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Most of those places were doing just fine before becoming tourist destinations. This “economy” you speak of is just the profit margins of hotel chains. It very seldom benefits the people living there.
No, no suelte’ la bandera ni olvide’ el lelolai, que no quiero que hagan contigo lo que le pasó a Hawái
But now that they’ve let it into their economy, it has grown like a parasite the type of which cannot be removed without also killing the host.
See also:
- locals who live in a college town every time they see a student
- locals who live near an international airport every time a plane flys over
- locals who live near a military base every time something goes boom
- locals who live near pretty much any industry town every time anything from that industry annoys them
Its weird with military bases. I used to work on one and got regular emails about scheduled EOD explosions, and somehow i never heard a single one.
I’d say most employees feel that way about customers, tourist or not. Dealing with the general populace just eats away at your soul
Almost all of the places I have lived have been tourism heavy.
- French Quarter, New Orleans
- Park City, Utah
- Kissimmee, Florida (Disney)
- Jackson Hole, Wyoming
- Austin, Texas (not at first, but definitely the later years)
- Destin, Florida
There is one recurring theme. People on vacation are stressed the fuck out, desperate to enjoy their very limited and probably very expensive time off, and impatient. This makes many of them rude and entitled. Many people forget to bring their common sense and their manners when they go on vacation. They also have a propensity to binge on everything including food, entertainment, and especially booze and/or drugs. Locals are under no obligation to take your shit just because you are blowing $10k on a week or weekend vacation (of which you only get two of per year) with the family, and you are having an existential crisis that you hope your expensive vacation might remedy. Some of us are just trying to get a coffee on the way to our daily grind and you have decided to let your kids sample every flavor of ice cream in the shop before only buying a single scoop. If you see people waiting, be nice and offer to let someone else get their order in while your kids make up their minds. It is common courtesy.
One of my most valuable memories comes from i worked at an incredibly touristy restaurant in one of the most tourist friendly areas in the country.
This restaurant would routinely have a line out the door for walk-ins, despite the fact we had reservations. Im talking 700 covers a day at a minimum during peak season.
Entitled Tourist who walked past the line: Hi there, im super exhausted, and my family needs to seat 4 people.
Me: im sorry we have a 2 hour wait, you’ll have to wait in line
Entitled tourist: are you sure, we really need some food
Me: yes i am very sure, there are people outside who have waited in line for an hour plus
Entitled tourist: (irritated) but we just got off of our flight and we heard you guys were great
Me: yes im absolutely sure
Entitled tourist: you cant treat us this way, we came to your city to enjoy your food
Me: im sorry maam, we cannot let you skip the waiting list
Entitled tourist: (now visibly angry) you can not treat us this way, WE ARE TOURISTS!!!
Me: i look at the hostess next me and we both start cracking up at the absurdity
We continued to laugh until she left.
Was honestly one of the funniest things ive eve encountered in the service industry and thats after a career of almost 25 years.
Thats the thing I don’t get with vacations. I am stressed at work so I take a week off to be stressed somewhere else for a week? Don’t get me wrong, there is so much to love about vacations but I never found vacations to be relaxing just because I feel like I am under time pressure to go out and see and do as much as I possibly can in the limited time at the vacation spot.
In contrast taking a week off and just staying at home has been far more relaxing.
And? Reasonably so. Tourists are annoying af
If your entire economy is based on tourism, and you want to get rid of the tourists, you are saying that you really want to get rid of your own job. Not usually a wise decision.
This is basically Japan right now.
Are you from there?
For my town it isn’t so much tourists, its the rich yuppies from the city showing up to my rural town to roleplay blue collar living by clogging up the only decent restaurants in town to day drink. Can barely get across town to pick up my niece from school without almost getting smoked by a BMW.
Smoked by a BMW? Are you drag racing?
If you share the road with a BMW you’re in the race now, boyo.
Who is economy?
I am!
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.
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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;
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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;
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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;
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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;
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…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 💀
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
You sound like a basement dweller ngl
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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whose*
It’s almost like the “economy” has fuck-all to do with quality of life and a couple business owners getting rich isn’t worth commodifying your home!
Tourists when they enter a place: Clearly the whole economy is based on Tourism :)
the locals don’t want you there, the transplant white business owners and their pocketed politicians do
Yeah the locals would rather go back to living in hots because they can’t afford anything else because there’s no employment. When tourism is the largest sector of the economy, it’s also the largest employer. Telling people that they don’t want the tourists he’s also saying that they don’t want jobs.
A city has tourism-based economy, because tourists go there. If they wouldn’t go there the economy would be based on different stuff.
Often times these tourist cities are much richer than the manual labour cities though.
Now if we’re talking about big cities, it’s mixed economies anyway and tourism will be part of it anyway, but it might not dominate.
Sometimes that’s true, but often it is true that there simply would not be an economy otherwise. And instead would be rampant poverty.
College town permanent residents when me and my university homies would roll into a local joint.
