Posts Tagged ‘tourism’
“Tourism basically boils down to the leisure of going and seeing what has become commonplace”*…
Last year six European countries (seven if, given Istanbul’s gateway status, you count Turkey) dominated the list of top-ten countries most visited by foreigners; France alone had over 100 million visitors.
Janan Ganesh argues that the continent’s success in attracting tourists is a problem…
This is the first century in several that Europe won’t shape. Even the 20th one, the “American” one, played out on the continent’s world war battlefields and cold war frontline. The largest ideas, Einstein’s and Keynes’s, were conceived by Europeans in Europe. So were those experiments — Picasso’s in painting, Joyce’s in literature, Le Corbusier’s in architecture — that we bunch under the name Modernism. European states had colonies well into the second half of the century, which brought discredit, but also clout.
All of which makes our present impotence sting a bit. Europe has a lack of major tech companies, a reduced share of world output and, as protectionism spreads, no hope of matching American or Chinese largesse on domestic industries. In a trading world, Europe had one superpower, the “Brussels effect”, by which EU regulations became the de facto global standard. The fragmentation of trade could deprive Europe of even that vote on the shape of the future.
Now, at the risk of bathos: tell me about your summer break. It involves Europe, doesn’t it?
I suggest these two things — the irrelevance of the continent, and the popularity of it — are linked. Because Europe commands the interest of the world without trying, it struggles to understand how marginal it has become, and to respond. It can count on levels of attention that other places must fight for. It can reap a level of income from visitors that is near-unique in the rich world. In 2019, the last pre-Covid year, tourism was 12 per cent of GDP in Spain, 8 in Portugal and 7 in Greece. No western nation outside Europe, save New Zealand, got to 3 per cent. Nor did Japan or (despite an airport that could be a destination itself) Singapore.
Europe is forever sweet-talked — “You matter” — and not by tourists alone. Think of the wider cultural patronage it receives as the glamour continent. If a regime wants to sportswash itself, it acquires Paris Saint-Germain, not the Lakers. If a Chinese rural-dweller wants to advertise their ascent into urban affluence, LVMH products, not the US equivalents, are de rigueur. Europe should never shrink from these strengths. It would be crackers not to monetise its own prestige. But such mastery of the “soft” stuff might blind it to what is afoot in tech and other harder realms. The danger is that Europe becomes the geostrategic equivalent of a person too beautiful to ever need do or say anything interesting. It can be flattered into not noticing that the century is being authored elsewhere.
And so the phrase “tourist trap” acquires a new meaning. The entrapped aren’t the visitors. Yeah, smirk all you like when they order a “cross-ont” at the pâtisserie and overpay to boot. The locals are the ones with the problem, and the problem is a sort of lucrative stagnation.
Tourism is said to despoil places. But that can be managed. Venice has banned tour groups larger than 25. Barcelona has put up its tourist tax again. Europe could charge more without losing custom because, in the end, nowhere else can match it for sheer geographic compression of what we can only call good stuff. (I did Zurich to London in 75 minutes on a flight this year. I can’t do waking to exiting the bed in 75 minutes.)
No, the “blight” of tourism isn’t, or isn’t just, environmental. It is mental. It saps a place’s incentive to modernise. It rewards ossification. For a long time, theories have circulated as to why market reforms are so difficult to enact in Mediterranean Europe in particular. These include: some collectivist ethos in Catholicism (but then how to explain businesslike Bavaria?), weather so good as to induce a taste for leisure (what about Australia?) and high expectations of the welfare state (unlike Scandinavia?).
None of these explanations check out, quite. Doubtless, no single one ever could. But it matters that southern Europe can get a lot wrong in policy terms and still expect to be patronised, in at least one sense of that word, by outsiders bearing not just hard currency but ego-boosting attention. What an exorbitant privilege. And what a nice way to decline…
“Europe’s real tourist trap” (gift link): the continent gets too much attention from the world to recognize its irrelevance. @FT.
* Guy Debord , The Society of the Spectacle
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As we rebook, we might want to recall that it was on this date in 1894 that a major contributor to French and European tourism this summer was founded: the International Olympic Committee. The IOC is responsible for organizing the modern (Summer, Winter, and Youth) Olympic Games, and for governing the (currently 206) National Olympic Committees (NOCs).
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”*…
… a circular journey of discovery that can be accomplished much more quickly today than 110 years ago…
In 1914 John G. Bartholomew, the scion of an Edinburgh mapmaking family and cartographer royal to King George V, published “An Atlas of Economic Geography”. It was a book intended for schoolboys and contained everything a thrusting young entrepreneur, imperialist, trader or traveler could need. As well as the predictable charts of rainfall, temperature and topography, it had maps showing where you could find rubber, cotton or rice; maps showing the distribution of commercial languages, so that if you wanted to do business in Indonesia you knew to do so in Dutch; and maps showing the spread of climatic diseases, so that if you did find yourself in Indonesia you knew to look out for tropical dysentery. It also contained the map you see here, which told you how long it would take to get there from London: between 20 and 30 days.
This is an isochronic map – isochrones being lines joining points accessible in the same amount of time – and it tells a story about how travel was changing. You can get anywhere in the dark-pink section in the middle within five days – to the Azores in the west and the Russian city of Perm in the east. No surprises there: you’re just not going very far. Beyond that, things get a little more interesting. Within five to ten days, you can get as far as Winnipeg or the Blue Pearl of Siberia, Lake Baikal. It takes as much as 20 days to get to Tashkent, which is closer than either, or Honolulu, which is much farther away. In some places, a colour sweeps across a landmass, as pink sweeps across the eastern United States or orange across India. In others, you reach a barrier of blue not far inland, as in Africa and South America. What explains the difference? Railways.
In the early 1840s an American dry-goods merchant called Asa Whitney, who lived near New York, travelled to China on business. It took 153 days, which he thought a waste of time. When he got back he began lobbying for a transcontinental railroad connecting Lake Michigan with Oregon, which had a trade deal with China. The railroad, he thought, would cut the journey time to China to about 30 days and open up the market. Similarly, the British invested so heavily in the Indian railway that between 1860 and 1880 it extended from 838 miles to 15,842 miles. If you compare this isochronic map to one from the 1870s, by Francis Galton, you see the difference. Bombay is quickly accessible by sea; the rest of India less so. Likewise, there is no spit of pink reaching across the Russian Empire on Galton’s map, because there was no Trans-Siberian Railway. As the geographer L.W. Lyde says in his introduction to Bartholomew’s atlas, “isochronic distances…change with every additional mile of railway brought into use.” What was the one thing a young entrepreneur needed most? A train ticket…
“Time Travel,” by Simon Willis in Intelligent Life/1843 Magazine
That was then. Now entrepreneurs and other travelers are reaching for a different kind of ticket– now we have aviation…
In late 2015 the Rome2Rio team spotted a beautiful travel map on Intelligent Life. The map, which was published by venerable mapmaker John G. Bartholomew in 1914, illustrated how long it would take to travel from London to destinations across the globe.
We were excited to see such a fantastic visualisation of travel times and we were curious to see what had changed in the 100-odd years since; especially at such a world-changing juncture in travel technology. The first commercial flight took place on January 1st, 1914, so travel times started changing drastically soon after this date.
We created a new map using Rome2Rio’s routing engine and unique repository of transport data… It is clear that travel times have improved immensely. Modern air, rail and road infrastructure has led to a ten-fold increase in travel times across the dark pink parts of the map.
Globalisation is also readily apparent. Journeys that would have taken 10 to 20 days by boat and train have been replaced by the speed of air travel, with most of the world now accessible within ½ to 1 day. This change is most apparent in Asia. In 1914 reaching Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo would take up to 40 days. Now, these powerhouses are a day’s travel from London.
Island destinations have benefited from the advances in technology as well. Locations such as the Bahamas, Bermuda, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar are all with ½ a day’s travel, suggesting demand for direct flights by holiday makers. For those who prefer colder locales, visiting the world’s coldest city, Yakutsk, is a breeze in comparison to the area surrounding it; from London, it takes ¾ of a day…
“Time flies? According to these maps it does,” from Rome2Rio
What a difference a century– and a new technology– can make…
* T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets
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As we fasten our seatbelts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that was Amelia Earhart became the first person successfully to fly from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California. It had been attempted numerous times before by other pilots who’d been foiled by mechanical trouble; Earhart had none. Indeed, it is said that during the final hours of her flight, she relaxed to the broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera from New York.
Sadly it was just two year later that she went missing while attempting to fly from Lae Airfield in Papua New Guinea to Howland Island (about 1,700 nautical miles southwest of Honolulu). She was never seen again.
“As long as we tell our urban ancestors’ stories, no city is ever lost. They live on, in our imaginations and on our public lands, as a promise that no matter how terrible things get, humans always try again.”*…
In the dusty plains of present-day Sindh in southern Pakistan lie the remains of one of the world’s most impressive ancient cities of which most people have never heard. Samantha Shea reports…
A slight breeze cut through the balmy heat as I surveyed the ancient city around me. Millions of red bricks formed walkways and wells, with entire neighbourhoods sprawled out in a grid-like fashion. An ancient Buddhist stupa towered over the time-worn streets, with a large communal pool complete with a wide staircase below. Somehow, only a handful of other people were here – I practically had the place all to myself.
I was about an hour outside of the dusty town of Larkana in southern Pakistan at the historical site of Mohenjo-daro. While today only ruins remain, 4,500 years ago this was not only one of the world’s earliest cities, but a thriving metropolis featuring highly advanced infrastructures.
Mohenjo-daro – which means “mound of the dead men” in Sindhi – was the largest city of the once-flourishing Indus Valley (also known as Harappan) Civilisation that ruled from north-east Afghanistan to north-west India during the Bronze Age. Believed to have been inhabited by at least 40,000 people, Mohenjo-daro prospered from 2500 to 1700 BCE.
“It was an urban centre that had social, cultural, economic and religious linkages with Mesopotamia and Egypt,” explained Irshad Ali Solangi, a local guide who is the third generation of his family to work at Mohenjo-daro.
But compared to the cities of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, which thrived around the same time, few have heard of Mohenjo-daro. By 1700 BCE, it was abandoned, and to this day, no-one is sure exactly why the inhabitants left or where they went…
The fascinating tale: “Pakistan’s lost city of 40,000 people,” from @IDtravelblog in @BBC_Travel.
* Annalee Newitz, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age
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As we muse on mutability, we might send (semi-)adventurous birthday greetings to Thomas Cook; he was born on this date in 1808. An English businessman, he is best known for founding the travel agency Thomas Cook & Son— through which he pioneered the “package tour” and helped build tourism systems (vouchers, company agents/guides, purpose-built hotels, et al.) that fueled the growth of leisure travel first in Italy, then around the world.
“The use of alternative energy is inevitable”*…
Contemplating the unintended– or at least not-yet-widely-anticipated– consequences of a move to green energy…
It is not hard to understand why people dream of a future defined by clean energy. As greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow and as extreme weather events become more frequent and harmful, the current efforts to move beyond fossil fuels appear woefully inadequate. Adding to the frustration, the geopolitics of oil and gas are alive and well—and as fraught as ever. Europe is in the throes of a full-fledged energy crisis, with staggering electricity prices forcing businesses across the continent to shutter and energy firms to declare bankruptcy, positioning Russian President Vladimir Putin to take advantage of his neighbors’ struggles by leveraging his country’s natural gas reserves. In September, blackouts reportedly led Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng to instruct his country’s state-owned energy companies to secure supplies for winter at any cost. And as oil prices surge above $80 per barrel, the United States and other energy-hungry countries are pleading with major producers, including Saudi Arabia, to ramp up their output, giving Riyadh more clout in a newly tense relationship and suggesting the limits of Washington’s energy “independence.”
Proponents of clean energy hope (and sometimes promise) that in addition to mitigating climate change, the energy transition will help make tensions over energy resources a thing of the past. It is true that clean energy will transform geopolitics—just not necessarily in the ways many of its champions expect. The transition will reconfigure many elements of international politics that have shaped the global system since at least World War II, significantly affecting the sources of national power, the process of globalization, relations among the great powers, and the ongoing economic convergence of developed countries and developing ones. The process will be messy at best. And far from fostering comity and cooperation, it will likely produce new forms of competition and confrontation long before a new, more copacetic geopolitics takes shape…
The new geopolitics of energy: “Green Upheaval,” by Jason Bodoff (@JasonBordoff) and Meghan L. O’Sullivan (@OSullivanMeghan) in @ForeignAffairs.
See also: “The Geopolitics of Energy in the 21st Century.”
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As we think systemically, we might recall that it was on this date in 1925 that Arthur Heineman opened the Milestone Mo-Tel in San Luis Obispo (on the road from San Francisco to Los Angeles)… the first “motel.” Heineman had abbreviated motor hotel to mo-tel after he could not fit the words “Milestone Motor Hotel” on his rooftop.
“I told my doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to stop going to those places.”*…
The “Hanoi Street Train”
As we depart the 2010s, a period that gave rise to influencers and forced us to grapple with our carbon footprints, and set sail for the ’20s, we at Fodor’s are asking ourselves a simple question: How can we be better travelers in the decade to come?
We’re hardly alone in asking it. We all desperately wish to see and experience this wonderful world, but how can we do so responsibly? Ultimately, we must each, individually, come to our own conclusions. And that’s how we view this year’s No List.
Every year, we use the No List to highlight issues—ethical, environmental, sometimes even political—that we’re thinking about before, during, and long after we travel. For this year’s No List, as we do every year, we highlight places and issues that give us pause. The underlying issues are ones that we’ll certainly be grappling with in the decade to come…
Fodor’s explains why we might NOT want to visit a baker’s dozen famous tourist destinations in 2020– their “No List”: “Thirteen places to reconsider in the year ahead.”
* Henny Youngman
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As we move off the beaten path, we might recall that this date, January 1, debuted in 46 BCE with the advent of the Julian calendar. It became the first day of the year in 1622; that honored had previously belonged to March 25.
January 1 is both the furthest away and closest day to December 31st. Because of time zones, the first person born in a year can be born before the last person of the previous year.
Happy New Year!
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