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
Do you live in Edinburgh by any chance? Because that all sounds familiar....
I was going to say the same thing about it being Toronto 💀
EXACTLY
This is the kinda shite that happens, you've also got things like the one time people mistook an actual decapitated corpse for a Halloween decoration and the entire old town had to be closed off
Sorry for the barely related anecdote it's still such a crazy story
This all assumes it's the locals and not wealthy migrants that bought a shit ton of real estate and are squeezing the investment for what it's worth till some politician grows a pair. AirBNB is also a foreing wealthy company, it's part of the problem because it used tech to evade regulations that protected against precisely what people are complaining about.
AirBNB's CEO should be brought behind the shed and sent to the far away farm.
Edit: Also, good luck regulating US big tech. The US started a proxy war to have the entire EU by the balls, smaller countries alone have exactly 0 chance.
The problem is that Tourism enables all that shit.
Also beyond that, it lets politicians get away with mismanaging a country because you don't need a highly qualified population with a good standard of living to sell the sights to foreigners.
The problem aren't the tourists individually, it's the systemic changes that their presence in large number innevitably leads to, especially in places were politicians are corrupt, refusing to take measures to at least stop the worst abuses and instead profiting from it themselves both directly and indirectly.
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.
I mean... that's one definition of tourism I guess?
I'm very much a "leave only footprints" sort of guy - I know Brits have a bit of a shit reputation particularly when it comes to inexpensive package holidays, but I think tourism and learning about the rest of the world promotes a greater understanding of the only planet we live on. Whether it's food; culture; history; or scenes of key historical events - it gives a window into people's own gaps in knowledge or empathy.
I agree that an economy based entirely on tourism is a house of cards in itself, but I don't think it's a binary choice. Humanity have always had a nomadic element and there will always be those who want to travel, but it should be done sustainably.
TIL I’m wrecking where I live and that’s why I like to travel. I could have sworn it was because I wanted to see and experience different places and cultures.
Wtf no. Tourism is awesome, you get to show people from around the world the awesome parts of your country and take them on amazing experiences. It makes a ton of money and encourages a beautiful town.
A world where every town was manufacturing, or tech sounds like a dystopian hellscape.
You sound like a basement dweller ngl
I second this. I watched my hometown turn into a tourism focus and there ended up being no careers so there was massive brain drain as people left to other towns and states for work.
A strong tourism industry in a small city does displace everything else. It's one version of the Dutch disease that actually happens even when the government doesn't actively cause it.
So they should wreck their cities and nature, but by your own logic that would only fuel more tourism in areas that aren't wrecked.