Opinion / Andrew Tuck
Tourist trap
There are too many people going on holiday, clogging up the piazzas, museums, canals and ice-cream parlours of the world’s greatest cities. And the locals are getting ructious. They don’t want their neighbourhoods taken over by cheapskates staying in Airbnbs and failing to put money into the economy. They don’t want people posing for photos on their picturesque doorsteps. They don’t want late-night stag-party people with their willy inflatables. They want all of these people gone and now. So buy your Colosseum snow globe, get back on your bus and bugger off. Oh and take your cruise ships too.
One small problem. Who is going to stay at home? Which one of you is going to stop travelling?
It’s at this point everyone seems to come up with a solution that miraculously leaves them out of the no-holiday equation. They will tell you how backpackers are the menace because of their penny-pinching tendencies (Helga and Johann living off crackers and sleeping on the beach are hardly going to keep a city’s restaurants busy, they reason). Next to have their passports snatched away will be those who get around by coach. And placed on permanent house arrest will be anyone who has a cruise-ship predilection – who needs people who spend eight hours frantically Instagramming every tourist site and barely have the time to suck a lolly before they are back on board? These, to be clear, are the bad tourists.
And the good ones? Well, wealthy people because they do put money into the economy. And perhaps the odd visiting professor who will spend her whole trip out of sight in a miserable museum and bother nobody. Oh, and also in the good books will be the person giving you their tourist vision – “Oh me? I am more of a traveller. I always get to know the locals. And I do speak French you know.”
Let’s be clear, mass tourism can buckle cities, distort economies and make it frustrating to get to the bar. But it also works rather well.
Take Venice. This week the Italian government said that it would restrict cruise-ship access and make boats drop anchor at neighbouring ports instead (let’s see). I get it. The ships are too big and have banged into canal sides and caused anguish. But the idea that the city cannot cope with all the visitors is debatable. Last summer we sent a team to the Architecture Biennale in the heat of summer and, yes, St Mark’s Square was like a theme park and the Grand Canal was dotted with gondoliers efficiently helping tourists to part with their life savings. But away from here you could walk for 15 minutes and be totally alone. I did and I was. You could even find a good restaurant in need of a customer. Same in grumpy Barcelona where you’d be mad to go on a Gaudí pilgrimage in the summer. So don’t. Instead just go in the other direction and you’ll be fine.
In London I would never think of going for drinks in Leicester Square. Tourists want to. I hope they have a lovely time. But it means none of the neighbourhoods where most Londoners head to feel frazzled by tourists. Mass tourism pulls people into a few small pockets and then sends them home again. It’s efficient.
In the battle of the good and bad tourist there’s another problem: the whiff of snobbery. Actually some people need to travel by coach. And there are plenty of very nice, cultured people who like a cruise, so leave them alone.
When I was 16, a friend and I somehow convinced our parents to let us buy a one-month Interrail card to use in the summer holidays. I had been abroad a handful of times and spoke no languages. And this was pre-mobile phone. Looking back I am unsure that I would have let me go but over the coming weeks we headed as far north as Oslo, as far east as Vienna and all the way down to Nice. We slept in a tent or used our European rail timetable to find overnight trains to sleep on for free. Our diet was bread and cheese. I wasn’t the good tourist scattering wealth but that journey (and two more Interrails in following summers) opened up the world and kept me coming back.
So, yes, cruise ships should get smaller and we should legislate to let people clamp down on Airbnb, but let’s keep our cities open and welcoming because the desire to travel is instinctive. There should be no wealth bar to entry. So if you want to stay at home, do, but I am going to keep on exploring.