this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Weird take.
How is tourism extractive like mining? What is extracted?
You could make the same complaints of any primary industry.
If you think of inflows and outflows to and from a small local economy, in an era where almost every purchase is an outflow to Amazon et al, tourism is an important inflow. Locals cant just keep passing the same $1 around until someone spends it online, you need money coming in.
You can call it "trickle down" economics if you like, but i dont think thats a fair summation. In a small coffee shop, there's no fat cat corporate owner, but a half dozen people with jobs.
Its absolutely true that in some places airbnb has reduced the number of homes available to locals, but thats not generally true of all tourist destinations. Most jurisdictions where this is / was a significant problem have enacted appropriate laws to mitigate it.
Its not about crooked politicians and their rich friends. A reasonable level of tourism is good for everyone, but too much can obviously cause problems.
It's extractive because tourists don't add or contribute to the reason that place is a tourist destination to begin with and in fact often take away or are detrimental.
Of course they bring money but too many and the start to crush the vibe, ruin the housing market and sometimes cause gentrification pushing out the people who were originally there.
Some people are fine but too many can ruin things pretty quick. In the age of Instagram and accessible travel it doesn't take much for a small place to get over run in just a few years.
For an extreme example look at the lines to get up to mount Everest.
This is a dramatic generalisation.
There are plenty of tourist destinations that people love because they are over-run with tourists - the very antithesis of your comment.
I'm not really sure how tourists are ruining the housing market on mount everest. As an aside, I suspect the locals are generally pretty happy with the tourism industry on and around mount everest.
Of course there are examples of tourism disaffecting locals, but these cases are really limited. In general, tourism is a great industry for regional centres.
Because you seem like a person wanting to learn and not a bot, here is a video by John Oliver, 6 years ago, about the actual local situation in Everest.
The causes will be varied, and the housing market is not threatened in Everest because tourists don't use houses in Everest the way tourists use houses in Europe (Airbnb), but they're is always incredible damage in whatever thing, local owners use tourist money, to fuck local workers about, not caring for the Shit and damage left behind. In the case is Everest, that Shit is literal. In other places, that Shit is off-season ghost towns, underfunded schools and local necessities, and corrupt local politicians.
This is just capitalism by design, it's not unique to tourism. It IS the owner's fault, not the tourist's, but the tourist buys the meal that the local no longer can afford, because tourists by definition go be tourists in cheaper countries than their own. Do you understand what that means? The locals that serve the tourists, get so little money in comparison, that it's not even funny.