So what I'm supposed to kiss your feet because the owning class is raking in bags of cash off of you driving up prices on pretty much everything, while we're left with you getting shitfaced and acting like complete assholes? Thanks I guess.
While I hate tourism and owning class as much as the other guy, you have to account for economical realities. A lot of small places would be dying ghost towns without tourism. Only realistic (but not necessarily easy) way to reduce tourism without destroying the economy is to found alternate competing economical activity so that the city is less dependent on tourism and then find a way to limit tourism by some means.
Many tourist destinations are popular due to their architecture and monuments. Ghost towns don't make big monuments and cathedrals.
Many tourist destinations are also popular due to their location like canary islands or lapland.
Usually people already live there and have normal jobs. Some big attraction is commercialised, a company (often but not always from outside the community) profits off of it. People like it so more and more keep coming, causing prices to jump. Slowly but surely people can't afford housing. Normal businesses that do normal work can't remain competitive when their offices get much more expensive, so they depart too, leaving only more tourism-focused companies to be profitable. The locals have to choose between leaving their home or joining the companies that ruined it.
Mass tourism industries do provide a lot of income for businesses that profit off it. But to do so those businesses have cannibalised the actual life and economic activity of the location. Nice for the businesses, less so for the people who just wanted to live and have a normal job in their home town...
Austin went this way back in the '00s.
The city leadership decided throwing tons of events would boost business in the city. So you took this kinda quiet college town and juiced up with an endless parade of car races, festivals, and corporate events without ever building out public infrastructure.
On top of that, downtown kept expanding well past the point that the traffic can accommodate it.
So you just get these nightmarish jams all through the city constantly.
often but not always from outside the community
Not-so-fun fact: Cambodia's Choeung Ek "Killing Fields" genocide museum is run by a private Japanese company.
On a similar note, Pragueās Museum of Communism was set up and paid for by Americans, who never actually lived under said regime but would very much like everyone to know how bad Communism is for ā¬16 a ticket.
"I make your life possible, peasant. Grovel."
Everybody hates a tourist.
Yea god forbid you don't want your town turned into a playground for wealthy foreigners. Yay! High rent and plenty of dead end service jobs
The area I grew up was known for partying in the summer. Tourists would wander around local neighborhoods drunk af and piss in peopleās front lawns without a care. Theyād drive drunk and our cops hyped up on everyone as a result. The very first time I was pulled over was in such an area, allegedly for running a red light (I turned right, which is legal. So the cop changed gears and said I didnāt stop fully before turning. This was before dash cams were standard, so it was his word vs mine.)
He asked me three fucking times, āHave you been drinking? ARE YOU SURE?ā I was like 18, on my way to work, and had yet to even touch an alcoholic drink in my life. Iād say he went from 0 to 11, but thatād be generous. He initiated the situation already determined that I was a criminal. Add on, the local police department building was on the same street we stopped on, so a crowd of officers ended up standing around watching us. The guy might have been putting on a show for his buddies. It was such an aggressive experience that afterwards, I pulled over somewhere and cried.
I know, I got off lucky with those American cops. I canāt imagine how it wouldāve gone if Iād had a darker skintone. ACAB, but especially cops in tourist areas. They clock in with a bone to pick and a quota to fill.
Especially one who thinks itās all such a laugh
To be fair basing an entire economy around tourism tends to make a city shitty. I live in NYC and its a city that people actually live in with an actual economy, when tourists come they stick to the shitty parts that people here tend to avoid so they're mostly out of the way.
Thats because the residents didnt choose to have their town be economically dependent on tourism. Tourist economies tend to really fuck over local residents. Be it insane housing prices due to airbnbs. Or lack of necessities like grocery stores, affordable restuarants, etc due to all the stores being knick-knack and commodity shops or gentrified tourist centered restaurants. Lack of decent jobs due to everything being targeted towards tourism (really shitty if its seasonal tourism, cause then you are out of the job for the off season). Not to mention having to deal with the roads being congested with tourists, be they pedestrians or drivers. Plus so so so much more. My take, a place should NEVER base its economy around tourism. I got no problem with tourism, but it should be a byproduct or consequence of having a place worth visiting. Not the whole point of the town existing. An economy around tourism is like an economy built around oil. Yeah its a great boost to income for the place, but it comes at the expensive of QoL for the residents, and eventually the well will dry up and youll have nothing to fall back on.
My county's economy is based entirely off of maximizing the extraction of the merger wealth of the working class and this is pretty much my face at all times these days.
Tbf tourists very often treat locals like zoo animals so...
I'd really love you to try and live in one of those cities. Not just spend some days there, but actually live there.
Housing prices, thanks to fucking airbnb are the highest of your country so buying a house is impossible, but even renting is nearly impossible because nobody wants to rent to a local when they can earn 3x or more by scamming tourists.
Want to work here? You either work in services (bars, restaurants, or other kind of touristic slavery) or need to look for work out of the city. You might be lucky enough to work in something that's not tourism related, but it's pure luck to find one.
The city centre? Yeah... Don't go there, you're not gonna find other than a tourist theme park. Tons of shops created exclusively with the tourist in mind and don't you dare trying to look for something to eat. All you'll find are tourist traps.
I've seen this city become the shithole it is today thanks to tourism.
because tourism is a gentrification economy. it represents that we built something for us that now someone else gets to enjoy while we stand outside cold and shivering. tourism requires colonialism to work
tourism requires colonialism to work
If this were true, why do people go to any of Spain, England, France, Belgium, for touristic purposes? Why wouldn't they exclusively go to places like the Carribean, the Americas, West & South Africa?
For starters, there are no cities "whose economy is entirely based on Tourism". The closest to 100% Tourism are large resorts made specifically for that.
Further, this opinion of many locals about Tourism is from cities which used to have little or no Tourism and now have very large numbers of tourists.The reason for it is that, before Tourism became a large fraction of the local economy, such places used to have a far more diversified and robust Economy that didn't just crash whenever some volcano in Iceland had a burp or something such, neither did they have the overcrowding, high prices and disneyfication of shops, restaurants and attractions that Tourism brings.
Unless you're some third world shithole, without limitations Tourism lowers quality of life, makes everything more expensive (pushing out the locals) and destroys the vibe of a city - you don't need to be that much ahead of 3rd World status for mass tourism to actually make the quality of life for the locals worse: Tourism brings gains to only a fraction of the population but the costs are borne by almost everybody, in a similar way to high polluting industries.
Further, Tourism is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - the side effects of too much Tourism destroy the environment that attracted tourists in the first place, at the very least over time reducing the quality of the tourists that do come (i.e. as Tourism degrades the place you get fewer high spending tourists interested in the local culture and culinary tradition, and more cheap mass Tourism) - and thus invariably those places where governments and local authorities bet heavily on Tourism are either places that used to be dirt poor (and thus have nothing to lose from even excessive Tourism) or are badly managed and thus, driven by pure greed and "we have found a silver bullet" delusions, never impose the kind of restrictions on Tourism needed to avoid the Tragedy part.
As it so happens, I live in such a place - Portugal - and come from a city which has suffered exactly what I describe - Lisbon. The government of an European country with high average levels of Education betting on a low value added industry which mainly employs people with low levels of specialization is literally choosing to stay at "just above 3rd World" level even though the population's level of Education could yield far more than that, which is probably why Portugal has fallen back to being one of the countries with the lowest GDP per-capita of the EU as almost all countries of Eastern Europe have surpassed Portugal in the last 2 decades even though when they joined the EU their GDP per-capita was in average around 70% that of Portugal.
Tourism is great if you're a 3rd World shithole because there no matter how much it becomes it will only make things better than before, but the more ahead a place is in terms of Education and Quality Of Life the lower the level of Tourism beyond which for the majority of people living there things actually become worse than before.
students and their parents in a college town
who's
whose
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