The Impacts of Increasing Tourism

Op/Ed

Mary Donné

The Impacts of Increasing Tourism

With its medieval walls, 13th-century cathedral, and cobbled streets, my hometown of York, England attracts a lot of tourists, estimated at around seven million each year. Traditionally, tourists have been very welcome, not least of all because they spend approximately £600m ($754m USD) annually in York alone. Presumably, this is a good thing because this money is put back into the local economy. But it doesn’t always work that way, which (among other issues) has led to a backlash directed towards tourists evident in both local and national media over the last few years.

Regarding tourism in England and other developed western countries, the arguments against mass tourism are generally twofold.

First, certain visitors arriving in historic cities for weekend breaks are stereotypically loud and badly behaved. They stay in cheaper hotels and spend their money in chain bars and clubs, many of which are not locally owned. In fact, this issue became so significant that a few years ago, the Irish police took matters into their own hands and began implementing a zero-tolerance attitude towards criminal or disruptive behavior of drunken groups of stag and hen (bachelor and bachelorette) parties that arrived in Dublin each weekend, courtesy of budget airline flights. The authorities in Amsterdam have taken a similar approach, and York is seeing the start of the same. Of course, implementing this sort of policing costs public money, and there is an argument that the main beneficiaries of this sort of tourism — the big hotel and hospitality chains — should be the ones financing the “clean up” operation required.

Second, older and wealthier groups who travel en masse clog up large swathes of tourist attractions. Anyone who has recently tried to get anywhere near the Mona Lisa or the Trevi Fountain will know firsthand how this can detract from the experience of locals and other visitors. In fairness, this group does usually spend their money locally, preferring independent guest houses and food establishments. But the sheer volume of these tourists brings disadvantages too; in a small medieval city like York (or just about any other old city in Europe), they take up a lot of room, particularly on public transport and in shops and cafes.

This increase in tourism has very real environmental impacts: in the past two years, flights between UK airports and China alone have increased threefold. Just think of all that air pollution!

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A typical hotel golf course or landscaped park in a tropical country uses as much water as 60,000 residents. Significant volumes of fertilizers and pesticides are used to keep these destinations looking “tourist friendly,” causing damage to the delicate aquatic ecosystems into which they drain. And it is estimated that approximately 50 tons of mountaineering rubbish has accumulated at Mount Everest Base Camp: used oxygen cylinders, food packaging, and camping debris, as well as feces and other biological waste. That doesn’t even take into account the erosion that thousands of hiking feet will cause or the safety concerns that can result from congestion in risky locales. In places known for their natural beauty, the constant wear and tear caused by planeloads of visitors descending each day leads to the destruction of the very thing they came to see.

Outside of the UK, on a global scale, tourism remains a billion-pound industry. In fact, for many countries, tourism is now the primary source of employment and foreign exchange. While the UK is less reliant on tourism as a primary source of income, tourism has nonetheless created a large number of jobs. Unfortunately, many jobs in the hospitality industry are seasonal, insecure, and poorly paid. They are also heavily reliant on non-nationals (who fill 40% of hospitality jobs, if the figures are correct), so the benefit to the long-term local economy is unclear.

Tourism also has serious implications for property values. In the UK, this has been an issue in places like Cornwall, where locals have been virtually priced out of the area by wealthy outsiders buying up holiday homes. As a result, cities are unable to recruit essential workers such as teachers and nurses, as they are unable to afford the increased cost of living.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Tourism has allowed places like Cambodia and Vietnam to recover relatively quickly from devastating wars and reinvent themselves into tourist destinations. It has raised awareness of the need for conservation of endangered species. Arguably, it has also helped preserve cultural and linguistic traditions that may have died out without interest from tourists; a great example of this is the proliferation of street signs in Irish Gaelic throughout the Republic of Ireland, installed mainly for the benefit of tourists.

The question we as travelers must now ask is how to balance the positive impact of tourism with the inevitable pull on global and local resources.

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