Too Many People Want to Travel

God forbid we have more people entering the middle class, who want to explore the world.<p>I hate how preachy publications like Vox and The Atlantic can be. The writers come from these urbanized, upper middle class backgrounds and have no self-awareness. When I (with my small-town highschool dropout roots) read stories like this, I can&#x27;t help but reword what they&#x27;re saying in my head:<p>&quot;Go back to being working-class scum who stays in the same place so us upper-class people can enjoy jet-setting and taking photos in exotic locations only you can dream of.&quot;

Some of this is overblown. Locals who live at tourist destinations have always complained about tourists, even when those tourists are the economic lifeblood of the area. Talk to anyone who grew up in a beach town.<p>The multiple snide comments about cruises seem both classist and misplaced. Most of those cruise ship passengers are going to travel somewhere, and having them on the cruise ship effectively minimizes their impact on locals. When they get off the ship, most passengers either take a guided excursion in an already heavily touristed area, or just go to a beach club. Would you rather they rent Airbnbs in the downtown neighborhoods of the cities they&#x27;d like to visit? Or would you rather build new resorts and timeshare communities at beach destinations?<p>Venice also seems like an unusual case that might need special attention. Most cruise ship ports are not beautiful places in need of preservation.<p>Many places in the world (especially national parks) are successfully restricting visitor volume. The solutions are well known: Require permits (either via purchase or lottery) and&#x2F;or increase the cost to visit (via entrance fees, additional hotel taxes, etc.)

Pipe dream but it would be interesting to devise some increasing tax based on the number of flights you&#x27;ve done per year. They already ask for ID when you buy flights so it would be easily track-able. First flight 10%, second 20%, third 30%, etc. Just as a thought exercise but I&#x27;m aware of the friction this sort of idea would get. Related gif: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;flightradar24&#x2F;status&#x2F;1013088775973556224" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;flightradar24&#x2F;status&#x2F;1013088775973556224</a>

The article sort of reads as a list of individual incidents but I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s able to present itself as a particularly alarming trend.<p>Yes, the Mona Lisa is the most popular painting in the world. Maybe the Louvre needs to expand or build a new space for it that can accommodate more people. Maybe ticket sales should be more limited and sell out after a certain point, with a set number of visitors allowed per day&#x2F;hour&#x2F;etc. It sounds like mismanagement (hence the workers walkout) than the tourists being at fault.<p>Yes, people are dying taking stupid selfies, but not really all that many of them, either.<p>Yes, some landmarks are being damaged, but also, governments completely have the power to enforce their laws and limit admission, and hand out tickets for littering and vandalism.

I think moving and experiencing the city and surrounding places for a few years is more enjoyable than short trips. I am now looking at moving to my 5th different city in 10 years. I spend my vacation days exploring around what is in my &quot;backyard&quot;. Taking a 10 hour flight and spending a few days trying to see everything is not enjoyable to me.

I think it&#x27;s worth considering not only how online media has contributed to the very uneven distribution of interest over tourist destinations, but also how it might help fix it. The internet is used to creating power-law distributions, where a small minority of titles capture a large fraction of interest&#x2F;traffic&#x2F;views. Real world cities, parks and sites struggle to cope with global popularity. It&#x27;s entirely possible for online media about travel to take a different set of considerations into account, and yield different top-level distributions in who wants to travel where.<p>Every listicle, travel-focused instagram, etc, pushes the same destinations to all of its audience. A small number of places become extremely coveted. What if we had tools and platforms that spread those eyeballs around more, where the number of impressions is related to the number of tourist arrivals per year? Stop showing so many people beautiful shots of Iceland; it&#x27;s over burdened. Why should travel sites, influencers etc care to shift impressions in this way? Among influencers, platforms could place more value on uniqueness; if I&#x27;ve seen 5 shots of beaches in Bali in my feed this morning, maybe mix in something else. Influencers could feel a pressure to highlight comparatively under-exposed destinations. Places that produce travel content with funds from tourism departments ... well, I&#x27;d suppose that the marginal value of additional prospective visitors for Venice is small, but would be higher for a city that isn&#x27;t so popular.<p>This year I walked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. While it was a positive experience, Machu Picchu itself was crowded, and visitors are very specifically limited in how they can walk around it. Only once I was in country did I hear about Choquequirao, another large Inca complex perched on a promontory, which is much less popular, and sometimes called &quot;the other Machu Picchu&quot;. I can&#x27;t help but feel that neither I, not Machu Picchu was well served by that ignorance.

Something that I worry about is that it seems like almost every enjoyable&#x2F;empowering thing is being considered harmful to the environment&#x2F;society or is becoming difficult to afford:<p>Driving a car, eating meat, travel, owning a home, living in a popular location (e.g New York), owning a gun, etc.<p>Combine that with an increasing number of people who feel socially isolated and it seems like a recipe for unrest.

If there is one thing that is for certain, this is only going to get much worse. And peoples wet dreams about a jobless society. Well, you are not going to spend all that leisure time alone on secret deserted locations around the world.

This is the type of thing that is easy to police other people, but I wonder if the author has an instagram herself filled with pictures from Italy or France.

Easy to say this from a privileged position, less so when it&#x27;s your vacations or work travel on the chopping block. Free movement for me, but not for thee. Wouldn&#x27;t want all those unwashed masses ruining your perfect vacation.

Travel is fun, for sure, but I think our society, especially in wealthier and progressive circles, over-hypes it, to the point that you feel like you have to travel to make yourself more interesting. Maybe we need to lighten up a bit and have the attitude that staying home and reading about a far away place, yet never visiting, is cool too.

It&#x27;s a negative externality. Price it into the cost, use that extra money to offset pollution&#x2F;whatever, and the problem is solved. It&#x27;s simple to say but nobody wants to do it because it hurts.

My parents have lived in a gem of a town outside of the US for 20 years. About 15 years ago it started to pop up in top 10 lists and the last 10 years has exploded with tourism.<p>What used to be an extremely affordable, beautiful, and pleasant place to live and mix with the local culture is now gone.<p>It went from a beautiful town to Disney Land. A gigantic party city. Insane hour long lines of cars to get into the town on weekends. Real estate blew up and gigantic hotels are being built, all the homes in the center are owned by rich people from other countries as speculative investments. Tons of new bars and restaurants have opened but few of them by locals. Rich business owners from other places come in droves looking for more growth to extract money. Most people demand USD for rent or real estate deals and not local currency now, many businesses use foreign payment services for credit cards and the money never flows into the town.<p>Crime has greatly increased with all the money floating around. Home burglaries, car jackings and street muggings are common everyday of the week anytime of the day.<p>There have been some improvements from the tourism and a few hundred local families (out of the 100,000 locals that live there) have done well selling the homes their families have owned for generations. Now they can’t afford to live in the center and have to live in the outskirts.<p>Gone are the local restaurants, pushed out by high rents or because the owners sold the buildings, replaced by generic tourist traps pushing cheap alcohol and over priced food.<p>The local water supply has been drained, utilities cannot keep up with waste and demand, corruption for permits and zoning changes is rampant.<p>Literally thousands of homes in generic housing developments are being built in the surrounding countryside. Cheap build profit extracting developments solely to make money as the water table continues to drain lower and lower.<p>The only thing that has some what saved the city is lack of an airport being close by. Closest is 1.5 hours drive. But another rich entrepreneur is looking to bring a new runway in that is long enough for private jets.<p>That’s when it will officially be over.<p>An influx of money benefits everyone, but it’s also at the expense of the city. Is that worth it? I think what bothers me the most is seeing thousands of people crowd the central square and take the same photo of the church over and over and over and over. It’s within everyone’s right, rich or poor to be in that square. No one owns a city, except when the money starts coming in, and then money owns it.

Cmd+F&#x27;d the comments and not one person has mentioned overpopulation. There are more people than ever before, and the issues of crowding are simply a symptom of overpopulation. The idea of raising the prices to make it cost-prohibitive... what&#x27;s the point of doing anything, then? Soon, every single hobby will have too many people doing it. Are we to raise the price of everything to be so unaffordable that we go back to spending evenings sitting in front of the television?<p>We need to face the problem sooner or later, and that&#x27;s that we have too many people on this planet. We&#x27;re going to have a massively difficult time feeding everyone in 20+ years (the meat industry is already devastating enough on the climate), &quot;tourist crowding&quot; will be the least of our worries. Well, until the lack of food or the climate issue sorts that first bit out.

Too many people want to travel, too many people want to eat meat, too many people want economic development, etc...<p>But how does someone who grew up being able to do&#x2F;benefit from all these things tell the rising middle class from the developing world that they can&#x27;t do these things because it&#x27;s harmful?

Maybe something to do in order to tackle overcrowding in museums is to start returning some of the exhibits back to their origins. The Louvre and the British museum hold a lot of antiquities that were shipped from other countries during colonial times.

As the article states: &quot;while many sites are inarguably overcrowded, very few cities and towns are&quot;<p>People aren&#x27;t really going off the path, there is plenty of opportunity to get them to do that and disperse the crowds<p>I travel a lot and am mostly exempt from these crowds because I&#x27;m not rushing on a 5-day trip around a 3-day weekend to jam pack tourist destinations. I&#x27;m also not going to tourist destinations probably because I&#x27;ve already been there - in off-season no less - or have other things bringing me to an area.<p>Just disperse.

&gt; Governments are also rolling out regulations, such as bans on tour buses in Rome and gating-and-ticketing in Barcelona.<p>The ban on tour buses might actually end up being counter-productive, if that one bus is replaced with many more smaller vehicles that in aggregate take up a lot more space on the roads.<p>A better solution would be a universal congestion fee that all vehicles entering the most congested zone pay (and yes, the fee for large vehicles like buses would be higher).

Increasingly, I find that seeing sights around the world turns into: &quot;let&#x27;s take a selfie, and get out of here&quot; because it&#x27;s so crowded.

The article misses another important cause for the surge in travel: demography. The baby boomers are retiring, many of them with spare money for traveling.

A recent LeVar Burton Reads has a story that tackles this in a science fiction context where Earth is the hot tourist destination.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;art19.com&#x2F;shows&#x2F;levar-burton-reads&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;30648706-18c2-4a84-9141-009636248862" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;art19.com&#x2F;shows&#x2F;levar-burton-reads&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;30648706...</a>

&#x27;Too Many People are using travel destinations as items on the bucket checklist.&#x27; They are missing the point of travelling altogether. I just got back from the Taj Mahal, and I was stunned, it truly is spectacular. Unfortunately it was with a client, and everything was social media picture - check, bad souvenirs - check. Then look at me! I&#x27;ve been to the Taj. The place is truly amazing. I would go back before dawn and spend a whole day (when the weather isn&#x27;t 45 degrees C) and enjoy the space. Every time I end up with so many questions to answer. Who maintains the place, how do they do it? Why this, why that? Local bookstores and shops. It makes the history books I read real, the novels set in a place tangible.

The problem isn&#x27;t that too many people want to travel, but that too many people want to travel to the same places. I generally find the more off-the-beaten-path places more enjoyable.

Here a documentary about the case of Mallorca (subtitles in various languages, 65 minutes long):<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;totinclos.cat&#x2F;documental&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;totinclos.cat&#x2F;documental&#x2F;</a>

&gt;If tourism is a capitalist phenomenon, overtourism is its demented late-capitalist cousin: selfie-stick deaths, all-you-can-eat ships docking at historic ports, stag nights that end in property crimes, the live-streaming of the ruination of fragile natural habitats, et cetera.<p>What is this even saying? How is this attributable to specifically capitalism and not humanity in general? After the hypothetical revolution how will people magically stop being annoying tourists? Will there be controls on number of travelers and their behavior? Will nobody have the means to travel? Not be allowed to travel? What?<p>Or does the The Alantic&#x27;s editorial process allows the following format to grace their pages &quot;If [obvious bullshit], then [invented nonsense from a faulty premise].&quot;?

If we take arguments like this to the extreme, one extreme interpretation is that their are simply too many people.

Part of the problem is that we don&#x27;t build enough of anything. Roads, trains, housing, anything.

I think the actual problem is there are too many people who want to travel to <i>specific</i> places. Like, there are only a limited number of very touristic sites that <i>everyone</i> wants to go to, yet plenty of other lesser known sites exist and provide a better experience if you do your research and learn about them. Like, I live in Paris and have set foot exactly once (1) on the Eiffel tower. Likewise, there are hundreds of museums but people only ever go to the Louvre (and <i>maybe</i> Orsay). I get that they&#x27;re iconic but <i>come on</i>, there&#x27;s plenty of other stuff to do here.

&quot;Too many people&quot;<p>That really is the root cause of most of our problems these days.<p>The reality is that it&#x27;s not possible to live a &quot;western middle class&quot; lifestyle when that lifestyle is accessible to billions of people. The planet cannot take it.

Listen, there&#x27;s too many people for all of us to be at the top of the social hierarchy and enjoy traveling and consuming whatever we want, etc.<p>The current capitalist based system isn&#x27;t bad. But we should get rid of the inefficiencies and cronyism and money shuffling.<p>It should basically be, if you innovate and help people enjoy their lives or live better lives, etc... you get rewarded for that. If you don&#x27;t, you get to live a normal and healthy life without pomp.<p>Also, need to limit the number of people. Nobody should be having more than 2-3 kids or they get penalized with an equal and opposite economic penalty.