The Good Tourist: Can We Learn To Travel Without Absolutely Infuriating The Locals?

Author Paige McClanahan says there is a way to be your best self abroad – it starts by visiting fewer places and spending longer there. Can her approach end the growing anger around overtourism?

Tourism has never had a great reputation, given that the very word “tourist” is pejorative. At best, it suggests someone whose interest is superficial and whose understanding of a place is nonexistent. What’s the first thing you think, when you hear the phrase, “They’re a bit of a tourist”? You think, that person is annoying. But the word’s reputation has plummeted further in recent years. Anti-tourism movements are springing up across the world: that might look like a protest march, as in Barcelona, where one placard bluntly pleaded “Tourists go home; you are not welcome here”. It might look like a visitor fee, as Venice introduced this year, or it might look like the mayor of Amsterdam simply closing the cruise ship terminal, as he did last year.

Part of this is about sheer volume: the number of people crossing an international border as tourists (rather than displaced people or migrants) in 2023 was 1.3 billion, which is not only a complete bounceback post-Covid, but an almost 25-fold increase since the 1950s. Driven not only by flights becoming ever more affordable, but the online convenience of booking travel – from the launch of last-minute flight and hotel brokers in the late 90s, to Airbnb in the late 00s, followed by Google Flights and Trips – everything about travel has become easier and cheaper. But the difficulties and costs still exist, they’re just paid elsewhere. Tourism accounts for just over 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Short-term holiday rentals distort housing markets until the locals are spending summer months living in car parks – as has happened in Ibiza.