Is travel cringe? It certainly feels that way, particularly if youâre traveling to one of the destinations that have become symbols of internet-driven over-tourism â Tulum, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Mexico City, Santorini, Dubrovnik, to name a few from the past decade. These are cities boasting both extraordinary natural beauty and, crucially, governments and corporations eager to profit from tourism. In catering to Western tastes, developers and the dollars they seek arenât only killing the existing culture, theyâre also, ironically, killing what makes people want to visit a place. In the latest edition of his Barcelona guide, the legendary travel author Rick Steves writes a eulogy for the Ramblas, a thriving market for locals thatâs since become a tourist trap selling souvenirs and Instagram-ready fruit skewers.
âIâve been doing this for 40 years, and when I started, there was not enough information. Now thereâs too much,â he tells me. He describes the kind of travel that has emerged in the last decade or so as âbucket listâ tourism, where people use crowdsourced information and top 10 lists to plan their trips and end up annoyed that everyone else is there, too. âIâm part of the problem, because I write books and I send a lot of people to places that are quote âundiscovered,ââ he says. âBut what I like to do is give people a basis for finding their own discoveries: the little mom and pops that carbonate your travels with great memories. My favorite places are what I call personality-driven, not just a money-making venture of some faceless company thatâs going to hire the cheapest labor.â
Customers, having felt as though theyâve missed out on the last few years of international travel due to the pandemic, expect prices to be the same as they were in 2019, explains Jacqui Gifford, the editor-in-chief of Travel + Leisure, and therefore arenât always prepared for the delays and cost increases caused by inflation, labor shortages, and supply chain issues. âI went to Rome in March, which is typically an off-season month, and it was jam-packed,â she says. âThereâs really no low season, itâs just busy year-round in some destinations. At any major museum in Europe, you need to book your tickets in advance; itâs very rare you can go up and wing it.â Even airport lounges, those once-exclusive havens for the business elite, are being ruined by tourists. âSo many people get in now because of credit cards. Iâve had times when Iâve had to wait in line, and it was like 50 people deep. Youâre like, âIs this really worth it?ââ
Worse, that entitlement leads tourists to believe that the people who live in a place should be grateful youâre there. âIt just sounds so ridiculous,â says Bani Amor, a travel writer and lecturer. âIâm from New York, itâs one of the most traveled places in the world. It gives billions to our economy. But is that lowering my rent? Is that adding an elevator to my train two blocks away that I canât go on because Iâm disabled? [Instead] theyâre removing benches, it becomes dirtier, and houselessness goes up. The money is not circulating. Itâs going to police, to jails. Itâs not making my life better. Thatâs a basic lack of understanding of capitalism.â No better example exists of this phenomenon than Hawaii, where most people work more than one job to barely get by, and where new tourist accommodations and attractions are advertised as job bringers and then fail to pay a living wage. Amor, while acknowledging that social media and the internet speed up the process of certain destinations going viral, says that none of this is new. âAt the heart of it is displacement: the constant erosion of place, of culture. Tourism always begets more tourism.â
You could certainly make the argument that traveling at all is across-the-board unethical, and while a certain kind of tourist behavior undoubtedly is (young British men have made Amsterdam residents so miserable that the government released a PSA telling them to please, for the love of god, host their ladsâ weekends someplace else), thatâs only part of it. To declare that traveling is problematic just because it has become more accessible for middle- and working-class people to experience and therefore more people are doing so feels both classist and misguided.
More people are traveling because they can, a direct result of policy changes on a governmental and corporate level: the rise of online travel agencies like Expedia and Viator that make vacation planning as easy as online shopping, the slackening of visa requirements for foreigners and âdigital nomadsâ who buy local real estate (many of whom promptly renovate them into cookie-cutter Airbnbs), deregulation of the airline industry, the popularity of user-generated, algorithmically ranked âbest ofâ travel recommendations, a capitalist global economy that keeps developing countriesâ currencies low and therefore favorable to people from richer nations, and the widespread adoption of remote work, to name a few. That there is not enough space at the restaurants we want to eat at, that the must-see museums sell out weeks in advance, these are not the fault of the individual travelers clamoring to go there, theyâre the result of explicit decisions made by governments and corporations.
I am old enough to remember what traveling internationally was like before Uber and Airbnb, but not old enough to remember a time before budget airlines. In other words, I have only ever known travel to be cheap, but it has not always been quite this easy. The seamlessness with which Americans (and other English speakers) can sift through the world without actually feeling like weâve left home can make traveling feel like, well, not. The messy logistics are catered to us in the form of instant phone translations and English language apps to hail taxis and book apartments, and also by the literal aesthetics of the places we go: In attempts to woo wealthy cool-seekers, developers design restaurants, hotels, and public spaces to look like facsimiles of the restaurants, hotels, and public spaces determined by Silicon Valley investors to be what cool people should want. A coffee shop in Beijing now can look the exact same as one in Buenos Aires and as one in your hometown. Our tourist dollars, after displacing innumerable families from neighborhoods theyâve occupied for generations, then turn those same neighborhoods into playgrounds specifically for us.
It all feels sort of embarrassing once youâre there. In Venice, which earlier this year imposed a reservation system and a daily fee to out-of-towners due to over-tourism, I remember waiting in line to squeeze single-file through a crowded bookstore described as a must-visit in all the travel guides where no one bought any books because there literally wasnât any time or space to do so. Even when weâre not being particularly awful (thereâs been a minor hoopla on Twitter over the past week because of a couple TikToks making jokes about the lack of free water at restaurants in Europe, which, theyâre right! You do actually have to ask for and pay for water at most European restaurants!), the discourse always ends up being how shitty Americans are. Which, fair. âAn ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you,â Jamaica Kincaid wrote in 1988, and that is precisely how it feels in 2023.
That doesnât mean we canât be better at it. Despite what a recent semi-viral New Yorker essay argues, walking around Paris aimlessly does, in fact, sound like a great way to spend a day. Travel is fun, and it is a luxury, and that is okay! âLeisure travel is selfish, and we can think of that word neutrally,â says Amor. âNo one is doing anyone a favor by traveling.â
Whatâs embarrassing, then, is the obsession with getting everything right, with the spreadsheets and the research and the taking of the thousandth photo, followed by the pouting because the bar was too crowded or the emotional unleashing on a service worker because your train got canceled due to a railway labor strike. You are not a good or more interesting person because you have visited 35 countries before the age of 35, or because youâve dined at every restaurant on Bon Appetitâs guide to Tokyoâs best izakayas. The quality of your photos does not equal the amount of fun you had on a trip. Just ask Rick Steves: On a recent trip to Venice, he watched as couples on gondola rides spent almost no time looking at each other or their surroundings. âAnd they shoot everything vertical for Instagram,â he says, laughing. âI just thought of that right now. It makes no sense. Our eyes are designed to look at things horizontally.â
How do we travel better? Steves recommends visiting âsecond cities.â âEverybody goes to Paris, what about Lyon? Everyone goes to Dublin, what about Belfast? Everybody goes to Edinburgh, what about Glasgow?â Gifford, meanwhile, suggests spending more time in one place rather than trying to check off every city on your list. âI used to get requests all the time like, âI want to do Greece and Italy and France in one trip in 10 days.â I donât think from a logistical standpoint people want to do that kind of trip anymore. Whatâs nice about it is itâs a very relaxed pace.â
From my own experience, itâs the extremely trite observation of âputting down your phoneâ that helps make travel seem like a real vacation. Itâs like going to a party thatâs so much fun youâve forgotten to take any photos: One of the most fun nights I had on a trip to Florence started off with me being annoyed that my boyfriend dragged me to a nondescript pub to watch some sports game instead of checking out a cute little wine bar weâd been recommended, but we ended up meeting a whole tour group and going out to dinner with them. Later I posted an Instagram story of us singing karaoke in a crappy bar to Taylor Swiftâs 10-minute version of âAll Too Wellâ and everyone was like, âWhat the fuck are you doing at a karaoke bar in Florence?â and I was like, âHaving a blast!â Literally, who cares!
âJust because somethingâs number one on some listing, whatâs number one for you? Itâs not about how many places youâve been to. I want to know how many friends youâve met and the mistakes youâve made and then actually enjoyed as a result of those mistakes,â says Steves. âThe magic of travel is still there. But people have to be in the moment. Let serendipity off its leash, and follow it.â Annoyingly, my TikTok algorithm has already figured out Iâm going to the Cotswolds in a few weeks, and itâs taken everything in my power to scroll past the nauseatingly magical thatched-roof cottages and quaint little shops and surrender to the mysterious forces of fate. Travel isnât supposed to be a fairy tale, after all â a great trip is far more interesting than that.
