and the real place you're visiting.
Famous landmarks really don't stick with you like the experiences you get
meeting new people.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
> If you want to avoid unpleasant tourist traps, go off the beaten path to
> smaller towns and villages.

That only works until someone with a sufficiently large follower base promotes
it on instagram. Instant tourist influx. Many of the tourist traps started out
as hidden treasures.

~~~
overcast
Actually being one of those influencers, I can tell you that most people in
this world don't care what someone on Instagram says. Those that do pay
attention are there for the fantasy, and not actually jumping on a plane to a
remote location because one of us posted a pretty picture. The rest of the
planet is going to see the Taj Mahal, and Fontana de Trivi, because that's
what you're "supposed" to do when visiting a foreign land. It doesn't take
much effort to find a quiet home outside of a major city, and see what's
really going on. There are nearly infinite places on this Earth to go, only a
handful are being 'promoted' because they are already popular.

btw, the Taj Mahal is indeed beautiful, but it's a very small oasis in the
literally the most vile city(Agra) I've been to in all my travels. Absolute
filth. The best thing to do is drive there, see it for an hour, and then drive
back to the place you came from.

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FigBug
> Seventy-five years ago, tourism was about experience

75 years ago was 1943, there was no tourism in Europe unless you were flying a
bomber or driving a tank.

The first jet airliner didn't fly until 1949 which enabled tourism for the
common person.

I'm sure tourism was "better" in the old days when only the wealthy could
afford to travel.

~~~
tim333
That's not true - Sanremo did a decent business with Brits getting the train
to the med in the late 1800s. Here's a link to the nyt report of Queen
Victoria going there in 1888
[https://www.nytimes.com/1888/02/25/archives/queen-
victoria-a...](https://www.nytimes.com/1888/02/25/archives/queen-victoria-at-
san-remo.html)

And one of my recent trips was to walk a bit of the Camino de Santiago which
has the oldest known tour guide book published around 1140. Though people have
been walking it before Jesus was around.

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CoolGuySteve
This article resonates with me after my recent vacation to the Amalfi coast.
The narrow roadways are clogged with buses and the buses themselves are so
full you often have to wait in line for an extra hour to get on one. I
definitely wouldn't recommend it.

After Amalfi, we went to a small fishing village nearby and had an experience
that was so, so much better. I even got to speak some Italian and buy some
homemade grappa from the local shop, which would be difficult in a more
'disneyfied' place.

It would be nice if TripAdvisor or Google had some sort of 'tourist jam'
avoidance algorithm, letting you pick places like or near the place you want
to go, but slightly off the beaten path.

Or some kind of warning if you're planning to go somewhere during the peak
season.

~~~
lozaning
I recently had the opportunity to stay for considerable time in a villa on a
100 acre vineyard in the italian countryside. Rode a bike into town every
morning and did the days grocery shopping, I was living just like all my
italian neighbors where and it was fabulous.

The quick jaunt through Rome and Florence I tacked onto the end of the trip
was very loathsome in many aspects. I'd bet you have to go at least 3 miles
away from the colosseum in any direction to find food of a higher quality than
Olive Garden.

~~~
pigscantfly
If you'd visited the Vasari Corridor or tried the Uffizi on a Tuesday morning,
I think you'd have had a much different experience. Rome is constantly crowded
in the same way NYC is, but you can't really expect to have the entire forum
to yourself - it's one of the most famous places in the world! Loathsome is
the polar opposite of how I feel about visiting either of those cities.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Mind you, you couldn't have expected to have the Forum to yourself for
_millenia_ now. Rome seems to have plenty of experience with barbarian hordes
(/joke) - or more seriously, how to mix the locals with tourists while
remaining a city, not a preserved relic to be gawked at.

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harperlee
At least part of it was caused by the cheapness of flights - which also brings
tourists with less disposable income to leave behind.

~~~
slg
We all like to complain about the annoyances and uselessness of the TSA (EDIT:
and other post 9/11 security changes) or the cramped seats and extra fees that
come with a standard economy ticket, but not enough attention is paid to how
much safer and cheaper flying has become over the last few decades.

~~~
orbitur
When did the TSA make flying safer and cheaper?

~~~
maccard
I don't think OP is saying that TSA has affected safety or cost, merely that
flying has gotten cheaper and safer(independent of his statement about the
TSA)

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jimbokun
"He noted that in 1960, when the jet age began, around 25 million
international trips were taken. Last year, the number was 1.3 billion."

I honestly did not expect the number to be that high.

So a double digit percentage of all humanity travels internationally, every
year.

~~~
lainga
Could be, but I think that number includes people taking multiple trips each.
Think businessmen.

~~~
newen
I really don't think it's close to double digits. I don't even consider myself
as having travelled a lot and I've taken two international trips per year for
the last five or so years on average. There should be people who do dozens of
international trips a year but there must be a lot of people who do two or
three international trips a year.

~~~
skohan
Like a lot of things it's probably a heavily-skewed distribution. For a large
number of europeans it could be a half dozen from holidays alone. For
businesspeople in Europe it could easily be dozens of trips per year.

But there's probably huge swaths of the population who have never traveled
internationally for economic reasons, or because they live in a large country
(like China, the US, India or Russia) which makes that less necessary.

~~~
lainga
Or my relatives in Geneva, who regularly shop in France, dine in Germany, and
then drive home, in the same day.

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da_murvel
I don't know about Facebook and Instagram being the main "culprits", but
rather the fact that it's so much easier to travel today, than it was before.
And I'm talking about everything from price to accessibility. You just grab
your phone, order a ticket, book a room somewhere, pay up and wait for the
departure date to come. Sure, social media helps promoting places and creates
an urge to show that you also travel to these ultra amazing locations. But if
it was more difficult to travel, people wouldn't be touristing as much either.
As I see it, it's a two way relationship where both ends fuel the other.

------
mudil
We have seen nothing yet. Chinese tourism is going to go through the roof for
the rest of the century. Boeing produces about 40 737s a month, plus other
models, and production is only going to go up. Every fifth Boeing is going to
China.

~~~
samsonradu
This felt very true in Switzerland this winter. We were the only non-chinese
in a local bus through Interlaken. Not that I have something against it, just
that they sure advertise it well in China. Also chinese street signs are
slowly showing up.

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Bucephalus355
A lot.

Travel now is part of conspicuous consumption as much as a flashy purse is.
Displaying that you went to some small French village on your Instagram can
generate a fair amount of prestige and envy. Also, unlike purses though, there
is a permanent record of your purchase for all to see.

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InclinedPlane
I find it fascinating that people want to fill their lives with "authentic"
experiences and then they go out of their way to set themselves up for cookie
cutter "zombie" experiences. Cram your vacation into a minimum amount of time.
Spend all your time in generic airports, hotels, and tour buses. Take the
exact same pictures everyone else does. Blaming all this stuff on millenials
and instagram is lame, these same patterns have been common for not just
decades but generations.

It doesn't take much to get away from the crowds. It also doesn't take much to
have unique, different, more satisfying experiences. Walk more, explore more,
don't be so concerned with ticking off the classic "must do" checkmarks, take
the time for your vacation to be for you.

~~~
lotsofpulp
It's a socioeconomic class thing. Humans organize themselves into heirarchies,
so if the class you're in (or one above) starts doing something that can
illustrate their status, and not doing it can separate you, then you are also
compelled to do it to keep up.

But once the class below catches up, the class above will change what it is
that separates them (by definition since humans are inherently wanting to
outdo each other). Once material goods become cheap, the thing that separates
people with status from people without is time. Upper class people have time
to go on lengthy international vacation, something lower class people can't do
even with money.

In my circles, it's not cool to just go to the big sights that mass Chinese
and Indian tourists go to. So now a riskier trip with more expenses and
planning is required to show status, such as going out on your own backpacking
in South America or Safari in Africa or hopping around some islands no one's
heard of for scuba diving or hiking in Nepal. The older people opt for luxury
in their vacations, showing that not only can they afford to go traveling, but
they can go with their whole extended family and rent huge houses in national
parks.

But it doesn't have to be explicit thinking of "I'm going to show this other
person up", it's just the way humanity works in my opinion. You have a certain
network, and you either maintain yourself in it or you fall out of it if you
don't continue to do the things that network is doing.

------
kashyapc
I live in a relatively small (population ~260,000) Western European city. It's
really pleasant during most of the calmer months, but come summer (and the
festival of nearly ten days), there's 2+ million people visiting during that
time. Having been to the festival (which is spread throughout the small city),
it simply becomes impossible to stay beyond a couple of hours, lest you get
nauseated with the pressure of the crowds. Most locals simply leave the city
during that entire festive season.

~~~
johntiger1
Serious question: do you notice or feel any of the economic impact of the
tourists? It seems like there's a decent side hustle to be made during the
summer from all those people

~~~
kashyapc
By "you", if you mean the city, I presume so—when I see the cafés, restaurants
open almost until 03:00 AM (at least during the ten days of the festival), and
probably the local musicians and artists might also make a buck or two from
their performances (not to mention people renting out their homes via AirBnB;
I don't know how popular that option is here, as I certainly see lots of
closed and 'dark' homes at night).

But many locals say that they don't feel like being in the city during summer
due to overcrowdedness and they feel like they can't get the day-to-day
errands done in the city without going through a sea of people.

~~~
skohan
It was like this in Barcelona. In August the center is crowded to the point of
disfunction; it's like being at a festival or something. I used to live a few
minutes from Las Ramblas and I dreaded even going down the block to pick up
milk from the corner store during high-season.

~~~
kashyapc
/me can relate; I recall that neighborhood (was in Barcelona a couple of times
in winter, for conferences).

Here I just bicycle the complete opposite direction from the center to go to
"known quiet spots" where we can get errands done. And pleasantly enough, the
city has also recently implemented a plan to expand the "no cars" zone in the
city, thus it has become even more safer for bikers and pedestrians.

------
stevenking86
I traveled around South America while working remotely a few years back.
There's almost none of this disneyfication. In Ecuador, Peru, and Chile it was
extremely normal to have days with no interactions with anyone who could speak
English.

I know that this article is mostly about those who live in the host city, but
it does also mention the experience of the traveler. For any travelers looking
to avoid these situations, there are plenty of wonderful places to go where
there's not disneyfication. I almost just began to list countries out but
really: It's almost everywhere other than a few major cities in Europe!

~~~
growlist
Not sure I quite agree with this - Scotland for example is facing problems in
a number of non-urban areas due to growing tourism.

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droidist2
Well if certain cities don't want them, I'm sure there are many places that
would love to have the boost from tourism. Maybe we'll start seeing more
tourism advertisement and viral marketing campaigns through social media (pay
a trend-setter to come to your city and vlog about it, etc.)

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narag
"Europe" isn't worried. Some Europeans are. Some others aren't. In Barcelona
there is a three-party war between hotels, leftist council and landlords.
Council hasn't allowed to build new hotels in years, for instance.

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distant_hat
"for a lot of people, the photos you take on a trip become more important than
the experience.”

Cheap photography is to blame for this more than anything else. I was
transiting through Dubai a few years back and spent a bit of time at the Burj
Khalifa. There is a fountain at the base that does a performance every so
often. The majority of people were not seeing the fountain directly at all,
they were watching it through their mobile phones. It was a weird sight. I
personally didn't take a video since you can see much better ones on Youtube
than the one I'd have been able to take with trying to keep other people's
phones out of it.

------
growlist
Travel off-season, and if you want to be away from other tourists (I don't buy
this traveller/tourist distinction) invest just a little bit of time to find
somewhere that's not a hotspot.

As for overtourism - it's a nice problem to have.

------
IkmoIkmo
I still think summer vacation is one of society's worst inventions. It creates
so many problems in different fields, like the summer education loss.
Overtourism is just one of them.

~~~
maccard
Could you elaborate on the summer education loss? My understanding is that
grades drop across summer/fall breaks, but the (little amouht of) research
shows that shortening the breaks doesn't actually resolve the problem.

------
borkt
I've even noticed it in the California wine country. While in decades past the
weekend flow was typically from the North Bay to San Francisco, now on
weekends we regularly have traffic throughout the day in Santa Rosa.
Healdsburg, a town of around 10,000 people has added around 300 hotel rooms
this year. We are no where near tourists outnumbering locals, but it is
definitely much different than when I was a kid

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autokad
does anyone notice how if other people say something along the lines of: 'we
need to stop outsiders from coming here' it gets explained away as something
like 'altering the character of historic cities'

whereas if an american says it, it gets explained way as: 'they are a racist
protectionist bigot'.

~~~
pjc50
There's a big difference between tourists and permanent migration.

~~~
autokad
I'm not talking about that, but if they don't want you visiting, they sure as
heck don't want you staying.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Nope. Nope nope nope.

There's a great deal of difference, and it hinges on time.

If your plan for visiting is "get the cheapest one-day return flight from
Wherever, binge drink all night with your buddies, retch it up en route to
airport and sleep on the return flight," all you care about is the cheap booze
- literally nothing else matters (yes, this is a significant set of tourists
around here).

Then you get the other tourists who actually come for something else spend
money in addition to using the infrastructure. That is normal, albeit with
major scaling problems (there's the issue - "don't have enough space to put
all the tourists coming to see the Major Must-See Sights, as those aren't
inflatable"). Those care about the appearance NOW ("people retching on public
transport? How revolting!").

And then you get the normal city traffic - with locals, expats, and whoever
else actually _lives_ here. And those care about quality of life in long term
("what good is public transport, if it efficiently gets you into a city center
that's devoid of actual life, only with a disneylandesque imitation? Will I
want to live in such city in 5 years? What do I want to _change_?").

In other words, the longer you're planning to visit, the more probable it is
that you'll be nicer about it, because you'll be expecting similar behavior in
return. If you just pass through: eh well, break that window, piss in the
street, kick that dog - not likely anyone will catch you within the remaining
four _hours_. Note that this doesn't have any relation to _whence_ the
tourists are coming - the behavior correlates very closely with the length of
the stay, be it an just-out-of-town sports team (common) or a stag party from
the UK (also common).

~~~
skohan
Yeah this was a big complaint about tourists (especially from certain
countries) in Barcelona: they viewed the city as a playground and somewhere to
let off steam, and they acted in inconsiderate and disrespectful ways in which
they would never act back home. It's like to them Mediterranean culture seemed
permissive and relaxed compared to what they were used to, so they made the
false assumption that "anything goes" rather than putting in the effort to
actually learn and respect the norms of the culture they were guests of.

------
protomyth
I am more than happy for the trend to build brand on social media with all the
picture they take. It retires the fun practice of them showing everyone a
slideshow of their trip. Like 8-track, I am overjoyed at watching slideshows
becoming a historical curiosity.

------
naveen99
They didn’t list google maps and google translate. Once we have live
translation speech to speech, the world will see a real reshuffle of
populations, not just tourism.

