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Tourists may benefit some local business owners (or chains) while having a negative impact on many others.
Take a small fishing or farming village for example, now it becomes popular with tourists. House prices shoot up to what Londoners can afford and as they only use it as a holiday home it becomes a ghost town in winter.
yeah, it’s awesome to live and work in a town and have to rent a temporary place for 3 months in summer cuz your’re priced out of your normal home, and it was rented in advance by tourist paying 4 times normal rent value
The cruise tourists benefit my life in no way. They come off the ship and buy a stupid shirt that says Canada on it from one of the Chinese owned gift shops then they go back onto the boat and dump sewage into my ocean.
Can’t even go to tofino anymore as a local who literally subsidizes all that infrastructure with my tax dollars. Have to compete with the rest of the planet for campsites and can’t even enjoy my own backyard anymore
Don’t even get me started on the amount of literal human shit littered across the island at the end of summer
Nah fuck the tourists, nasty animals
It’s getting tiresome to constantly explain this shit…
Tourism is almost always an extractive activity, kinda like mining only it sells a place’s natural beauty and/or culture built by previous generations rather than whatever is dug out of the ground, and like mining it suffers from it’s own version of the Resource Curse:
- Most of the population isn’t needed to extract that “resource” and there’s no need for those who work in it to be highly educated or have much of a quality of life
- Most of the gains from Tourism end up in a small number number of hands and don’t really trickle down
- Tourism has all manner of destructive side-effects, from actual natural environment destruction and overcrowding to massive realestate bubbles that push out the locals.
- It’s kind of a silver bullet for politicians, especially for the crooked ones, since they don’t really need to invest in the broader population and their welfare to get themselves lots of money from Tourism, be it from thankfull Tourism Industry companies or from the value of their own realestate investments going up thanks to the realestate prices going up as the Demand for space (and, in the era of AirBnB, the actual residential units) from Tourism adds up to the normal demand from people living there, pushing prices up like crazy.
Tourism can be a good thing for most people in the kind of place like a little village in a developing nation with mainly primary sector industries at a subsistence level, because it brings better jobs than subsistence farming or fishing and which reward some level of education (enough to read and write in English), plus it brings money from people from much richer countries, but it’s a totally different thing when we’re talking about established cities in nations which are supposedly developed because there it brings jobs which require lower educational qualifications than most people there have, because of the side effects of Tourism (such as the above mentioned realestate prices and overcrowding) which make it hard for the existing Industries already present there to profitably operate and finally because it isn’t even a path towards becoming a richer nation since the kind of customers it has to attract are those from already rich nations which aren’t crazily ahead in the income scale, so it has to remain cheap enough to attract them hence it’s wealth production abilities is in the main capped because of having to stay below that of those nations - you’re not going to build a modern and advanced powerhouse nation with an industry that sells sunshine and old buildings to foreigned from modern and advanced powerhouse nations whilst employing people with mid-level or lower qualifications: you can bring a developing nation up with it but you can’t use it to push a developed nation all that much up from poor developed nation with Tourism.
People inside the Tourism Industry love it because they personally make money from it and Politicians love it because their “generous friends” make money from it, they themselves indirectly make money from it and they can be completelly total crap at managing a country and Tourism still keeps on generating money because it mainly depends on natural beauty and/or ancient buildings and people with low and mid levels of Education that don’t even need to be locals so the fatcats in nations underinvesting in their people still make lots of money from Tourism.
I grew up, and live in a tourist destination. My highschool was trash. Tourists are a nuisance. We have a few big events in town yearly that bring an insane amount of people here and most locals just hide in their house for a week at a time. I would leave but it has the only weather I like. I make really good money(well over 100k) in a non tourist job and can’t afford to buy here.
I fully undetstand the housing problem. Especially with services like airbnb making many apartments unavailable to rent for the locals, but i cant but think how many people make their living from the tourism. For example Hawaii Tourism Authority calculated that visitor spending in August was over 800 million. That means pretty many family got their bread from tourism.
flute intro
Welcome to Duloc Such a perfect town Here we have some rules Let us lay them down
Don’t make waves Stay in line And we’ll get along fine Duloc is a perfect place
Keep your feet off the grass Shine your shoes Wipe your - face Duloc is, Duloc is Duloc is a perfect plaaaace…
Whose
That’s my job but thanks
Whomst’s?
fucking thank you
Yeah, we don’t like them.
Tourist Town is what happens after your community has been bankrupted and stripped for parts
No shit people are resentful
It’s also what happens when there’s no jobs for 6 months of the year. It’s no surprise that a lot of the seaside towns in the UK are also on the list of the most deprived towns.
Not the tourists’ fault, and hating on them demonstrates a lack of civic pride and not much else. I welcome tourists who come to my city for its niche history and the historic mall and the foofy shops who wouldn’t be in business without them.
It kinda is though, people who buy holiday homes are directly responsible for pushing up the price to the point that local people can no longer afford to live there. Then they don’t even live in those holiday homes so the local economy is fucked. Why hire any workers for 9 months of the year when your customers are only there for 3 months of the year?
fuck civic pride, are you kidding? you’re telling people who have been priced out of their hometowns to shut up and appreciate the surge of shady shops selling tacky trash
shady shops selling tacky trash
You’re referring to your neighbors and community members trying to make a living? It’s not their fault either.
It’s everyone’s fault, collectively. We all need to rise up and overthrow the ruling class. To achieve that, we need to actually talk about the problems our current society has without taking it all personally, and reflect on how the structure of our society has created the problems we have. It’s not about who specifically we have to blame, that’s a distraction.
You want to smash the state with me? Want to be my comrade? First I need you to look around at your own community and say something nice about it and the people who live in it. If you can’t do that, I don’t need you.
I have no problem with the people. I have a massive problem with the society. Criticising one does not mean that I have a personal problem with the people who comprise that society.
It’s all built on exploitation. Tourism is just another kind of exploitation. So, no, I think by telling people they should be thankful for their oppression, you were doing a shitty thing. That doesn’t mean you’re a shitty person, I just want you to reflect instead of brushing concerns under the rug.
Being “nice” won’t get us to where we need to be. Solidarity and class consciousness will.
Yeah our town has more tourist capacities than actual residents. It sucks to live there in the summer. Traffic out the wazoo and fucking tourists who cannot even be bothered to speak english when adressing you everywhere.
People need to realize it’s not the locals that decided to base their economy on tourism at some town hall meeting. Where I live the government moved all the industry to different parts of the country and allowed for huge real estate development that turned the area into tourism based economy. At the beginning it’s just extra jobs and people are happy about it but at some point it starts displacing locals and people start complaining.
When the town gets too expensive for locals to live then it’s a problem
Adding infrastructure adds cost. If you’re adding improvements for added housing, you upgrade internet, sewage, health and safety, replacing old building membranes that eventually break down, hospitals, community centres, libraries, parks, routes for delivery access, this does cost. This is stuff that does benefit the locals. And it’s not only paid for by the locals.
And yet, taxes, cost of living, housing prices, rent also goes up. The one thing that doesn’t is pay. To which the locals have to move to outlying areas and commute.
Complining about tourists is the new complaining about hostile architecture. Add 'generation something" to your title and collect your reddit gold.
The problem is usually wealth inequality. The residents have to compete with the tourists for resources, but most of what they could get in return gets gobbled up by late stage capitalism. Most people who have a direct relation to tourism to how it benefits them in their lives have no problem with it.
I remember talking to an ice-cream seller in Egypt and he asked me what I do for a living. When I told him I was an engineer he said ‘so am I’. The predatory behaviour of Egyptian street sellers made more sense after that exchange but it never stopped grating. I think the best way deal with it is engage with the people in a friendly way and have a laugh. Most of the time people just need acknowledgement, that goes a long way.
usually.
but
let me introduce you to the native People of the southmost part of Bavaria/Germany … almost Austria.
Example: A Boat-Person of the Beautiful Königssee spent almost all of the ride ranting about stupid dumb dumb tourists… .to tourists. the rants were only interrupted by short lacklustre descriptions of the beautiful nature and rich history… and a forgetable music stop with agressive tip fishing.
Now, this was off season and in german. Well, german - a non native speaker would likely struggle to understand his thick accent liberally spiced with words only they use. Half the people on board have no idea what the angry noise is about. The others don’t complain, they know: yes, this is a perfect example specimen. This is what the average local is like. this man is not rich probably, no, but certainly well off, safe, living surrounded by breathtaking nature and beauty…
And he hates everybody else with every fibre of their being.
I’ve met several people from this specifc small region, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world, who were exactly like this.
maybe their point is to protect this environment. every stranger is a potential danger to it, they dont want to risk. if they value the protection of nature over their livelihood, it can almost be seen as noble. just don’t ask them what they vote for
Don’t worry, those people hate other Germans (“Saupreißn”= Prussian pigs), and visitors from Munich, the capital of Bavaria (“Isarpreißn” = Prussians living at the river Isar) just as much.
There’s a joke about how they call Asian tourists “Saupreißn, Chinesische” (=Chinese Prussian pigs).
I mean on a macro scale sure but I think most of them just don’t like the stereotypical entitled and annoying tourist they’ve been routinely exposed to. Emotional responses rarely incorporate indirect economics.
Yeah, there are some bigots and dickheads too.
I wonder if you could get away with some kind of payment for locals in tourist heavy locations, like the Canary Islands are HEAVY tourist locations. Stick a tourist tax on hotels, holiday rentals etc. and a large property tax on villas owned by foreign companies and non-Spanish citizens, and then distribute that money to any local working and living on the islands as a flat “Dealing with the tourists” payment. Couple that with lower/no taxes for locals that are employed on the islands (not just those that own property and rent it out) and that might make things seem nicer for them.
After a long enough time, it eventually becomes part of the culture. People in the Virgin Islands are super nice to tourists, even if they don’t work in a typically tourist-facing job.
IMHO the resentment is when they can remember a time before tourism.
I live in a tourist heavy place. My biggest issue is that the influx of tourists is seasonal. During the summer, the number of tourists brings the infrastructure to knees and shops, restaurants and cafés are uncomfortably full. During the off season, maintenance of the roads serms to be of low priority and a lot of the shops, restaurants and cafés reduce their opening time or even close, and the town center becomes a ghost town.
So no hate towards tourists, but the inconsistency of this place is very annoying.
It does definitely show just how much the local businesses rely on this kind of income
Tourism can ruin a city
Yea how dare they give an influx of money. Cities don’t need moneh!
Hopefully you’re fine with shitty abusive workplaces since you get paid and that’s that matters lol
