memes

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.

• 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;

• 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;

• 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;

• 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;

• ...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

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

The problem is usually wealth inequality. The residents have to compete with the tourists for resources, but most of what they could get in return gets gobbled up by late stage capitalism. Most people who have a direct relation to tourism to how it benefits them in their lives have no problem with it.

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.

That's because tourism heavy economies have a tendency to screw over low income locals to favor high income tourists.

People need to realize it's not the locals that decided to base their economy on tourism at some town hall meeting. Where I live the government moved all the industry to different parts of the country and allowed for huge real estate development that turned the area into tourism based economy. At the beginning it's just extra jobs and people are happy about it but at some point it starts displacing locals and people start complaining.

It's getting tiresome to constantly explain this shit...

Tourism is almost always an extractive activity, kinda like mining only it sells a place's natural beauty and/or culture built by previous generations rather than whatever is dug out of the ground, and like mining it suffers from it's own version of the Resource Curse:

• Most of the population isn't needed to extract that "resource" and there's no need for those who work in it to be highly educated or have much of a quality of life
• Most of the gains from Tourism end up in a small number number of hands and don't really trickle down
• Tourism has all manner of destructive side-effects, from actual natural environment destruction and overcrowding to massive realestate bubbles that push out the locals.
• It's kind of a silver bullet for politicians, especially for the crooked ones, since they don't really need to invest in the broader population and their welfare to get themselves lots of money from Tourism, be it from thankfull Tourism Industry companies or from the value of their own realestate investments going up thanks to the realestate prices going up as the Demand for space (and, in the era of AirBnB, the actual residential units) from Tourism adds up to the normal demand from people living there, pushing prices up like crazy.

Tourism can be a good thing for most people in the kind of place like a little village in a developing nation with mainly primary sector industries at a subsistence level, because it brings better jobs than subsistence farming or fishing and which reward some level of education (enough to read and write in English), plus it brings money from people from much richer countries, but it's a totally different thing when we're talking about established cities in nations which are supposedly developed because there it brings jobs which require lower educational qualifications than most people there have, because of the side effects of Tourism (such as the above mentioned realestate prices and overcrowding) which make it hard for the existing Industries already present there to profitably operate and finally because it isn't even a path towards becoming a richer nation since the kind of customers it has to attract are those from already rich nations which aren't crazily ahead in the income scale, so it has to remain cheap enough to attract them hence it's wealth production abilities is in the main capped because of having to stay below that of those nations - you're not going to build a modern and advanced powerhouse nation with an industry that sells sunshine and old buildings to foreigned from modern and advanced powerhouse nations whilst employing people with mid-level or lower qualifications: you can bring a developing nation up with it but you can't use it to push a developed nation all that much up from poor developed nation with Tourism.

People inside the Tourism Industry love it because they personally make money from it and Politicians love it because their "generous friends" make money from it, they themselves indirectly make money from it and they can be completelly total crap at managing a country and Tourism still keeps on generating money because it mainly depends on natural beauty and/or ancient buildings and people with low and mid levels of Education that don't even need to be locals so the fatcats in nations underinvesting in their people still make lots of money from Tourism.

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

Whoever made this meme doesn't live in a city where new houses are bought up to be turned into shitty airbnbs

I live in a tourist heavy place. My biggest issue is that the influx of tourists is seasonal. During the summer, the number of tourists brings the infrastructure to knees and shops, restaurants and cafés are uncomfortably full. During the off season, maintenance of the roads serms to be of low priority and a lot of the shops, restaurants and cafés reduce their opening time or even close, and the town center becomes a ghost town.

So no hate towards tourists, but the inconsistency of this place is very annoying.

And? Reasonably so. Tourists are annoying af

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!

Tourism can ruin a city

Tourists when they enter a place: Clearly the whole economy is based on Tourism :)

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.

The tourists love the town for how it was before they got there. We did too…

Yeah, we don't like them.

yeah, it's awesome to live and work in a town and have to rent a temporary place for 3 months in summer cuz your're priced out of your normal home, and it was rented in advance by tourist paying 4 times normal rent value

Europe is like that nowadays. Rents have skyrocketed only from Airbnb and the tourists. Why rent it to a local when a tourist will pay more? Not to mention it ruins the economy. If another covid happens, market will crash, like the one in the USA.

whose*

the locals don’t want you there, the transplant white business owners and their pocketed politicians do

I grew up, and live in a tourist destination. My highschool was trash. Tourists are a nuisance. We have a few big events in town yearly that bring an insane amount of people here and most locals just hide in their house for a week at a time. I would leave but it has the only weather I like. I make really good money(well over 100k) in a non tourist job and can't afford to buy here.

A city has tourism-based economy, because tourists go there. If they wouldn't go there the economy would be based on different stuff.

I used to live in a Northern Wisconsin town almost entirely comprised of tourism and snow birds for an economy from May to September. Most were people from Chicago and Milwaukee that moved "a little too fast" for someone who lived in the area, so they were easy to spot.

Once school started up, the place was an absolute ghost town. All of downtown completely shut down except one bar. The hotels either shuttered during the winter or operated a single floor of rooms. The population would drop by ~80%.

I loved living in The Great Northwoods of WI, as it's absolutely gorgeous up there half the year, but I don't miss standing at the bus stop when it's -40F wind chills or shovelling out my car to drive somewhere.

Stargazing was incredible in the winter, though.

Its funny how the blame is on tourists who have to pay exorbitant amounts but not the owners of the property. Its almost like the exploitation of people whether tourists or locals is just the divine nature of our world so it must be the fault of tourists (or immigrants in other places) and never the owning class

Tourists may benefit some local business owners (or chains) while having a negative impact on many others.

Take a small fishing or farming village for example, now it becomes popular with tourists. House prices shoot up to what Londoners can afford and as they only use it as a holiday home it becomes a ghost town in winter.

Whose

I'd be happy if they just stayed out of the bike lanes.

I vacationed in Venice last year and I had to wade my way through rivers of people, so I can understand the sentiment.