Introduction

Summary

“TOURISTS GO HOME” was a battle cry that could be heard in several European cities in the summer of 2017. Beleaguered citizens in places like Barcelona, Venice, and Dubrovnik demanded that authorities curb the number of visitors because they were pushing up prices, bringing traffic to a standstill, and spoiling local neighborhoods and cultures. Worldwide, tourism is the largest industry, providing employment for one in eleven people, and popular destinations have, indeed, experienced record-breaking levels of sightseers. In 2017, 75.6 million people visited Spain, and Venice, a city with a population of 55,000, saw 28 million visitors. Dubrovnik announced plans to drastically cut the number of tourists from 8,000 per day to 4,000. Residents angered by overcrowding, unrestricted hotel development, and the spread of Airbnb rentals are by no means limited to iconic European cities. Municipalities and countries from New York City to Thailand struggle with managing tourists’ impact on ways of life, resources, and the environment, while wanting to maintain the revenue tourism generates. Projected growth rates for the industry show that the problem of supply and demand will worsen over the upcoming decades, particularly given the rise in Chinese tourism. How to preserve localities that have been marked and marketed, sometimes for centuries, as embodiments of beauty and desire, while simultaneously granting access to millions, whose very presence destroys what they are seeking, is thus tourism's key challenge. Not surprisingly, the United Nations designated 2017 as the “International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development,” advocating that the capital generated by tourist businesses be used for goals such a poverty reduction, improvement of local ecologies, and employment opportunities.

While mass tourism jeopardizes famous sites, more affluent travelers are seeking to bypass the preselected experiences tourism provides in search of authenticity. In fall 2017 Benedict Allen, a British writer and traveler, was reported missing in a remote region in Papua New Guinea, where he had wanted to meet with an indigenous group he had first visited thirty years ago. Allen eventually was found and revealed: “I don't take a GPS because for me it is all about disappearing into a place.”