Why Tourist Traps Can Be a Good Thing, Actually
In the just-published 'The New Tourist,' writer Paige McClanahan upends common tourism tropes.
You hear the stories of tourists behaving badly almost daily. Carving their names into historic monuments, climbing on (and doing worse things) to statues, trying to pet large undomesticated animals. It can feel like the Wild West out in tourist land, with rules made up as they go.
And lately the chaos seems to have reached a tipping point–and residents are pushing back. In Mallorca and elsewhere in Spain, locals took to the streets to protest tourism. Barcelonians sprayed tourists with water guns. Governments are amping up efforts to curb overtourism, too. This year Amsterdam raised its tourist tax from 7% to 12.5%, and it’s one of the highest in Europe, while Venice hiked its day fee to a new record high.
But as much as we hear about these incidents, they are overwhelmingly the outliers. The majority of travelers don’t want to be a nuisance to locals while on vacation. “Surveys are showing now that travelers are coming back post-pandemic with more inclination to look for sustainable options when they travel, and with more willingness to consider the needs of the communities that they're visiting,” says Paige McClanahan, the author of The New Tourist: Waking Up to the Power and Perils of Travel. “And on the destination side, many local governments are being much more active in ensuring that tourism occurs in their communities in ways that are consistent with the high quality of life for their residents.”
A US-born, French-based journalist who has claimed residence in five countries, McClanahan was compelled to put pen to paper motivated by what she was seeing in the news. “Tourism is this massive phenomenon,” she says. “It's the world's biggest mover of human beings, and the lens through which we understand other cultures.” It shapes national narratives, impacts protected natural wonders, and fuels economic turnarounds. “But in 2018, 2019, so much of what I was seeing in the media about travel was kind of either like ‘Top 10 Beaches in Brazil,’ or tourists are destroying Barcelona,” she says. “There wasn't a whole lot of nuance in between.”
The narrative around tourism deserved better, she thought. More analysis, more scrutiny–especially as the sector grows. At least 1.5 billion international tourist arrivals are anticipated in 2024 alone. According to McClanahan’s research, tourism is expected to rise by an average of 5.8% per year until 2032. “Tourism really shapes how we see the world, and somebody needs to tell the story.”
So she did. We talked to McClanahan about the nuances of tourism, what both travelers and governments can learn from the industry’s growth, and why, sure, tourist traps can be a good thing.
Thrillist: Your book is called The New Tourist. Who is the new tourist? How do they compare to the old version?
Paige McClanahan: I think of the old tourist as a pure consumer. One who is ignorant of the impact of their presence on the place they're visiting, I might even say, who's willfully ignorant of their impact on the place they're visiting. A new tourist, in contrast, is somebody who takes the time to educate themselves about the impact of their presence on the place, and who uses that information to inform their decisions, with a view to maximize the positive impacts and minimize the negative impacts of their presence.
The new tourist is also somebody who is changed by the experience, who opens up their hearts and their minds when they travel, and who comes with a view to getting outside of their comfort zone and having their minds changed or perspective shifted.
These days we hear a lot about bad behavior and overtourism. But it seems like whenever the government implements a tourism restriction it comes too late and they're just trying to mitigate the destruction. Are you seeing any cities that are getting ahead of the problem?
There is kind of the media bias here, right? Because how hard is it to pitch a story to your editor about a place that is like being solely proactive in their policies, but there haven't been any problems yet, you know? That’s not a sexy story.
But one place that I would say is really a strong example of getting it right, an example that I write about in the book, is Kerala in South India. They did have their moment of tension, with anti-tourist protests. The local communities were concerned, one, that tourists were littering and leaving trash in their lagoons and on the beaches. And two, with the beach resort tourism, resorts were hiring all of their staff from either abroad or other parts of India, and that they were importing all of their food and all of their soft furnishings, so everything that went into the hotel was coming from outside of Kerala. They were saying, not only are these people coming and polluting our beautiful waterways, they're not giving us anything in return.
But the state government of Kerala listened to the demonstrators. They held an international conference on responsible tourism, and invited international experts on tourism to come to Kerala and examine the problem. Then the government took action, and came up with a series of pilot projects to test how to improve tourism in the state. One of them was working with local producers to train them and connect them with the resorts so that the resorts could source their milk and produce, furniture and carpets, everything from local producers.
Another initiative that was launched tried to get tourists out of the resorts, and bring them into local communities in a way that was really dictated by the terms of the local Panchayat, which is like the local governing council. They call it their village life experience. From everyone I spoke to, it seemed like the programs are working really well and supporting local communities and helping prevent the fleeing of all the young people up to Bangalore for their jobs.
You hear about tourism as exploiting culture, and in Kerala’s way it's preserving it, which is interesting. There’s so much in your book that has two sides to it.
For sure. And the question is how do we make sure it helps? Elsewhere in the book, I talk about a luau I went to—imagine me doing the air quotes around that, you know, “a luau”—literally in the middle of a shopping mall in Waikiki. And you could say, well, this is like sharing Native Hawaiian heritage with tourists, but like, the difference between that experience of “cultural tourism” and what I experienced with the village life experience at Kerala was so diametrically opposed. So how do we do this in a way that doesn't exploit or fetishize, but that does support and give a reason to preserve this important cultural heritage? I really think the most important thing to pay attention to here is that tourism is happening on terms that are decided by the community.
Another double-edged sword you addressed in the book was tourist traps, which you argue could sometimes be a good thing.
Honestly I feel like everything's interesting and everything is complex, and everything merits close scrutiny. And then we can use whatever information we gather to make informed decisions. I found tourist traps really fascinating. Because very few people probably would say they explicitly seek out tourist traps when they travel. And yet, so many of us end up in these places. What is it about these places that is so appealing to so many of us?
What I came down to is that, okay, in some cases, we want to sort of experience something iconic, because this makes us feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves and maybe gives us a slight little feeling of immortality.
And by going to see this thing that so many other millions have experienced, we're kind of getting our own little slice of this thing that's bigger than ourselves. Maybe that's one part of it, but also I think it's just that tourist traps like an amusement park or the red light district of Amsterdam offer a sort of a different version of reality. They offer us an escape from our day-to-day reality, which is something that we all need, right? I think this is really a human thing, the need to kind of check out for a little bit. It can help us revive ourselves and come back to our everyday life with more energy and inspiration.
But then sometimes living that fantasy in a real place can lead to trouble.
As I write in the book, I think we get into trouble when we try to live out a fantasy that’s also home to the residents of that place. And this is what I see in the red light district in Amsterdam. People want to come and they want to live this fantasy of sex and drugs and partying, which, of course, is like, probably not their everyday experience back home. But the problem is that this is happening in a way that's butting up against the everyday life of the residents of the red light district, many of whom I was privileged enough to have the chance to speak with.
So I think a solution might be creating explicitly fake versions of places. I used to love going to Busch Gardens, Williamsburg when I was a kid. You might pay $10 for your bottle of water, but you're probably going to have a good time, and you're not going to sort of infringe or trespass upon anybody's everyday life. My takeaway from this is that if you're in a mood, or if you're in a moment in your life where you just really need to escape, and you just need to live a fantasy for a little while, no judgment whatsoever, but take inner need and scratch that itch in a place that is ready to welcome you in that state. A tourist trap that happens within the right kind of framework can be exactly what we need.
One of the earlier points you made in the book was that, for better or for worse, Instagram is the new sort of travel log. A lot of times people are going just for the photo at the location.
I think social media is fascinating and so wonderful and such a gift in that it has just exploded the number of voices that are sharing travel narratives. If we go back even to the 1990s, if you want to read some travel writing, you are going to read the people on the shelf in Barnes & Noble, or in the pages of National Geographic, people who have managed to overcome incredibly high barriers to entry. Whereas now, we can all be the narrators of our own adventure, with the possibility of reaching an audience of millions.
So I think, on one hand, it's really wonderful that we've kind of enfranchised so many more people to share their stories in a way that can reach a lot of people. At the same time, social media, as we see in so many examples, like Iceland, can create tourist destinations from scratch, just through geolocation tags. This creates all sorts of challenges that governments have not anticipated, driving people to places where there is no infrastructure to welcome them.
And even in places where there is some infrastructure and then they are ready to welcome tourists, social media can drive huge crowds in a way that we weren't really seeing before the advent of social media. So there are these new challenges that we need to rise to and learn to manage.
You talk about last chance tourism, which was really interesting. Can you explain what it is?
Last chance tourism is this idea that glaciers, coral reefs, and other tourist destinations that are threatened by climate change actually become more appealing to some tourists because they are in the process of disappearing.
How does it play out, for example, with glacier funerals? Which again, has two sides to it.
Yeah, in recent years, we've seen a handful of these glacier funerals cropping up, which are basically kind of media stunts—not to kind of throw any shade on that—but to call the public's attention to the actual disappearance of the glacier. If you're trying to deliver a message to the general public that climate change is happening now, holding a funeral for a glacier strikes me as an incredibly powerful thing to do.
I would say, very reasonable and very well-informed people disagree on whether this is necessarily a good or a bad thing. On one hand, you have the idea that a visit to a dying glacier could be a really emotional moment, and you could have a really emotional reaction to being a personal witness to this devastating effect of climate change. You might come away from that visit moved so much that you want to adopt more environmentally-friendly behavior in the future. On the other hand, you have people who say, you know, a tourist who comes to visit a dying glacier just to get the selfie in front of it is just contributing more carbon to the atmosphere, and it's just going to accelerate the demise of that glacier that the person has come to very hedonistically consume.
The truth includes both of those things and a lot of things in the middle.