Modern Tourism is Getting Weird

After three years of the pandemic, tourism is booming again and exceeding 2019 levels in some of Europe’s most popular destinations this summer, from Barcelona and Rome, Athens and Venice to the scenic islands of Santorini in Greece, Capri in Italy and Mallorca in Spain. Crowds are packing the Colosseum, the Louvre, the Acropolis and other major attractions.

What makes this year different than other years is that this tourism boom is mostly led by Americans and their strong dollar. Chinese visitors have not fully returned, with flights from China and other Asia-Pacific countries down 45% from 2019. This has led to some funny Tik-Tok videos like:

This one on the Amalfi Coast

This one in Paris

International travel is relatively new to American culture. Even up until 2004, less than 20 percent of Americans even had a passport.

America is a continent sized nation, vacations have traditionally centered around road-trips, local camping or flying to California, New York or Hawaii. There are also trips to Canada or Mexico. But recently international travel has become in vogue and part of mass culture. Social media apps like Instagram or Tik-Tok have no doubt influenced where people go now. The image saturated platforms contribute to envy and also create envy at the same time. Before, you only cared where people in your local community were going on vacation. Now you care where the “world” goes on vacation. This shift in point of view also means more tourists going to the same destinations.

There’s even a recent pushback by the elites now that travel is popular with the masses. Like this New Yorker Article.

Or Tweets like this saying it is a waste of time. I disagree. Traveling can be useful. The point of traveling is to change the environment for a while. It helps restore phenomenological balance. It also allows to you see your home with new eyes.

Mass Tourism is Very Recent

Tourism has always been around. A number of well known Ancient Greek figures (philosophers/members of the aristocracy etc) visited ancient sites during their lives. In fact, the list of the seven wonders of the ancient world actually comes from guide books sold to ancient Hellenic tourists.

Pilgrimage may have predated “tourism” but these are similar concepts. We like to think of tourism as purely for pleasure and pilgrimage strictly for solemn religious purposes, but that wasn’t always the case. Pilgrimage has always been a mix of pleasure and consumerism endeavor. It was also a good excuse to get out of town that you Lord would accept you were a serf tied to the land. Even in Medieval Venice, entrepreneurial and political investments provided support structures that have made pilgrimages possible and accessible. But this wasn’t a lot of people. Thousands at a time.

After the introduction of the automobile and air travel that number went to 25 million in 1950. If you watch old movies from that era you will notice way more locals than tourists in cities like Rome in Roman Holiday or Paris in the 60s French Films.

But just 70 years later, tourists numbers climbed to 1.4 billion.

That is a gigantic increase in a very short time. And most of it has happened in Europe.

People Do Not Have Normal Interactions in Tourist Cities

Venice is the perfect postmodern city: it sells no product other than itself.

Venice is a gorgeous city. When you first get there you get hit by its beauty intensely. It’s a city that doesn’t resemble any other city in the world. You start thinking about maybe buying a place. Other people have thought that same thing when they arrive.

You stay there for a few days and you notice that most of the population is either tourists, students or workers who don’t live there. There are 1.4 million tourists and only 51,000 full time residents who live in the actual city of Venice. We treat this as normal but it’s very strange and unprecedented in history. It’s an environment that only caters only to visitors who travel there for a few days and leave. A constant churn of people coming in and out. The restaurants, the cafes, the shops, the airbnbs, the boatmen.

Take Rome for example. Rome is beautiful but it has over 12 million visitors per year & a concentration of 10-15 tourists/non-permanent residents to 1 full time resident in the center. That type of ratio imbalance does strange things to the environment. Sure, there are still areas worth hanging around in fringe neighborhoods but then, why visit Rome in the first place? Visit a small, provincial city to see locals interact with each other normally.

People don't have normal relationships with one another in tourist cities. People don’t interact with each other like they would in a city filled with locals (and with occasional tourists). You’re walking around a Hollywood set. You’re in the Truman Show. There is no semblance of reality you are observing or interacting with. It’s Disneyland. I had the same reaction in Florence or Dubrovnik.

In previous centuries, armies would come to these cities and try to capture it. Today, it’s captured by tourists. The countries of Italy or Croatia need the money so they welcome it. But it feels like those cities don’t even belong to them anymore. They are now property of something else.

Rich Guy Tourism

While the masses are visiting Paris or Rome, the rich are doing something much more extreme. Such as visiting space for instance. Last year Musk flew people to the international space station on aircraft that cost $50 million a ticket. Bezos did the same thing with his company. He brought William Shatner along and Shatner saw a profound sadness in space. But it doesn’t end there.

Just a few months ago a submarine filled with millionaires and billionaires that was supposed to go deep under water to visit the wreckage of the Titanic imploded in the water killing everyone.

Even Mount Everest has a long line at the top now.

17 people died climbing Mt. Everest this year. The deadliest year in history. Why are rich people risking their life for extreme forms of tourism? The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote:

The poor (and middle class) avoid pain and the rich avoid boredom.

The rich get bored easily. They are not worried about becoming homeless. Their priorities are different than middle class people. So they have to keep upping the ante for entertainment.

Modern tourism is a strange business. You have millions of middle class people crowding toward the same cities while the super rich go deep under water, into space or top of mountains to get thrills.

In This Newsletter

1) International Tourists should visit the best American suburbs: Europe has beautiful cities because they invested in those cities for centuries. America became super rich after 1945 and put all of its money into suburbs. I make the (controversial) argument that, to see real American wealth, tourists should visit the best suburbs that America has built.

2) The future of the Euro Gentrified City. Americans are flocking back into cities but the real estate prices are skyrocketing. What happens if some Americans (with remote jobs) decide to permanently move to cheap European cities"?

Tourism and the Elite American Suburb

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