Tourism: C/D?

Living in a city with a lot of tourists has made me realize that I really don't like them. The ubiquitous marketing of faux-authenticity, the absurd lines of people waiting to ride a tram or buy pastry from a specific bakery that's in all the travel guides, the tuk-tuks and segways and free walking tours, the inexplicable popularity of every imaginable museum, the fetishization of monuments, cathedrals, statues, the dreary anecdotes and stereotypes...

is there a way for me to stop worrying and love the positive impact of tourism on the economy or does everybody hate a tourist?

I'd like to read this book about global tourism and its impacts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/books/review/overbooked-by-elizabeth-becker.html

I am in a way a tourist myself (I have now been working here for half a year) and so part of my disgust may actually, subconsciously, be directed at myself, but I think it would be curteous to not speculate too much about this

Living in a city with a lot of tourists has made me realize that I really don't like them.

Not exactly a controversial opinion tbh.

I often get sick of these vast groups of tourists taking selfies at the iconic police station where Shannon Matthews and Peter Sutcliffe where detained.

Karen Matthews even!

the fucking daytrippers clogging up the Bagshaw Museum in Batley, reet fuck me off!

Unfortunately some of us have to deal with taxi tours to 'hotspots'/sectarian murals and the fetishization of a ship that sank.

A lot of the obvious impacts of tourism are virtually indistinguishable from the impacts of gentrification and if I was still living in London, those would bother me more.

I now live in a town that, at least in the centre, relies almost entirely on tourists and it’s pretty good. It keeps a check on aggressive development and brings a lot of revenue to small businesses.

More broadly, in smaller cities where tourism and ‘normal life’ coexist, there is a case for saying the impact has become worse as the broader global service sector has become more exploitative. Where once you had a boom in hotels, providing employment opportunities, you now have people buying up housing stock to turn into Airbnb apartments, pushing rents up and forcing people out. Similarly, the precarious employment provided by Uber, etc, undercuts regulated city taxis, and so on.

It has become much easier for tech firms and speculators to hive off the financial benefits - leaving communities with the problems.

I love tourism but also tourists. if for some dumb reason I get jaded about where I live, I just need to watch a group of people going gaga over local stuff & I catch the spark again. Tourists don't really come to the part of the city where I live, so it's only when I'm near work or out touristing myself that I encounter them. (Though I wish they would come there, they'd see interesting things too!) My country is the most touristed country in the world, and my city is what most people think of when they think of my country, so it's an enormous part of our economy. But one part of becoming a local is to live in the local way, so mostly tourists come here and try to conform to our way of life, and that's not so disruptive.

I spent quite a few years alternately working and traveling around the world and went through quite a few phases of tourist-hate (& its more advanced cousin traveler-hate) but eventually settled on the boring opinion that tourists (& "travelers") come in the same asshole and non-asshole varieties as everyone else, and the good ones tend to have an enthusiasm and an openness to new stuff that you just don't get from bored locals.

i'd like to remind everybody that Hull will still officially be City of Culture for another 3 years and we have a wide range of affordable accommodation and a proud maritime history stretching back for over 700 years

*pulls out motoring guide to the uk, looks for highway to hull*

It keeps a check on aggressive development
how do you mean?

I agree that the attentiveness of tourists can be inspiring, I like having friends visit for this reason

I want to visit Hull! but in looking at where it is, I see that there is, not so far away, a town called Wetwang, and now I want to visit there more.

Don't totally bypass the glorious Heavy Woollen district of W Yorkshire for the bright lights and big city glamour of Hull!

It keeps a check on aggressive development
how do you mean?

One of the main reasons people visit is that the main section of town looks reasonably similar to how it did when Dickens was writing about it. It provides a counterweight to the financial incentive councils usually have to give over land to developers, protects local small businesses from chain restaurants, etc. There are pros and cons - it's a great place to buy obscure paperbacks, a terrible place to get groceries, but on the whole it's pleasant.

Unfortunately Euler Wetwang's name is the most notable thing about it.

xp makes sense

lol Cook's Tours

https://youtu.be/-aSHdqoz9cQ

Tourism really dovetails with a lot of the biggest cultural anxieties of our age, doesn't it - gentrification, precariousness in jobs, erosion of community, climate change...

lack of affordable housing, death by selfie...

Here in Sedona AZ, nobody who works in tourism can afford to live in town. Real estate was always high, but airbnb and its ilk gobbled up the few apartment buildings/shitty houses that existed. Local govt tried to ban short-term rentals, but those lovers-of-local-govt AZ Republicans in the state govt nullified it. When I was looking for a condo, I found a great-looking place right in town. But since >60% of the development was short-term rentals, no bank will give a mortgage loan. Thus only ppl who can pay CASH for a condo could buy it, which in reality means short-term rental "developers".

I am now perusing all the articles about instagram, cameraphones and overtourism

do they mention Horseshoe Bend?? total shitshow now post-Instagram

I see Horseshoe Bend recently added an entrance fee due to instagram.

I very much detest the pathological phototakers everywhere. They are completely unaware of their surroundings.

Yeah cause they're constructing a huge new lot and toilets and whatnot. I was gonna stop there and show my parents it but the roadside was littered for a mile in either direction from it with vehicles and ppl walking so I kept going. When I went a few years prior, the lot was less than 1/3 full. It already was a pretty big lot!

Yep. Plus with a place like Horseshoe Bend, I just figure there's 100s of photos by pro photogs 100 times better than any I'd take that I could look at if I wanted to. So taking pics at places like that is only to show you were there. Pics or it didn't happen etc.

At this point I just appreciate those who stop and get out of their car to take pics. Scary watching DRIVERS try to snap pics of the red rocks on twisty roads. Do these pics ever even get looked at?? "Oh honey, this blurry pic is when I almost wrecked our rental car, ahhhh memories".

There are so many places that have explicit signs and guards to stop people from taking pics and it does absolutely nothing to stop people. It's absurd. Especially when they are trying to take a picture of a picture.

A few people have gone over the edge at Horseshoe. I think at least 1 instance in past couple years was due to selfie taking. Some ppl react by saying "this is too dangerous!! We need guardrails there!". No. It's a natural place. We need ppl to not be clueless dipshits.

I used to work in Hounslow, in an office block directly opposite the Beavers Estate. It was sandwiched between Heathrow Airport and an army barracks. This was the local post office:
https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2411866

Geograph's photograph captures the general atmosphere of the place, and judging by Google Street View it hasn't changed much in twenty years. Everything has a flat roof. The local pub, the Beaver, had a flat roof, although it closed several years ago and was demolished. The local library had a flat roof. While I was there it was demolished and replaced with a cultural centre that also had a flat roof. The local area was a grim place on the flight line into Heathrow, with row after row of identical-looking grey housing blocks. There were cars parked everywhere because the houses were presumably divided into little flats with a shared toilet.

And I don't recall seeing any tourists. Tourists don't go to bad places. A few years later I remember Roger Ebert writing a blog post about how he loved London, but the reality was that his impression of London was based on a tiny part of the very middle of London where tourists go, filtered through a defensive force field of money. The vast majority of the city is row after row of HMOs where no tourists ever go because there's nothing there and it's horrible.

So my attitude is that tourists only go to places that are nice, and if your city is full of tourists - whether it's Bath or Oxford or Edinburgh or wherever - it's because you live somewhere nice, so you shouldn't complain. If you want to get rid of them all you have to do is knock down your monuments, throw rubbish all over the place, cut all the transport links, and ask the local chefs to cook deliberately horrible food. You would have Swindon or Basingstoke, and the tourists would go away, but you'd end up living in a cul-de-sac where the nearest shop is miles away and the pubs have flat roofs. The author in the OP's link comes across as the typical kind of person who was a tourist a few years ago, but they were a *good* tourist - a passionate devotee of travel - and everyone else is a *bad* tourist. I tend to see things in terms of class, and anti-tourist arguments are often just thinly-veiled class snobbery.

I say this having just come back from a week in Venice, which has been a tourist trap for centuries. If for whatever reason tourism dried up in Venice the lagoon would have the same fate as the outlying islands surrounding Hong Kong. The local population would leave because there would be no jobs, the water and electricity would be turned off, the islands would be stripmined for landfill, the lagoon would be used as a sewage outlet, and eventually Venice's main island would be used as a depot for aircraft parts or a firing range for the military or something equally grim. It's nice to imagine that it would become a haven for rare birds, but this is the real world.

As for foreign tourism, e.g. British people ruining beaches in Thailand, that's the fault of greedy local authorities operating hand-in-hand with greedy local businesspeople. The actual local people may well be very poor, but they don't have a say in anything because if they make a fuss the greedy local businesspeople will hire gunmen to kill them. This is a general problem repeated all across the world. Actual genuine local people don't have any say in their own fate because so much of their environment is owned by investment trusts and businesspeople that don't live there, who expect a return on their investment.

Therefore in my opinion the solution to overtourism is a strong, united people with a strong local government that cares about more than money. Ironically, for all the opprobrium directed at it, the organisational structure of Iran has much to recommend it - tourism hasn't hurt Persepolis one little bit - although the details could do with some finessing.