this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Having experienced life in a city with a heavy tourism influence, it's not the tourists that's the problem, it's counterintuitively a select few locals ripping the arse out of it.
Housing shortages and sky high rents because homeowners and flat owners stick their places on AirBNB and other types of peer to peer services they provide access to;
Ludicrous policies imposed on residents by locally-contracted private enterprises like event managers extending their road closures and parking suspensions a quarter mile away from their actual event areas, fucking over residents who actually live there for the other eleven months of the year;
Zero hour contracts for those in gig economy or service workers, who get used and abused for a few weeks a year and fucked off when the good times dry up, while business owners have made bank;
Increased pressure on public services for a few weeks a year, caused by influxes of folk putting heavy demands on the staff but leaving local residents to foot the tax bill;
...and the usual creep towards city centre locations trending towards tat merchants selling utter shite.
It's important to note that none of the above is anything wrong, it's just assholery for the most part...
...and then those small numbers of "locals" have the gall to blame Mr and Mrs Miggins from halfway across the globe for ruining the city. Fuck all of the way off
Nah, fuck tourists and tourism generally. Maybe if they didn't wreck where they lived they wouldn't feel the need to come looking to get waited on. Also, fuck economies that rely on tourism, how about some manufacturing or tech industry? Promoting tourism should be last on the list of priorities for any sane locale
Yes. Stay at home in your closed off little bubble. Never experiencing other cultures or places to help expand your world view and instead reinforce it with the echo chamber of those around you.
Oh, man...
I've lived in 4 different countries by now, visited even more countries than that and come from a very touristic country.
I can guaranteed you that you're not "experiencing other cultures" or "expanding your world view" by being a tourist somewhere - you have to actually live there for years in the way the locals do (rent or buy your own house, work there, do you own shopping, make your own food, have a car and/or month public transport pass, pay taxes, etc) and at the very least learn the local language to the point of following their news to start experiencing their culture and expanding your world view.
Tourists don't have to do even a fraction of the things locals have to do in their day to day, have zero of the worries people living there have, and pretty much only get to know local people whose work is catering to tourists and who thus just put on an act for the tourists.
Shit man, I've lived for over a decade in a foreign country and almost a decade in another and even then there are tons of local cultural elements I never experienced (and some of them never could have experienced since my familiy wasn't from there and I did not grow up there).
As for "expanding your world view", IMHO you get more of that from being good friends with somebody from a different country were you live than from merelly meeting people whilst travelling abroad, especially if you're going to a place with the idea that you live in a better (in the sense of superior) place than they do (which in my experience is a common thing with American and British tourists) - in other words having the modern day version of the "enlightned white man amongst the savages" spirit.
Try going to live in another country for a year or more and you'll see just how deluded is that idea that being a tourist is "experiencing other cultures".
Been there, done that. It really depends on how you travel. I very much will drop myself in the middle of a foreign place for an extended time, make friends and talk to them to understand what is going on. You don’t have to live there for a decade and still not understand things (I’d argue you’re doing it wrong at that point).
But even a short term visit can greatly expand someone’s world view with access to the arts (museums, architecture, food, music) that they normally would not get in their own bubble. And there is a vast difference between just seeing it on a screen vs being there in person that opens up minds much more than they normally could.
So please don’t try to gatekeep traveling. It can have more a profound impact for people than you realize.