Has tourism had its day?

Destination overcrowding is unpleasant for tourists and locals alike. We need to rethink our holidays.
an article by Freya Higgins-Desbiolles for the RSA Journal Issue 2 (2019) [via Medium]



Tourism and tourists are getting bad press. Complaints about the impact of backpackers in Asia, a ‘traffic jam’ of climbers on Everest, a mega cruise ship slamming into a Venetian wharf, and anti-tourism backlashes in Barcelona and Amsterdam suggest tourism has reached boiling point. But disdain for tourists has a long pedigree, at least as far back as the birth of mass tourism in the 1850s with Thomas Cook Tours in Europe.

With growing anxiety around climate change and mounting social tensions, is it now time to ask whether global tourism has had its day? At the heart of this tension is the number of countries that rely on tourism for their economic development and the sheer volume of tourists that now transit the globe: there were some 1.4 billion international trips in 2018.

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