Venice, Overwhelmed by Tourists, Tries Tracking Them
Can cellphone data and surveillance cameras help restore the city’s old-world charm, or just destroy what magic remains?
VENICE — As the pandemic chased away visitors, some Venetians allowed themselves to dream of a different city — one that belonged as much to them as to the tourists who crowd them out of their stone piazzas, cobblestone alleyways and even their apartments.
In a quieted city, the chiming of its 100 bell towers, the lapping of canal waters and the Venetian dialect suddenly became the dominant soundtrack. The cruise ships that disgorged thousands of day-trippers and caused damaging waves in the sinking city were gone, and then banned.
But now, the city’s mayor is taking crowd control to a new level, pushing high-tech solutions that alarm even many of those who have long campaigned for a Venice for Venetians.
The city’s leaders are acquiring the cellphone data of unwitting tourists and using hundreds of surveillance cameras to monitor visitors and prevent crowding. Next summer, they plan to install long-debated gates at key entry points; visitors coming only for the day will have to book ahead and pay a fee to enter. If too many people want to come, some will be turned away.
The conservative and business-friendly mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, and his allies say their aim is to create a more livable city for beleaguered Venetians.
“Either we are pragmatic, or we live in the world of fairy tales,” said Paolo Bettio, who heads Venis, the company that handles the city’s information technology.
But many residents see the plans to monitor, and control, people’s movements as dystopian — and either a publicity stunt or a way to attract wealthier tourists, who might be discouraged from coming by the crowds.
“It’s like declaring once and for all that Venice is not a city, but a museum,” said Giorgio Santuzzo, 58, who works as a photographer and artist in the city.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Tourism / Travel
Tourism / Travel
Last edited by kmaherali on Tue Aug 27, 2024 12:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Prince Amyn and Portuguese President inaugurate NOVA University’s Westmont Hospitality Hall
President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was joined by Prince Amyn earlier today for the inauguration of the Westmont Hospitality Hall at NOVA University in Lisbon, Portugal.
The newly opened space will serve as a home for the Westmont Institute of Tourism and Hospitality at NOVA University’s School of Business and Economics (SBE), which is celebrating the third anniversary of the opening of its campus in Carcavelos. The school’s students and faculty are known as an open and collaborative community, focused on the positive impact of their work and research in the world.
The Westmont Institute is the latest development in the partnership between NOVA SBE and Westmont Hospitality Group, a joint initiative aiming to develop and promote education in hospitality, tourism, and service management. Westmont Hospitality Group, founded by the Mangalji family, is a global brand that owns and manages more than 400 hotels all over the world. Its mission includes a desire to use hospitality, travel, and tourism as a way of promoting a more sustainable world.
In his remarks at the event, Prince Amyn congratulated NOVA SBE and shared his hopes for the future of the project. “The Westmont Institute of Tourism and Hospitality will have the mission to inspire and prepare leaders in the tourism and hospitality industries,” he said, “providing not only excellence in service, but sound business knowledge to promote and support sustainable tourism ventures both in Portugal and, I hope, in Africa and developing countries.”
The entire hospitality industry has suffered multiple adverse effects due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the new Institute inaugurated today hopes to harness the potential of tourism to drive innovative responses to complex challenges such as this.
“I think that tourism, by opening up to travellers’ new lifestyles, new cultures, new traditions, acts as a strong educational experience and breeds understanding, and appreciation of shared values — of how much we share, and not how great are our differences, and that ultimately it promotes a pluralistic approach,” continued Prince Amyn, who has decades of experience in the tourism and hospitality industry globally.
Majid Mangalji, CEO of Westmont Group spoke of the inspiration to partner with NOVA as an institute and Portugal as a country. “Right from the start, we felt very comfortable that we could meet our objectives to create something special here at NOVA as we had many areas of alignment of interest,” he said.
“Portugal is a beautiful country, with wonderful people, nice weather, and very good food. And we believe it’s a country that can further expand the tourism and hospitality industry,” Mr Mangalji added. “We hope the establishment of the Westmont Institute will benefit this very important industry in a meaningful way.”
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) has worked for many years to promote tourism as a key strategy for long-term, sustainable economic development. The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), AKDN’s economic development agency, manages hotels, resorts, and lodges under the Serena brand in Africa and Asia. Serena’s properties provide economic stimulus through employment, training, and local sourcing, and support social activities that improve the quality of life and environmental sustainability of local communities.
Portugal’s NOVA University and AKDN have worked together since 2016, partnering on the support for research in important areas such as climate change, sustainable development, media and communications, digital health, and the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In July 2017, NOVA University bestowed an Honorary Doctorate upon Mawlana Hazar Imam for his longstanding commitment to improving the quality of life for some of the world’s vulnerable populations, as well as for his efforts to promote respect for tolerance and pluralism. This event at NOVA was the first official public event of Hazar Imam’s Diamond Jubilee year.
A number of Ismaili students have attended NOVA University since its founding in 1973, going on to earn undergraduate and master’s degrees in various subjects including Business and Economics, Science and Technology, Health, Social Sciences and the Humanities, and Law.
Hannah Sabjaly, a student at NOVA SBE, looks forward to the addition of the new Westmont Institute. “I hope to make use of the Westmont Hospitality Hall and the Institute's facilities on campus to help me in my studies,” she said. “And I feel proud of this partnership with my university to support higher education in Portugal, while making a contribution to society here in this country and beyond.”
https://the.ismaili/global/news/imamat- ... s-westmont
President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was joined by Prince Amyn earlier today for the inauguration of the Westmont Hospitality Hall at NOVA University in Lisbon, Portugal.
The newly opened space will serve as a home for the Westmont Institute of Tourism and Hospitality at NOVA University’s School of Business and Economics (SBE), which is celebrating the third anniversary of the opening of its campus in Carcavelos. The school’s students and faculty are known as an open and collaborative community, focused on the positive impact of their work and research in the world.
The Westmont Institute is the latest development in the partnership between NOVA SBE and Westmont Hospitality Group, a joint initiative aiming to develop and promote education in hospitality, tourism, and service management. Westmont Hospitality Group, founded by the Mangalji family, is a global brand that owns and manages more than 400 hotels all over the world. Its mission includes a desire to use hospitality, travel, and tourism as a way of promoting a more sustainable world.
In his remarks at the event, Prince Amyn congratulated NOVA SBE and shared his hopes for the future of the project. “The Westmont Institute of Tourism and Hospitality will have the mission to inspire and prepare leaders in the tourism and hospitality industries,” he said, “providing not only excellence in service, but sound business knowledge to promote and support sustainable tourism ventures both in Portugal and, I hope, in Africa and developing countries.”
The entire hospitality industry has suffered multiple adverse effects due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the new Institute inaugurated today hopes to harness the potential of tourism to drive innovative responses to complex challenges such as this.
“I think that tourism, by opening up to travellers’ new lifestyles, new cultures, new traditions, acts as a strong educational experience and breeds understanding, and appreciation of shared values — of how much we share, and not how great are our differences, and that ultimately it promotes a pluralistic approach,” continued Prince Amyn, who has decades of experience in the tourism and hospitality industry globally.
Majid Mangalji, CEO of Westmont Group spoke of the inspiration to partner with NOVA as an institute and Portugal as a country. “Right from the start, we felt very comfortable that we could meet our objectives to create something special here at NOVA as we had many areas of alignment of interest,” he said.
“Portugal is a beautiful country, with wonderful people, nice weather, and very good food. And we believe it’s a country that can further expand the tourism and hospitality industry,” Mr Mangalji added. “We hope the establishment of the Westmont Institute will benefit this very important industry in a meaningful way.”
The Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) has worked for many years to promote tourism as a key strategy for long-term, sustainable economic development. The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED), AKDN’s economic development agency, manages hotels, resorts, and lodges under the Serena brand in Africa and Asia. Serena’s properties provide economic stimulus through employment, training, and local sourcing, and support social activities that improve the quality of life and environmental sustainability of local communities.
Portugal’s NOVA University and AKDN have worked together since 2016, partnering on the support for research in important areas such as climate change, sustainable development, media and communications, digital health, and the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In July 2017, NOVA University bestowed an Honorary Doctorate upon Mawlana Hazar Imam for his longstanding commitment to improving the quality of life for some of the world’s vulnerable populations, as well as for his efforts to promote respect for tolerance and pluralism. This event at NOVA was the first official public event of Hazar Imam’s Diamond Jubilee year.
A number of Ismaili students have attended NOVA University since its founding in 1973, going on to earn undergraduate and master’s degrees in various subjects including Business and Economics, Science and Technology, Health, Social Sciences and the Humanities, and Law.
Hannah Sabjaly, a student at NOVA SBE, looks forward to the addition of the new Westmont Institute. “I hope to make use of the Westmont Hospitality Hall and the Institute's facilities on campus to help me in my studies,” she said. “And I feel proud of this partnership with my university to support higher education in Portugal, while making a contribution to society here in this country and beyond.”
https://the.ismaili/global/news/imamat- ... s-westmont
Prince Amyn and Portuguese President inaugurate NOVA's Westmont Hospitality Hall in Lisbon
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRJTZKrsOds
The Westmont Institute of Tourism and Hospitality is the latest development in the partnership between NOVA University's School of Business and Economics and Westmont Hospitality Group, a joint initiative aiming to develop and promote education in hospitality, tourism, and service management.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRJTZKrsOds
The Westmont Institute of Tourism and Hospitality is the latest development in the partnership between NOVA University's School of Business and Economics and Westmont Hospitality Group, a joint initiative aiming to develop and promote education in hospitality, tourism, and service management.
Rick Steves on the Return of Travel and Why It Matters
The travel writer and TV personality is back in Europe, planning itineraries for next year. Travel, he says, can help us understand the world. Here’s how he recommends doing it.
On a recent morning, Rick Steves was wandering around the ancient Tuscan town of Volterra with a new crop of tour guides. His company’s trips to Europe are set to resume in February after a nearly two-year pandemic hiatus, and the guides were midway through a nine-day trip around Italy to learn “what makes a Rick Steves tour a Rick Steves tour.” One of the stops on their itinerary was Volterra, a medieval hilltop town whose stone walls are 800 years old. Mr. Steves — who has been to Tuscany many times for his popular public broadcasting show and YouTube channel — was relishing being back.
“We’re surrounded by the wonders of what we love so much, and it just makes our endorphins do little flip-flops,” he said during a phone interview.
That unabashed enthusiasm has fueled Mr. Steves’s empire of guidebooks, radio shows and TV programs, as well as tours that have taken hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas since he started running them in 1980.
Along the way, Mr. Steves has built a reputation for convincing hesitant Americans to make their first trip abroad — and that first trip is often to Europe, which Mr. Steves has called “the wading pool for world exploration.” But he also speaks passionately about the value of travel to places like El Salvador and Iran, and he’s open about how his time in other countries has shaped his views on issues like world hunger and the legalization of marijuana.
But Europe remains Mr. Steves’s bread and butter, and he’s back on the Continent now — both to prepare for the return of his tours and to work on a six-hour series on European art and architecture that he hopes will be broadcast on U.S. public television next fall. As he wandered through Volterra, we talked about why he doesn’t count the number of countries he’s visited, why his tour company will require vaccinations and why a world without travel would be a more dangerous place.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Conversation at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/trav ... 778d3e6de3
*********
Can California Tourism Survive Climate Change?
The most popular state for tourism in the U.S. endured record wildfires, drought and flooding just this year. “The rate of change has been so dramatic,” says one local scientist. “If I was the California tourism industry, I’d be really worried.”
“Want to go camping in October?” a friend texted in August. Somewhere pretty, she suggested. Big Sur? “Yes, but …” I replied, “how about May?”
Fall used to be my favorite season. I’d traipse up and down California, from coastal cabins to backcountry lakes to wine-country weddings. But in the last few years, fall has become something I rationally, and irrationally, fear. It’s too unpredictable. Too hot. Too dry. Too smoky. Too anxiety-provoking.
I’m not the only one worrying. As climate change continues to ravage our planet, those who like to explore it — as well as the travel industry that supports them — are inevitably affected, too. Especially precarious and popular California. And yet no one seems prepared.
In 2019, California was the No. 1 state in visitor spending in the United States, according to Visit California, the state’s tourism agency, with tourists bringing in $145 billion to the state economy. It was an unprecedented amount. Travelers splurged at Napa wineries and San Francisco restaurants, San Diego surf-side hotels and Sierra slope-side resorts, Airstreams in Yosemite and yurts in Joshua Tree, stargazing in Los Angeles, whale-watching in the Channel Islands — and don’t forget Disneyland! California tourism saw 10 consecutive years of record growth — until the pandemic. In 2020, revenue plummeted 55 percent.
Now, as travel emerges, pent-up demand has many small towns from Ojai to Oakhurst rocking. This mixed-up moment may not be a fair gauge of what’s to come. What is to come? According to Visit California, a full recovery and then some — $157 billion tourist dollars by 2025.
And yet: Wildfires consumed 4.2 million acres of California in 2020, and roughly 2 million so far this year alone. Severe drought forced quaint Mendocino inns to beg guests to conserve water. South Lake Tahoe was evacuated. In Death Valley, two hikers died in August from extreme heat, as did a family of three hiking southwest of Yosemite. This week’s welcomed rain came hard and fast, causing flooding, power outages and rockslides. All of this will continue in California’s future.
Though little research has been done on climate change’s long-term effects on tourism in the United States, much less in California, many scientists see the poorly managed forests through the trees.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/trav ... 778d3e6de3
The travel writer and TV personality is back in Europe, planning itineraries for next year. Travel, he says, can help us understand the world. Here’s how he recommends doing it.
On a recent morning, Rick Steves was wandering around the ancient Tuscan town of Volterra with a new crop of tour guides. His company’s trips to Europe are set to resume in February after a nearly two-year pandemic hiatus, and the guides were midway through a nine-day trip around Italy to learn “what makes a Rick Steves tour a Rick Steves tour.” One of the stops on their itinerary was Volterra, a medieval hilltop town whose stone walls are 800 years old. Mr. Steves — who has been to Tuscany many times for his popular public broadcasting show and YouTube channel — was relishing being back.
“We’re surrounded by the wonders of what we love so much, and it just makes our endorphins do little flip-flops,” he said during a phone interview.
That unabashed enthusiasm has fueled Mr. Steves’s empire of guidebooks, radio shows and TV programs, as well as tours that have taken hundreds of thousands of Americans overseas since he started running them in 1980.
Along the way, Mr. Steves has built a reputation for convincing hesitant Americans to make their first trip abroad — and that first trip is often to Europe, which Mr. Steves has called “the wading pool for world exploration.” But he also speaks passionately about the value of travel to places like El Salvador and Iran, and he’s open about how his time in other countries has shaped his views on issues like world hunger and the legalization of marijuana.
But Europe remains Mr. Steves’s bread and butter, and he’s back on the Continent now — both to prepare for the return of his tours and to work on a six-hour series on European art and architecture that he hopes will be broadcast on U.S. public television next fall. As he wandered through Volterra, we talked about why he doesn’t count the number of countries he’s visited, why his tour company will require vaccinations and why a world without travel would be a more dangerous place.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Conversation at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/trav ... 778d3e6de3
*********
Can California Tourism Survive Climate Change?
The most popular state for tourism in the U.S. endured record wildfires, drought and flooding just this year. “The rate of change has been so dramatic,” says one local scientist. “If I was the California tourism industry, I’d be really worried.”
“Want to go camping in October?” a friend texted in August. Somewhere pretty, she suggested. Big Sur? “Yes, but …” I replied, “how about May?”
Fall used to be my favorite season. I’d traipse up and down California, from coastal cabins to backcountry lakes to wine-country weddings. But in the last few years, fall has become something I rationally, and irrationally, fear. It’s too unpredictable. Too hot. Too dry. Too smoky. Too anxiety-provoking.
I’m not the only one worrying. As climate change continues to ravage our planet, those who like to explore it — as well as the travel industry that supports them — are inevitably affected, too. Especially precarious and popular California. And yet no one seems prepared.
In 2019, California was the No. 1 state in visitor spending in the United States, according to Visit California, the state’s tourism agency, with tourists bringing in $145 billion to the state economy. It was an unprecedented amount. Travelers splurged at Napa wineries and San Francisco restaurants, San Diego surf-side hotels and Sierra slope-side resorts, Airstreams in Yosemite and yurts in Joshua Tree, stargazing in Los Angeles, whale-watching in the Channel Islands — and don’t forget Disneyland! California tourism saw 10 consecutive years of record growth — until the pandemic. In 2020, revenue plummeted 55 percent.
Now, as travel emerges, pent-up demand has many small towns from Ojai to Oakhurst rocking. This mixed-up moment may not be a fair gauge of what’s to come. What is to come? According to Visit California, a full recovery and then some — $157 billion tourist dollars by 2025.
And yet: Wildfires consumed 4.2 million acres of California in 2020, and roughly 2 million so far this year alone. Severe drought forced quaint Mendocino inns to beg guests to conserve water. South Lake Tahoe was evacuated. In Death Valley, two hikers died in August from extreme heat, as did a family of three hiking southwest of Yosemite. This week’s welcomed rain came hard and fast, causing flooding, power outages and rockslides. All of this will continue in California’s future.
Though little research has been done on climate change’s long-term effects on tourism in the United States, much less in California, many scientists see the poorly managed forests through the trees.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/trav ... 778d3e6de3
The World Through a Lens
With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we’re turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places.
Link to places:
https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-worl ... pe=Article
With travel restrictions in place worldwide, we’re turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planet’s most beautiful and intriguing places.
Link to places:
https://www.nytimes.com/column/the-worl ... pe=Article
THE BIG QUESTION:
WHERE WILL YOU TRAVEL NEXT?
Friday, November 19, 2021
In today’s newsletter, our Best of the World 2022 picks: diving in Palau; running wild in Australia; a Ruhr adventure in Germany … and hiking Colorado’s ‘iron way.’
By George Stone, TRAVEL Executive Editor
What do a wildlife corridor in Belize, a First Nations trail in Canada, a national park in Mozambique, a cultural capital in Italy, and Spain’s Alhambra have in common? If you guessed they’re all on our Best of the World 2022 list, start packing your bags!
Although the pandemic changed when, where, and how we move about, the world is opening up again. Our global editors picked the planet’s 25 most exciting destinations for the year ahead. Five categories—Nature, Adventure, Sustainability, Culture and History, and Family—frame amazing experiences for everyone.
There’s a lot that I love about this list. A number of destinations are within reach for North Americans: You can count the stars in northern Minnesota (pictured above), embrace the allure of Atlanta, and learn about history and wildlife in Maryland. Other epic adventures are farther afield, including a wild safari in Namibia and a tea immersion in China.
This year’s list celebrates 10 UNESCO World Heritage designations—from Spain to Bonnaire, Japan, Russia, Ecuador, and beyond—in honor of the 50th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention in 2022.
Above all, our Best of the World list celebrates inspiring places, welcoming communities, and curious travelers who are eager to explore again. Here are six awesome adventures. Read our story for more reasons to unleash your wanderlust.
More...
https://email.nationalgeographic.com/H/ ... fad5f/HTML
WHERE WILL YOU TRAVEL NEXT?
Friday, November 19, 2021
In today’s newsletter, our Best of the World 2022 picks: diving in Palau; running wild in Australia; a Ruhr adventure in Germany … and hiking Colorado’s ‘iron way.’
By George Stone, TRAVEL Executive Editor
What do a wildlife corridor in Belize, a First Nations trail in Canada, a national park in Mozambique, a cultural capital in Italy, and Spain’s Alhambra have in common? If you guessed they’re all on our Best of the World 2022 list, start packing your bags!
Although the pandemic changed when, where, and how we move about, the world is opening up again. Our global editors picked the planet’s 25 most exciting destinations for the year ahead. Five categories—Nature, Adventure, Sustainability, Culture and History, and Family—frame amazing experiences for everyone.
There’s a lot that I love about this list. A number of destinations are within reach for North Americans: You can count the stars in northern Minnesota (pictured above), embrace the allure of Atlanta, and learn about history and wildlife in Maryland. Other epic adventures are farther afield, including a wild safari in Namibia and a tea immersion in China.
This year’s list celebrates 10 UNESCO World Heritage designations—from Spain to Bonnaire, Japan, Russia, Ecuador, and beyond—in honor of the 50th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention in 2022.
Above all, our Best of the World list celebrates inspiring places, welcoming communities, and curious travelers who are eager to explore again. Here are six awesome adventures. Read our story for more reasons to unleash your wanderlust.
More...
https://email.nationalgeographic.com/H/ ... fad5f/HTML
Why Space Tourists Won’t Find the Awe They Seek
Why would a tourist want to take a trip to space?
For the wealthy thrill seekers able to pay upwards of $450,000 for a seat with commercial space projects such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, the answer is likely to involve the pursuit of awe or wonder. Philosophers call the type of sensory and aesthetic stimuli that provoke it the sublime.
On its face, the kind of short flight to the edge of space that looks set to be the predominant mode of space tourism, at least in the short term, seems the very definition of what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called a “peak experience.” The kinetic thrill of rocketing to an altitude of over 50 miles, combined with the astonishing perspective it affords of our planet, invites us to believe that few adventures could be more profound.
But picture the millionaire awe chaser when the big day comes around, and the capsule he has booked a seat on hurtles skyward into the deep blue of the upper mesosphere. The whole escapade is being recorded by HD cameras. A dulcet computer-generated voice provides the commentary. The chair is uncannily comfortable. The ride, controlled by cutting-edge A.I. technology, is disconcertingly smooth. Champagne is waiting for the passengers on the landing pad.
Under such contrived conditions, awe will always be a chimera. That which we explicitly pursue will always, to a greater or lesser extent, remain out of reach.
The appeal of the sublime has been a subject of conjecture and interpretation for as long as humans have pondered the stars. Existing at the intersection of joy and fear, the feelings it can elicit are best understood as a paradox: the sensation of feeling enriched by way of feeling diminished. A person might experience it while standing on a mountainside when a storm rolls in or peering down the gullet of a thunderous waterfall. The transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson memorably called it his “transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all.” The writer Shannon Stirone described it as “the simultaneous shrinking and expanding of our hearts.”
We covet the experience of sublimity because it hints at mysteries and forces beyond the realm of ordinary human understanding. And it is good for us. Neuroscientists discovered that regular doses of awe can boost critical thinking, physical health and emotional well-being. Studies have also shown that it makes us kinder and more empathetic.
But chasing it misses an essential element of awe, which is that so much of its potency depends on factors that commercial spaceflight seems custom designed to negate.
In many years of working as a travel writer — which I’ve often thought of as working the awe beat — I’ve come to understand that awe cannot be easily choreographed.
Some of the times I have experienced awe: An hour of avalanches rumbling down the south face of Annapurna under a full moon. Fork lightning strobing across the empty deck of a cargo ship on Lake Victoria. An eagle hovering 20 feet above my shoulder in the Chilean tundra.
These were the sort of transcendental moments we might hope to enjoy when we book a trip for adventure. But what they all had in common was some unanticipated ingredient. They relied on serendipity, whether in the form of weather conditions or animal idiosyncrasy. The high-flown emotions they triggered — the sorts that manifest in goose bumps, sometimes even tears — came unbidden.
Some occasions, by contrast, when I didn’t feel awe: gorilla tracking in Uganda, seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre amid a jostling crowd of people taking photos of it with their mobile phones, every safari I’ve ever been on. These experiences were certainly noteworthy. But they were far from sublime.
Space tourism belongs to this subset of ostensibly awesome experiences that often feel anticlimactic precisely because they come with a promise of awe factored in.
For one thing, space tourists probably embark with a pretty good simulation of the experience already imprinted on their minds. Westernized and space curious, clients of the new space tourism outfits will have watched the modern canon of astronautical drama, including “Gravity” and “Interstellar.” In preflight training, they will have been drilled and prepped for every moment they will spend in suborbit. The sense of surprise that is arguably the most vital precondition for experiencing awe will have been watered down by the months of forethought and demystification.
Often, the problem is simply one of context. Do you have any preconceived expectations about the experience? How exposed are you to the thing you’re observing? Is the activity ethically fraught? These potential distractions might seem incidental. But they all have the potential to obstruct our ability to enjoy an authentic communion with the sublime.
It’s the difference between joining a 20-strong organized tour to see the Northern Lights and, say, camping alone in some Scandinavian wilderness and being roused from your tent by the aurora’s spectral green ripples illuminating the canvas. The first will be nice, even memorable. You will take pretty photos and get lots of hearts on Instagram. The second could make you feel that you have been touched by grace.
The scientific study of awe is still in its infancy, but this awe junkie’s intuition is supported by a growing body of research. “One of the most striking discoveries in our 15 years of studying awe is how often it involves finding the extraordinary in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity to a homeless person in the streets, looking at a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the author of a book on awe set for release next year.
“The best way to access this everyday awe is by allowing yourself to wander, to avoid following a schedule each moment of the day. We didn’t evolve to feel awe about hurtling through space.”
Oh, most of the space tourists will say it was awesome, as the billionaire and space tourism entrepreneur Richard Branson did: “How you feel when you look down on Earth is impossible to put into words. It’s just indescribable beauty.” But how could they say it was anything less than the best moment of their life, having shelled out hundreds of thousands for the experience? In the age of performative experientialism, in which those with economic means can be seduced by gold-wrapped steaks not because they taste good but merely because they are exclusive, this conflation of expectations with lived sensation — the mistaking of bragging rights for joy — is nothing new.
Consider, again, our millionaire astronaut in his cushioned revolving chair, as the indigo sky fades to black. The thrusters shut off, their roar giving way to the profound silence and weightlessness of the cosmic void.
While he is up there, gazing down at this godlike overview of metastasizing deserts and receding ice, the best he might hope for is a moment of clarity.
“When you get up above it,” Jeff Bezos said of the atmosphere after his inaugural flight on New Shepard in July, “it’s this tiny little fragile thing, and as we move about the planet, we’re damaging it.”
Perhaps he and other amateur astronauts are fated to recognize, in that quiet knot of bathos, that to be the Midas of an ailing planet is the ultimate spiritual impoverishment. That an act of hubris can never truly buy humility, let alone wonderment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Why would a tourist want to take a trip to space?
For the wealthy thrill seekers able to pay upwards of $450,000 for a seat with commercial space projects such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, the answer is likely to involve the pursuit of awe or wonder. Philosophers call the type of sensory and aesthetic stimuli that provoke it the sublime.
On its face, the kind of short flight to the edge of space that looks set to be the predominant mode of space tourism, at least in the short term, seems the very definition of what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called a “peak experience.” The kinetic thrill of rocketing to an altitude of over 50 miles, combined with the astonishing perspective it affords of our planet, invites us to believe that few adventures could be more profound.
But picture the millionaire awe chaser when the big day comes around, and the capsule he has booked a seat on hurtles skyward into the deep blue of the upper mesosphere. The whole escapade is being recorded by HD cameras. A dulcet computer-generated voice provides the commentary. The chair is uncannily comfortable. The ride, controlled by cutting-edge A.I. technology, is disconcertingly smooth. Champagne is waiting for the passengers on the landing pad.
Under such contrived conditions, awe will always be a chimera. That which we explicitly pursue will always, to a greater or lesser extent, remain out of reach.
The appeal of the sublime has been a subject of conjecture and interpretation for as long as humans have pondered the stars. Existing at the intersection of joy and fear, the feelings it can elicit are best understood as a paradox: the sensation of feeling enriched by way of feeling diminished. A person might experience it while standing on a mountainside when a storm rolls in or peering down the gullet of a thunderous waterfall. The transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson memorably called it his “transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all.” The writer Shannon Stirone described it as “the simultaneous shrinking and expanding of our hearts.”
We covet the experience of sublimity because it hints at mysteries and forces beyond the realm of ordinary human understanding. And it is good for us. Neuroscientists discovered that regular doses of awe can boost critical thinking, physical health and emotional well-being. Studies have also shown that it makes us kinder and more empathetic.
But chasing it misses an essential element of awe, which is that so much of its potency depends on factors that commercial spaceflight seems custom designed to negate.
In many years of working as a travel writer — which I’ve often thought of as working the awe beat — I’ve come to understand that awe cannot be easily choreographed.
Some of the times I have experienced awe: An hour of avalanches rumbling down the south face of Annapurna under a full moon. Fork lightning strobing across the empty deck of a cargo ship on Lake Victoria. An eagle hovering 20 feet above my shoulder in the Chilean tundra.
These were the sort of transcendental moments we might hope to enjoy when we book a trip for adventure. But what they all had in common was some unanticipated ingredient. They relied on serendipity, whether in the form of weather conditions or animal idiosyncrasy. The high-flown emotions they triggered — the sorts that manifest in goose bumps, sometimes even tears — came unbidden.
Some occasions, by contrast, when I didn’t feel awe: gorilla tracking in Uganda, seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre amid a jostling crowd of people taking photos of it with their mobile phones, every safari I’ve ever been on. These experiences were certainly noteworthy. But they were far from sublime.
Space tourism belongs to this subset of ostensibly awesome experiences that often feel anticlimactic precisely because they come with a promise of awe factored in.
For one thing, space tourists probably embark with a pretty good simulation of the experience already imprinted on their minds. Westernized and space curious, clients of the new space tourism outfits will have watched the modern canon of astronautical drama, including “Gravity” and “Interstellar.” In preflight training, they will have been drilled and prepped for every moment they will spend in suborbit. The sense of surprise that is arguably the most vital precondition for experiencing awe will have been watered down by the months of forethought and demystification.
Often, the problem is simply one of context. Do you have any preconceived expectations about the experience? How exposed are you to the thing you’re observing? Is the activity ethically fraught? These potential distractions might seem incidental. But they all have the potential to obstruct our ability to enjoy an authentic communion with the sublime.
It’s the difference between joining a 20-strong organized tour to see the Northern Lights and, say, camping alone in some Scandinavian wilderness and being roused from your tent by the aurora’s spectral green ripples illuminating the canvas. The first will be nice, even memorable. You will take pretty photos and get lots of hearts on Instagram. The second could make you feel that you have been touched by grace.
The scientific study of awe is still in its infancy, but this awe junkie’s intuition is supported by a growing body of research. “One of the most striking discoveries in our 15 years of studying awe is how often it involves finding the extraordinary in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity to a homeless person in the streets, looking at a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the author of a book on awe set for release next year.
“The best way to access this everyday awe is by allowing yourself to wander, to avoid following a schedule each moment of the day. We didn’t evolve to feel awe about hurtling through space.”
Oh, most of the space tourists will say it was awesome, as the billionaire and space tourism entrepreneur Richard Branson did: “How you feel when you look down on Earth is impossible to put into words. It’s just indescribable beauty.” But how could they say it was anything less than the best moment of their life, having shelled out hundreds of thousands for the experience? In the age of performative experientialism, in which those with economic means can be seduced by gold-wrapped steaks not because they taste good but merely because they are exclusive, this conflation of expectations with lived sensation — the mistaking of bragging rights for joy — is nothing new.
Consider, again, our millionaire astronaut in his cushioned revolving chair, as the indigo sky fades to black. The thrusters shut off, their roar giving way to the profound silence and weightlessness of the cosmic void.
While he is up there, gazing down at this godlike overview of metastasizing deserts and receding ice, the best he might hope for is a moment of clarity.
“When you get up above it,” Jeff Bezos said of the atmosphere after his inaugural flight on New Shepard in July, “it’s this tiny little fragile thing, and as we move about the planet, we’re damaging it.”
Perhaps he and other amateur astronauts are fated to recognize, in that quiet knot of bathos, that to be the Midas of an ailing planet is the ultimate spiritual impoverishment. That an act of hubris can never truly buy humility, let alone wonderment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Vegan Travel: It’s Not Fringe Anymore
From Mexico to Greece, plant-centric hotels, restaurants and tours are proliferating.
When she went vegan about four years ago, Colleen Corbett, a bartender based in Tampa, Fla., thought she might starve or be forced to eat meat when traveling abroad. Instead, it was just the beginning of her explorations of the burgeoning vegan destinations that have flourished around the world.
“It’s changed how I make my bucket list,” she said in an interview between trips to Peru in December and Dublin in March. “It used to be just scenic stuff. Now, I find myself adding cities I wouldn’t have had an interest in before, but have booming vegan scenes. I just added Warsaw.”
While vegans and vegetarians are minorities in the United States, a growing number of people are more interested in reducing their meat consumption, often for environmental reasons, as livestock operations significantly produce climate-disruptive methane gas.
The travel industry is countering with plant-centric hotels, restaurants, festivals and tours as veganism becomes increasingly associated with sustainable travel, and not just during what some people are calling Veganuary, an annual January campaign to highlight the plant-based diet in the month traditionally associated with good intentions.
“Collectively, we’re far more aware of the planetary impacts of food than we were even five years ago,” said Justin Francis, the co-founder and chief executive of Responsible Travel, a sustainability-focused tour operator, which has seen demand for its vegan trips quadruple in the past decade. “As more people switch to planet-friendly diets, travel is responding to that.”
Favoring plants
Vegan diets consist exclusively of plant-based foods, excluding meat as well as animal-derived foods such as eggs, dairy products and honey.
It’s hard to say how many vegans exist in the United States. A 2019 survey by Ipsos Retail Performance found that 9.7 million Americans were vegan compared to about 300,000 15 years before. However, a 2018 Gallup poll found the 5 percent of Americans who said they were vegetarian and the 3 percent who said they were vegan were little changed from 2012.
Still, many are eating greener. In a 2019 Nielsen survey, 62 percent of Americans said they were willing to reduce meat consumption based on environmental concerns. Many have satisfied their carnivorous cravings with fake meats by brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. The nonprofit Good Food Institute, which promotes alternative proteins, said 2020 was a record year for investment in alternatives at $3.1 billion, more than three times the $1 billion invested in 2019.
“Never before has the demand for plant-based fine dining been as popular,” said Joan Roca, the founder and chief executive of Essentialist, a members-only travel-planning service company, referencing Eleven Madison Park, the lauded New York City restaurant that went vegan last year. She expects “environmentally conscious dining” to grow in 2022.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/trav ... 778d3e6de3
From Mexico to Greece, plant-centric hotels, restaurants and tours are proliferating.
When she went vegan about four years ago, Colleen Corbett, a bartender based in Tampa, Fla., thought she might starve or be forced to eat meat when traveling abroad. Instead, it was just the beginning of her explorations of the burgeoning vegan destinations that have flourished around the world.
“It’s changed how I make my bucket list,” she said in an interview between trips to Peru in December and Dublin in March. “It used to be just scenic stuff. Now, I find myself adding cities I wouldn’t have had an interest in before, but have booming vegan scenes. I just added Warsaw.”
While vegans and vegetarians are minorities in the United States, a growing number of people are more interested in reducing their meat consumption, often for environmental reasons, as livestock operations significantly produce climate-disruptive methane gas.
The travel industry is countering with plant-centric hotels, restaurants, festivals and tours as veganism becomes increasingly associated with sustainable travel, and not just during what some people are calling Veganuary, an annual January campaign to highlight the plant-based diet in the month traditionally associated with good intentions.
“Collectively, we’re far more aware of the planetary impacts of food than we were even five years ago,” said Justin Francis, the co-founder and chief executive of Responsible Travel, a sustainability-focused tour operator, which has seen demand for its vegan trips quadruple in the past decade. “As more people switch to planet-friendly diets, travel is responding to that.”
Favoring plants
Vegan diets consist exclusively of plant-based foods, excluding meat as well as animal-derived foods such as eggs, dairy products and honey.
It’s hard to say how many vegans exist in the United States. A 2019 survey by Ipsos Retail Performance found that 9.7 million Americans were vegan compared to about 300,000 15 years before. However, a 2018 Gallup poll found the 5 percent of Americans who said they were vegetarian and the 3 percent who said they were vegan were little changed from 2012.
Still, many are eating greener. In a 2019 Nielsen survey, 62 percent of Americans said they were willing to reduce meat consumption based on environmental concerns. Many have satisfied their carnivorous cravings with fake meats by brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. The nonprofit Good Food Institute, which promotes alternative proteins, said 2020 was a record year for investment in alternatives at $3.1 billion, more than three times the $1 billion invested in 2019.
“Never before has the demand for plant-based fine dining been as popular,” said Joan Roca, the founder and chief executive of Essentialist, a members-only travel-planning service company, referencing Eleven Madison Park, the lauded New York City restaurant that went vegan last year. She expects “environmentally conscious dining” to grow in 2022.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/trav ... 778d3e6de3
East Africa's Biggest Resort"
Why Zanzibar is Building a $1.6 BN Blue Amber Resort "East Africa's Biggest Resort"
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcYDEL6ATzU
Located in Matemwe on the North-Eastern coast of Zanzibar in Tanzania, Blue Amber is Africa’s leading leisure destination and Zanzibar’s premier island resort. Appointed across 410 hectares (1013 acres) of tropical landscape with 4 kilometers of prime Indian Ocean coastline,
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcYDEL6ATzU
Located in Matemwe on the North-Eastern coast of Zanzibar in Tanzania, Blue Amber is Africa’s leading leisure destination and Zanzibar’s premier island resort. Appointed across 410 hectares (1013 acres) of tropical landscape with 4 kilometers of prime Indian Ocean coastline,
Tanzania Installs Internet On Mount Kilimanjaro For Insta-Ascents
State-owned Tanzania Telecommunications Corporation set up the broadband network on Tuesday at an altitude of 3,720 metres (12,200 feet), with Information Minister Nape Nnauye calling the event historic.
Tanzania has installed high-speed internet services on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, allowing anyone with a smartphone to tweet, Instagram or WhatsApp their ascent up Africa's highest mountain.
State-owned Tanzania Telecommunications Corporation set up the broadband network on Tuesday at an altitude of 3,720 metres (12,200 feet), with Information Minister Nape Nnauye calling the event historic.
"Previously, it was a bit dangerous for visitors and porters who had to operate without internet," Nnauye said at the launch of the service, flanked by government officials and tourists.
"All visitors will get connected... (up to) this point of the mountain," he said at the Horombo Huts, one of the camps en route to the peak.
He said the summit of the 5,895-metre (19,300-foot) mountain would have internet connectivity by the end of the year.
Last year, the Tanzanian government announced plans to build a cable car on the southern side of Kilimanjaro, triggering uproar among climbers, expedition companies and environmentalists.
Mount Kilimanjaro is an important source of tourism revenue in Tanzania and neighbouring Kenya, with around 35,000 people attempting to summit it each year.
Immortalised in Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", the mountain is part of a national park as well as being a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Technology has increasingly infiltrated the world of mountaineering, with climbers on Mount Everest enjoying easy access to wifi, power generators and smartphones that make it possible to share photos and make SOS calls in the event of an accident.
In contrast, when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of the world's tallest mountain on May 29, 1953, the news didn't reach the outside world until June 2, just in time for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.
https://www.citizen.digital/news/tanzan ... ts-n304076
Stop trying to have the perfect vacation. You’re ruining everyone else’s.
Entitlement and endless optimization have turned travel into an unfun bloodsport.
It’s sort of a cliché to remark that Americans make bad tourists, but on the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the evidence. In the past week, two videos of American tourists complaining about Europe have gone viral: In one, a traveler says that Paris “smells like piss, cheese, and armpit” and that its food “looks grimy as hell,” and in the other, a woman argues that any influencer who posted pretty photos of the Amalfi Coast “deserves jail time” because they neglected to mention the logistics of actually getting there. “This is literal manual labor not vacation,” she writes in the caption. I’m not going to add to the chorus of Twitter users sending death threats to these two, because in a sense, they’ve both got points: If you go to Europe just because it looks cute on TikTok and Instagram, you’re going to end up disappointed.
Many Americans, in much the same way we’ve grown accustomed to cheap products that arrive within 24 hours or less, have an unsavory tendency to feel as though we are owed a fabulous, friction-free time simply because we’ve spent enough money and energy planning to have a fabulous, friction-free time. Cottage industries and corners of the internet have sprung up to reinforce this illusion: No matter where in the world you go, especially as an American leisure tourist, absolutely every choice can be made for you. On TikTok, you can copy painfully intricate spreadsheets and decks promising you the “BEST SUMMER EUROPE TRIP EVER.” Startup apps like Postcard and Camber allow you to copy other people’s saved location pins and follow their itineraries like treasure maps. Publications and influencers compete to offer you the dreamiest-sounding getaways, guiding you to each trendy restaurant and café and what to order there. Some people are even letting ChatGPT plan their vacations. It’s an almost sports-like pastime to reference every possible available recommendation and “best of” list and cobble together a bulletproof itinerary, an activity I’ve engaged in many times, sometimes with great pleasure. But it all ends the same: with thousands of people doing the same things, in the same places, at the same times.
Is travel cringe? It certainly feels that way, particularly if you’re traveling to one of the destinations that have become symbols of internet-driven over-tourism — Tulum, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Mexico City, Santorini, Dubrovnik, to name a few from the past decade. These are cities boasting both extraordinary natural beauty and, crucially, governments and corporations eager to profit from tourism. In catering to Western tastes, developers and the dollars they seek aren’t only killing the existing culture, they’re also, ironically, killing what makes people want to visit a place. In the latest edition of his Barcelona guide, the legendary travel author Rick Steves writes a eulogy for the Ramblas, a thriving market for locals that’s since become a tourist trap selling souvenirs and Instagram-ready fruit skewers.
“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and when I started, there was not enough information. Now there’s too much,” he tells me. He describes the kind of travel that has emerged in the last decade or so as “bucket list” tourism, where people use crowdsourced information and top 10 lists to plan their trips and end up annoyed that everyone else is there, too. “I’m part of the problem, because I write books and I send a lot of people to places that are quote ‘undiscovered,’” he says. “But what I like to do is give people a basis for finding their own discoveries: the little mom and pops that carbonate your travels with great memories. My favorite places are what I call personality-driven, not just a money-making venture of some faceless company that’s going to hire the cheapest labor.”
Customers, having felt as though they’ve missed out on the last few years of international travel due to the pandemic, expect prices to be the same as they were in 2019, explains Jacqui Gifford, the editor-in-chief of Travel + Leisure, and therefore aren’t always prepared for the delays and cost increases caused by inflation, labor shortages, and supply chain issues. “I went to Rome in March, which is typically an off-season month, and it was jam-packed,” she says. “There’s really no low season, it’s just busy year-round in some destinations. At any major museum in Europe, you need to book your tickets in advance; it’s very rare you can go up and wing it.” Even airport lounges, those once-exclusive havens for the business elite, are being ruined by tourists. “So many people get in now because of credit cards. I’ve had times when I’ve had to wait in line, and it was like 50 people deep. You’re like, ‘Is this really worth it?’”
“WHEN I STARTED [WRITING TRAVEL GUIDES], THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION. NOW THERE’S TOO MUCH.”
Worse, that entitlement leads tourists to believe that the people who live in a place should be grateful you’re there. “It just sounds so ridiculous,” says Bani Amor, a travel writer and lecturer. “I’m from New York, it’s one of the most traveled places in the world. It gives billions to our economy. But is that lowering my rent? Is that adding an elevator to my train two blocks away that I can’t go on because I’m disabled? [Instead] they’re removing benches, it becomes dirtier, and houselessness goes up. The money is not circulating. It’s going to police, to jails. It’s not making my life better. That’s a basic lack of understanding of capitalism.” No better example exists of this phenomenon than Hawaii, where most people work more than one job to barely get by, and where new tourist accommodations and attractions are advertised as job bringers and then fail to pay a living wage. Amor, while acknowledging that social media and the internet speed up the process of certain destinations going viral, says that none of this is new. “At the heart of it is displacement: the constant erosion of place, of culture. Tourism always begets more tourism.”
You could certainly make the argument that traveling at all is across-the-board unethical, and while a certain kind of tourist behavior undoubtedly is (young British men have made Amsterdam residents so miserable that the government released a PSA telling them to please, for the love of god, host their lads’ weekends someplace else), that’s only part of it. To declare that traveling is problematic just because it has become more accessible for middle- and working-class people to experience and therefore more people are doing so feels both classist and misguided.
More people are traveling because they can, a direct result of policy changes on a governmental and corporate level: the rise of online travel agencies like Expedia and Viator that make vacation planning as easy as online shopping, the slackening of visa requirements for foreigners and “digital nomads” who buy local real estate (many of whom promptly renovate them into cookie-cutter Airbnbs), deregulation of the airline industry, the popularity of user-generated, algorithmically ranked “best of” travel recommendations, a capitalist global economy that keeps developing countries’ currencies low and therefore favorable to people from richer nations, and the widespread adoption of remote work, to name a few. That there is not enough space at the restaurants we want to eat at, that the must-see museums sell out weeks in advance, these are not the fault of the individual travelers clamoring to go there, they’re the result of explicit decisions made by governments and corporations.
I am old enough to remember what traveling internationally was like before Uber and Airbnb, but not old enough to remember a time before budget airlines. In other words, I have only ever known travel to be cheap, but it has not always been quite this easy. The seamlessness with which Americans (and other English speakers) can sift through the world without actually feeling like we’ve left home can make traveling feel like, well, not. The messy logistics are catered to us in the form of instant phone translations and English language apps to hail taxis and book apartments, and also by the literal aesthetics of the places we go: In attempts to woo wealthy cool-seekers, developers design restaurants, hotels, and public spaces to look like facsimiles of the restaurants, hotels, and public spaces determined by Silicon Valley investors to be what cool people should want. A coffee shop in Beijing now can look the exact same as one in Buenos Aires and as one in your hometown. Our tourist dollars, after displacing innumerable families from neighborhoods they’ve occupied for generations, then turn those same neighborhoods into playgrounds specifically for us.
It all feels sort of embarrassing once you’re there. In Venice, which earlier this year imposed a reservation system and a daily fee to out-of-towners due to over-tourism, I remember waiting in line to squeeze single-file through a crowded bookstore described as a must-visit in all the travel guides where no one bought any books because there literally wasn’t any time or space to do so. Even when we’re not being particularly awful (there’s been a minor hoopla on Twitter over the past week because of a couple TikToks making jokes about the lack of free water at restaurants in Europe, which, they’re right! You do actually have to ask for and pay for water at most European restaurants!), the discourse always ends up being how shitty Americans are. Which, fair. “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you,” Jamaica Kincaid wrote in 1988, and that is precisely how it feels in 2023.
That doesn’t mean we can’t be better at it. Despite what a recent semi-viral New Yorker essay argues, walking around Paris aimlessly does, in fact, sound like a great way to spend a day. Travel is fun, and it is a luxury, and that is okay! “Leisure travel is selfish, and we can think of that word neutrally,” says Amor. “No one is doing anyone a favor by traveling.”
What’s embarrassing, then, is the obsession with getting everything right, with the spreadsheets and the research and the taking of the thousandth photo, followed by the pouting because the bar was too crowded or the emotional unleashing on a service worker because your train got canceled due to a railway labor strike. You are not a good or more interesting person because you have visited 35 countries before the age of 35, or because you’ve dined at every restaurant on Bon Appetit’s guide to Tokyo’s best izakayas. The quality of your photos does not equal the amount of fun you had on a trip. Just ask Rick Steves: On a recent trip to Venice, he watched as couples on gondola rides spent almost no time looking at each other or their surroundings. “And they shoot everything vertical for Instagram,” he says, laughing. “I just thought of that right now. It makes no sense. Our eyes are designed to look at things horizontally.”
How do we travel better? Steves recommends visiting “second cities.” “Everybody goes to Paris, what about Lyon? Everyone goes to Dublin, what about Belfast? Everybody goes to Edinburgh, what about Glasgow?” Gifford, meanwhile, suggests spending more time in one place rather than trying to check off every city on your list. “I used to get requests all the time like, ‘I want to do Greece and Italy and France in one trip in 10 days.’ I don’t think from a logistical standpoint people want to do that kind of trip anymore. What’s nice about it is it’s a very relaxed pace.”
YOU ARE NOT A GOOD OR MORE INTERESTING PERSON BECAUSE YOU HAVE VISITED 35 COUNTRIES BEFORE THE AGE OF 35
From my own experience, it’s the extremely trite observation of “putting down your phone” that helps make travel seem like a real vacation. It’s like going to a party that’s so much fun you’ve forgotten to take any photos: One of the most fun nights I had on a trip to Florence started off with me being annoyed that my boyfriend dragged me to a nondescript pub to watch some sports game instead of checking out a cute little wine bar we’d been recommended, but we ended up meeting a whole tour group and going out to dinner with them. Later I posted an Instagram story of us singing karaoke in a crappy bar to Taylor Swift’s 10-minute version of “All Too Well” and everyone was like, “What the fuck are you doing at a karaoke bar in Florence?” and I was like, “Having a blast!” Literally, who cares!
“Just because something’s number one on some listing, what’s number one for you? It’s not about how many places you’ve been to. I want to know how many friends you’ve met and the mistakes you’ve made and then actually enjoyed as a result of those mistakes,” says Steves. “The magic of travel is still there. But people have to be in the moment. Let serendipity off its leash, and follow it.” Annoyingly, my TikTok algorithm has already figured out I’m going to the Cotswolds in a few weeks, and it’s taken everything in my power to scroll past the nauseatingly magical thatched-roof cottages and quaint little shops and surrender to the mysterious forces of fate. Travel isn’t supposed to be a fairy tale, after all — a great trip is far more interesting than that.
This column was first published in the Vox Culture newsletter.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23798890/am ... 778d3e6de3
It’s sort of a cliché to remark that Americans make bad tourists, but on the other hand, it’s hard to argue with the evidence. In the past week, two videos of American tourists complaining about Europe have gone viral: In one, a traveler says that Paris “smells like piss, cheese, and armpit” and that its food “looks grimy as hell,” and in the other, a woman argues that any influencer who posted pretty photos of the Amalfi Coast “deserves jail time” because they neglected to mention the logistics of actually getting there. “This is literal manual labor not vacation,” she writes in the caption. I’m not going to add to the chorus of Twitter users sending death threats to these two, because in a sense, they’ve both got points: If you go to Europe just because it looks cute on TikTok and Instagram, you’re going to end up disappointed.
Many Americans, in much the same way we’ve grown accustomed to cheap products that arrive within 24 hours or less, have an unsavory tendency to feel as though we are owed a fabulous, friction-free time simply because we’ve spent enough money and energy planning to have a fabulous, friction-free time. Cottage industries and corners of the internet have sprung up to reinforce this illusion: No matter where in the world you go, especially as an American leisure tourist, absolutely every choice can be made for you. On TikTok, you can copy painfully intricate spreadsheets and decks promising you the “BEST SUMMER EUROPE TRIP EVER.” Startup apps like Postcard and Camber allow you to copy other people’s saved location pins and follow their itineraries like treasure maps. Publications and influencers compete to offer you the dreamiest-sounding getaways, guiding you to each trendy restaurant and café and what to order there. Some people are even letting ChatGPT plan their vacations. It’s an almost sports-like pastime to reference every possible available recommendation and “best of” list and cobble together a bulletproof itinerary, an activity I’ve engaged in many times, sometimes with great pleasure. But it all ends the same: with thousands of people doing the same things, in the same places, at the same times.
Is travel cringe? It certainly feels that way, particularly if you’re traveling to one of the destinations that have become symbols of internet-driven over-tourism — Tulum, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Mexico City, Santorini, Dubrovnik, to name a few from the past decade. These are cities boasting both extraordinary natural beauty and, crucially, governments and corporations eager to profit from tourism. In catering to Western tastes, developers and the dollars they seek aren’t only killing the existing culture, they’re also, ironically, killing what makes people want to visit a place. In the latest edition of his Barcelona guide, the legendary travel author Rick Steves writes a eulogy for the Ramblas, a thriving market for locals that’s since become a tourist trap selling souvenirs and Instagram-ready fruit skewers.
“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and when I started, there was not enough information. Now there’s too much,” he tells me. He describes the kind of travel that has emerged in the last decade or so as “bucket list” tourism, where people use crowdsourced information and top 10 lists to plan their trips and end up annoyed that everyone else is there, too. “I’m part of the problem, because I write books and I send a lot of people to places that are quote ‘undiscovered,’” he says. “But what I like to do is give people a basis for finding their own discoveries: the little mom and pops that carbonate your travels with great memories. My favorite places are what I call personality-driven, not just a money-making venture of some faceless company that’s going to hire the cheapest labor.”
Customers, having felt as though they’ve missed out on the last few years of international travel due to the pandemic, expect prices to be the same as they were in 2019, explains Jacqui Gifford, the editor-in-chief of Travel + Leisure, and therefore aren’t always prepared for the delays and cost increases caused by inflation, labor shortages, and supply chain issues. “I went to Rome in March, which is typically an off-season month, and it was jam-packed,” she says. “There’s really no low season, it’s just busy year-round in some destinations. At any major museum in Europe, you need to book your tickets in advance; it’s very rare you can go up and wing it.” Even airport lounges, those once-exclusive havens for the business elite, are being ruined by tourists. “So many people get in now because of credit cards. I’ve had times when I’ve had to wait in line, and it was like 50 people deep. You’re like, ‘Is this really worth it?’”
“WHEN I STARTED [WRITING TRAVEL GUIDES], THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH INFORMATION. NOW THERE’S TOO MUCH.”
Worse, that entitlement leads tourists to believe that the people who live in a place should be grateful you’re there. “It just sounds so ridiculous,” says Bani Amor, a travel writer and lecturer. “I’m from New York, it’s one of the most traveled places in the world. It gives billions to our economy. But is that lowering my rent? Is that adding an elevator to my train two blocks away that I can’t go on because I’m disabled? [Instead] they’re removing benches, it becomes dirtier, and houselessness goes up. The money is not circulating. It’s going to police, to jails. It’s not making my life better. That’s a basic lack of understanding of capitalism.” No better example exists of this phenomenon than Hawaii, where most people work more than one job to barely get by, and where new tourist accommodations and attractions are advertised as job bringers and then fail to pay a living wage. Amor, while acknowledging that social media and the internet speed up the process of certain destinations going viral, says that none of this is new. “At the heart of it is displacement: the constant erosion of place, of culture. Tourism always begets more tourism.”
You could certainly make the argument that traveling at all is across-the-board unethical, and while a certain kind of tourist behavior undoubtedly is (young British men have made Amsterdam residents so miserable that the government released a PSA telling them to please, for the love of god, host their lads’ weekends someplace else), that’s only part of it. To declare that traveling is problematic just because it has become more accessible for middle- and working-class people to experience and therefore more people are doing so feels both classist and misguided.
More people are traveling because they can, a direct result of policy changes on a governmental and corporate level: the rise of online travel agencies like Expedia and Viator that make vacation planning as easy as online shopping, the slackening of visa requirements for foreigners and “digital nomads” who buy local real estate (many of whom promptly renovate them into cookie-cutter Airbnbs), deregulation of the airline industry, the popularity of user-generated, algorithmically ranked “best of” travel recommendations, a capitalist global economy that keeps developing countries’ currencies low and therefore favorable to people from richer nations, and the widespread adoption of remote work, to name a few. That there is not enough space at the restaurants we want to eat at, that the must-see museums sell out weeks in advance, these are not the fault of the individual travelers clamoring to go there, they’re the result of explicit decisions made by governments and corporations.
I am old enough to remember what traveling internationally was like before Uber and Airbnb, but not old enough to remember a time before budget airlines. In other words, I have only ever known travel to be cheap, but it has not always been quite this easy. The seamlessness with which Americans (and other English speakers) can sift through the world without actually feeling like we’ve left home can make traveling feel like, well, not. The messy logistics are catered to us in the form of instant phone translations and English language apps to hail taxis and book apartments, and also by the literal aesthetics of the places we go: In attempts to woo wealthy cool-seekers, developers design restaurants, hotels, and public spaces to look like facsimiles of the restaurants, hotels, and public spaces determined by Silicon Valley investors to be what cool people should want. A coffee shop in Beijing now can look the exact same as one in Buenos Aires and as one in your hometown. Our tourist dollars, after displacing innumerable families from neighborhoods they’ve occupied for generations, then turn those same neighborhoods into playgrounds specifically for us.
It all feels sort of embarrassing once you’re there. In Venice, which earlier this year imposed a reservation system and a daily fee to out-of-towners due to over-tourism, I remember waiting in line to squeeze single-file through a crowded bookstore described as a must-visit in all the travel guides where no one bought any books because there literally wasn’t any time or space to do so. Even when we’re not being particularly awful (there’s been a minor hoopla on Twitter over the past week because of a couple TikToks making jokes about the lack of free water at restaurants in Europe, which, they’re right! You do actually have to ask for and pay for water at most European restaurants!), the discourse always ends up being how shitty Americans are. Which, fair. “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you,” Jamaica Kincaid wrote in 1988, and that is precisely how it feels in 2023.
That doesn’t mean we can’t be better at it. Despite what a recent semi-viral New Yorker essay argues, walking around Paris aimlessly does, in fact, sound like a great way to spend a day. Travel is fun, and it is a luxury, and that is okay! “Leisure travel is selfish, and we can think of that word neutrally,” says Amor. “No one is doing anyone a favor by traveling.”
What’s embarrassing, then, is the obsession with getting everything right, with the spreadsheets and the research and the taking of the thousandth photo, followed by the pouting because the bar was too crowded or the emotional unleashing on a service worker because your train got canceled due to a railway labor strike. You are not a good or more interesting person because you have visited 35 countries before the age of 35, or because you’ve dined at every restaurant on Bon Appetit’s guide to Tokyo’s best izakayas. The quality of your photos does not equal the amount of fun you had on a trip. Just ask Rick Steves: On a recent trip to Venice, he watched as couples on gondola rides spent almost no time looking at each other or their surroundings. “And they shoot everything vertical for Instagram,” he says, laughing. “I just thought of that right now. It makes no sense. Our eyes are designed to look at things horizontally.”
How do we travel better? Steves recommends visiting “second cities.” “Everybody goes to Paris, what about Lyon? Everyone goes to Dublin, what about Belfast? Everybody goes to Edinburgh, what about Glasgow?” Gifford, meanwhile, suggests spending more time in one place rather than trying to check off every city on your list. “I used to get requests all the time like, ‘I want to do Greece and Italy and France in one trip in 10 days.’ I don’t think from a logistical standpoint people want to do that kind of trip anymore. What’s nice about it is it’s a very relaxed pace.”
YOU ARE NOT A GOOD OR MORE INTERESTING PERSON BECAUSE YOU HAVE VISITED 35 COUNTRIES BEFORE THE AGE OF 35
From my own experience, it’s the extremely trite observation of “putting down your phone” that helps make travel seem like a real vacation. It’s like going to a party that’s so much fun you’ve forgotten to take any photos: One of the most fun nights I had on a trip to Florence started off with me being annoyed that my boyfriend dragged me to a nondescript pub to watch some sports game instead of checking out a cute little wine bar we’d been recommended, but we ended up meeting a whole tour group and going out to dinner with them. Later I posted an Instagram story of us singing karaoke in a crappy bar to Taylor Swift’s 10-minute version of “All Too Well” and everyone was like, “What the fuck are you doing at a karaoke bar in Florence?” and I was like, “Having a blast!” Literally, who cares!
“Just because something’s number one on some listing, what’s number one for you? It’s not about how many places you’ve been to. I want to know how many friends you’ve met and the mistakes you’ve made and then actually enjoyed as a result of those mistakes,” says Steves. “The magic of travel is still there. But people have to be in the moment. Let serendipity off its leash, and follow it.” Annoyingly, my TikTok algorithm has already figured out I’m going to the Cotswolds in a few weeks, and it’s taken everything in my power to scroll past the nauseatingly magical thatched-roof cottages and quaint little shops and surrender to the mysterious forces of fate. Travel isn’t supposed to be a fairy tale, after all — a great trip is far more interesting than that.
This column was first published in the Vox Culture newsletter.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23798890/am ... 778d3e6de3
Tanzania taps into Portuguese tourism market
With its sights set on transforming the lucrative tourism industry, Tanzania has opened a new chapter in its endeavor after setting a foot in the Portuguese market.
For the first, the East African nation, which is endowed with unmatched tourist attractions, will receive 288 tourists from Portugal on Monday.
This was revealed by Zanzibar’s Minister for Tourism and Heritage Simai Mohamed Said yesterday in a telephone interview with the ‘Daily News’ from Lisbon, Portugal.
“On Monday I will join 288 tourists who are coming to Zanzibar on a chartered plane. This will be the first direct charter from Lisbon and it will fly to Zanzibar seven times during this tourism season,” said Minister Said.
He assured the tourists that the Tanzanian government will be very supportive, including visa processing.
“We’ll provide every kind of support they need and ensure they enjoy and experience our beautiful country,” he stressed.
Mr Said is in the European nation on a working tour aimed at promoting Zanzibar and Tanzania tourism in continued efforts to the sector, which is among the key drivers of the country’s economy.
Minister Said underlined the need to exploit the Portuguese tourism market saying there is a great potential to attract more visitors from countries such as Brazil, Greece and Spain among other Portuguese speaking countries.
“A lot of Europeans are buying houses and settling in Portugal because it is one of the cheapest countries, therefore by promoting our country here we are going to market ourselves to many European nationals,” suggested the minister.
Simai is accompanied by Chairman of the Zanzibar Tourism Commission, Mr Rahim Bhalou, Counsellor Aggrey Meena and Nazim Ahmed, a Diplomatic Representative.
https://dailynews.co.tz/tanzania-taps-i ... sm-market/
Re: Tourism
My Travel Tips for Seeing the World’s Best Places
’Tis the season for vacations, so let me make my pitch that the best travel is not lounging at a beach resort but rather journeying into a different world. We all need relaxation at times, but nothing beats the thrill of a trip of discovery and the education that comes with it.
Mark Twain once observed that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” In that spirit, I’ve long urged young Americans to take gap years before college or junior years abroad. (One high school reader of such an essay, Spencer Cohen, ended up taking a gap year partly in Japan, became an Asia hand and is now a colleague at The Times.)
Still, there are risks, less of violence (the U.S. has more guns than other countries) than of having your passport and credit cards stolen. So I preach both travel and prudence, and on a recent book tour, I found myself often asked about travel advice I had mentioned in my memoir. So let me share a few tips for the vacation season:
1. The most memorable travel often involves encountering something unfamiliar, so consider escaping the herds parading through Paris. Indonesia, Ghana, India, Nepal, Vietnam, Morocco and Bolivia are generally safe, far cheaper than Europe and offer indelible experiences. I’ll never forget venturing deep into the Potosí silver mines in Bolivia, exploring a grim slave castle in Ghana that dispatched prisoners to slavery in America, learning how to use a blowgun while staying with families in their longhouse in Indonesia’s Borneo rainforest. The world awaits us!
2. Some of the places that you find most culturally distant may be right here in the United States. A teenager from an affluent family in the New York or Boston areas would step into a different world by taking a ranch job in Wyoming. And this is the kind of travel that is not only affordable but actually pays for the experience.
3. Be spontaneous. As a law student in 1982, I spent five weeks backpacking through the Middle East and met a couple of Palestinian students on a West Bank bus; I jumped off at their stop and spent a memorable day with them in their refugee camp hearing about their frustrations and dreams (I wrote about reuniting with them last fall). And while on a bus in the Sahara, I accepted an Algerian man’s invitation to visit his village — which turned out to be a warren of underground burrows to protect families from the extreme heat, the most unusual residential architecture I’ve ever seen. In each case, I was with a couple of friends, which made it seem safer to put myself in the company of people I’d just met, and obviously one should be as judicious as one is spontaneous.
4. One occasionally hears that adventurous travel is just for men, but some of the most accomplished foreign correspondents and overseas photographers are women, as are a majority of Peace Corps volunteers. As a man, I don’t face the same risks that women face, but I have seen female travelers — disproportionately from Australia and New Zealand — thriving as they backpack through the most remote places. Some have suggested the purchase of a cheap wedding ring; a $20 band and a fabricated husband can help keep pests away.
5. Carry a decoy wallet. If pickpockets grab it, let them run off — only to discover that it contains just a bit of cash for street purchases, a day pass for the subway and an expired credit card. But do remember to let the pickpockets escape. Years ago, in Lima, Peru, I instinctively jumped a pickpocket who was trying to grab my friend’s decoy wallet, forgetting that he had nothing much in it; next thing I knew we had a melee and a gun was being fired.
6. Carry your passport and valid credit cards and cash in a pouch that loops on your belt and is tucked inside your pants. Travelers often carry travel pouches round their necks under their shirts, but these are visible and sometimes get stolen. While I’ve had bandits make me take off my shoes and socks while searching for cash, nobody has found my pouch in my pants (I dare mention this only because I assume robbers are not big readers of my column).
7. Carry a small cable lock (those for skis are perfect) to lock your bags together so one doesn’t run off while you’re sleeping in a train or on a bench at the train station.
8. Never check a bag for a flight because then it will get lost. That means packing light and taking quick-dry clothes suitable for washing in a hotel sink. I’m fond of travel clothing from a company called Clothing Arts, and I also rely on ultralight backpacking gear such as a tiny Black Diamond or Petzl headlamp that is invaluable when the power goes out.
9. If you’re getting into a taxi or other car in a location that seems at all dubious, use your phone to photograph the license plate before you get in. The driver may wonder if you’ve texted it to a friend. And women can look for female drivers if they exist.
10. My editor doesn’t want me to say anything that might encourage readers to try something dangerous, so I won’t suggest that there is nothing like the view while riding on the top of a train in Sudan. (That was in my dissolute youth, and today I definitely disapprove of riding on top of trains.)
11. People worry about terrorists, but the most likely serious risk is probably a vehicle accident. Motorcycle taxis common in low-income countries can be perilous, while buses and trains are safer (inside trains only!).
12. Now forget all the fears this article has conjured. Go have fun. Travel should be as enjoyable as it is eye-opening. If you take precautions it will be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
’Tis the season for vacations, so let me make my pitch that the best travel is not lounging at a beach resort but rather journeying into a different world. We all need relaxation at times, but nothing beats the thrill of a trip of discovery and the education that comes with it.
Mark Twain once observed that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” In that spirit, I’ve long urged young Americans to take gap years before college or junior years abroad. (One high school reader of such an essay, Spencer Cohen, ended up taking a gap year partly in Japan, became an Asia hand and is now a colleague at The Times.)
Still, there are risks, less of violence (the U.S. has more guns than other countries) than of having your passport and credit cards stolen. So I preach both travel and prudence, and on a recent book tour, I found myself often asked about travel advice I had mentioned in my memoir. So let me share a few tips for the vacation season:
1. The most memorable travel often involves encountering something unfamiliar, so consider escaping the herds parading through Paris. Indonesia, Ghana, India, Nepal, Vietnam, Morocco and Bolivia are generally safe, far cheaper than Europe and offer indelible experiences. I’ll never forget venturing deep into the Potosí silver mines in Bolivia, exploring a grim slave castle in Ghana that dispatched prisoners to slavery in America, learning how to use a blowgun while staying with families in their longhouse in Indonesia’s Borneo rainforest. The world awaits us!
2. Some of the places that you find most culturally distant may be right here in the United States. A teenager from an affluent family in the New York or Boston areas would step into a different world by taking a ranch job in Wyoming. And this is the kind of travel that is not only affordable but actually pays for the experience.
3. Be spontaneous. As a law student in 1982, I spent five weeks backpacking through the Middle East and met a couple of Palestinian students on a West Bank bus; I jumped off at their stop and spent a memorable day with them in their refugee camp hearing about their frustrations and dreams (I wrote about reuniting with them last fall). And while on a bus in the Sahara, I accepted an Algerian man’s invitation to visit his village — which turned out to be a warren of underground burrows to protect families from the extreme heat, the most unusual residential architecture I’ve ever seen. In each case, I was with a couple of friends, which made it seem safer to put myself in the company of people I’d just met, and obviously one should be as judicious as one is spontaneous.
4. One occasionally hears that adventurous travel is just for men, but some of the most accomplished foreign correspondents and overseas photographers are women, as are a majority of Peace Corps volunteers. As a man, I don’t face the same risks that women face, but I have seen female travelers — disproportionately from Australia and New Zealand — thriving as they backpack through the most remote places. Some have suggested the purchase of a cheap wedding ring; a $20 band and a fabricated husband can help keep pests away.
5. Carry a decoy wallet. If pickpockets grab it, let them run off — only to discover that it contains just a bit of cash for street purchases, a day pass for the subway and an expired credit card. But do remember to let the pickpockets escape. Years ago, in Lima, Peru, I instinctively jumped a pickpocket who was trying to grab my friend’s decoy wallet, forgetting that he had nothing much in it; next thing I knew we had a melee and a gun was being fired.
6. Carry your passport and valid credit cards and cash in a pouch that loops on your belt and is tucked inside your pants. Travelers often carry travel pouches round their necks under their shirts, but these are visible and sometimes get stolen. While I’ve had bandits make me take off my shoes and socks while searching for cash, nobody has found my pouch in my pants (I dare mention this only because I assume robbers are not big readers of my column).
7. Carry a small cable lock (those for skis are perfect) to lock your bags together so one doesn’t run off while you’re sleeping in a train or on a bench at the train station.
8. Never check a bag for a flight because then it will get lost. That means packing light and taking quick-dry clothes suitable for washing in a hotel sink. I’m fond of travel clothing from a company called Clothing Arts, and I also rely on ultralight backpacking gear such as a tiny Black Diamond or Petzl headlamp that is invaluable when the power goes out.
9. If you’re getting into a taxi or other car in a location that seems at all dubious, use your phone to photograph the license plate before you get in. The driver may wonder if you’ve texted it to a friend. And women can look for female drivers if they exist.
10. My editor doesn’t want me to say anything that might encourage readers to try something dangerous, so I won’t suggest that there is nothing like the view while riding on the top of a train in Sudan. (That was in my dissolute youth, and today I definitely disapprove of riding on top of trains.)
11. People worry about terrorists, but the most likely serious risk is probably a vehicle accident. Motorcycle taxis common in low-income countries can be perilous, while buses and trains are safer (inside trains only!).
12. Now forget all the fears this article has conjured. Go have fun. Travel should be as enjoyable as it is eye-opening. If you take precautions it will be.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/10/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Tourism
Lisbon locals say tourist tuk-tuks are clogging the streets and making the city unliveable
Some residents say tourist traffic is even stopping them from leaving their homes.
Fuelled by the rise of tourism in Portugal, the narrow streets of the country's capital Lisbon have become clogged with tuk-tuks.
From her balcony, Rosa Alves says she doesn't even try to count the small motorised vehicles anymore.
They appear as soon as the sun rises, carrying tourists to the top of the hill, and carry on until late in the day.
The 78-year-old pensioner has been living in her apartment for the past 50 years but she says things have never been worse in her beloved neighbourhood. There are more tourists, tuk-tuks and traffic, she says.
According to Rosa and local media, sometimes residents can’t even leave their homes due to traffic and parked tuk-tuks blocking their path.
“For the last five, six years this has become a mess. All over Graça [ Rosa's neighbourhood], there has been a serious change for the worse" she says.
Tuk-tuks drop off and pick up tourists at the gate of the 19th century Pena Palace in Sintra, Portugal, Friday, August 9, 2024.AP
On the other side of the road, a piece of graffiti says 'Stop Gentrification'.
Alves didn't write it but she sympathises with the message.
She has seen other changes in her neighbourhood: her neighbours started to leave and were replaced by anonymous strangers staying in holiday rentals.
Lisbon's deputy mayor has suggested limiting the number of tuk-tuks that are allowed on the city's narrow streets, though this measure has yet to be implemented.
Related
Tourist taxes, bus bans and TikTok: How Europe’s popular cities are tackling overcrowding
‘Go f*cking home’: The European cities where locals are fighting back against overtourism
"Traffic jam in paradise"
In Sintra, a town near Lisbon famous for its castles, local activists have started a movement called QSintra.
It is challenging City Hall to “put residents first” with better communication, for a start. They also want to know the government's plan for managing guests at a new hotel being constructed to increase the number of overnight stays, and more limits on the number of cars and visitors allowed.
“We're not against tourists,” reads the group's manifesto. “We're against the pandemonium that (local leaders) cannot resolve."
Related
‘Everything is collapsing’: Ibiza is the latest Spanish hotspot to fight back against overtourism
‘Tourists have no power to transform Barcelona’: Is rage at digital nomads misdirected?
QSintra join scores of locals across Europe who are protesting against the negative impacts of overtourism on their lives.
There is a strong movement in Barcelona where tourists have been sprayed with water and an overcrowded bus route has been taken off Google maps to try and hide it from tourists. In response, local authorities have raised tourist taxes and vowed to stamp out Airbnb rentals.
Last year, Mallorca residents placed fake signs on local beaches warning tourists to stay away, while in neighbouring Ibiza there have also been protests against overtourism.
Related
Japanese town builds giant screen to block views of Mount Fuji and deter tourist crowds
Fairytale castles and unspoiled nature: Where should you go to escape overtourism in Europe?
What is overtourism?
Overtourism describes the tipping point at which visitors and their cash stop benefitting residents and instead cause harm by degrading historic sites, overwhelming infrastructure and making life markedly worse for those who live in the destination.
But look a little deeper and you'll find knottier issues for locals and their leaders, none more universal than housing prices driven up by short-term rentals like Airbnb, from Spain to South Africa.
Some locals are asking authorities to encourage higher quality tourism, meaning visitors stay for longer in one place and spend more while they are in the destination.
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2024/08 ... vertourism
Some residents say tourist traffic is even stopping them from leaving their homes.
Fuelled by the rise of tourism in Portugal, the narrow streets of the country's capital Lisbon have become clogged with tuk-tuks.
From her balcony, Rosa Alves says she doesn't even try to count the small motorised vehicles anymore.
They appear as soon as the sun rises, carrying tourists to the top of the hill, and carry on until late in the day.
The 78-year-old pensioner has been living in her apartment for the past 50 years but she says things have never been worse in her beloved neighbourhood. There are more tourists, tuk-tuks and traffic, she says.
According to Rosa and local media, sometimes residents can’t even leave their homes due to traffic and parked tuk-tuks blocking their path.
“For the last five, six years this has become a mess. All over Graça [ Rosa's neighbourhood], there has been a serious change for the worse" she says.
Tuk-tuks drop off and pick up tourists at the gate of the 19th century Pena Palace in Sintra, Portugal, Friday, August 9, 2024.AP
On the other side of the road, a piece of graffiti says 'Stop Gentrification'.
Alves didn't write it but she sympathises with the message.
She has seen other changes in her neighbourhood: her neighbours started to leave and were replaced by anonymous strangers staying in holiday rentals.
Lisbon's deputy mayor has suggested limiting the number of tuk-tuks that are allowed on the city's narrow streets, though this measure has yet to be implemented.
Related
Tourist taxes, bus bans and TikTok: How Europe’s popular cities are tackling overcrowding
‘Go f*cking home’: The European cities where locals are fighting back against overtourism
"Traffic jam in paradise"
In Sintra, a town near Lisbon famous for its castles, local activists have started a movement called QSintra.
It is challenging City Hall to “put residents first” with better communication, for a start. They also want to know the government's plan for managing guests at a new hotel being constructed to increase the number of overnight stays, and more limits on the number of cars and visitors allowed.
“We're not against tourists,” reads the group's manifesto. “We're against the pandemonium that (local leaders) cannot resolve."
Related
‘Everything is collapsing’: Ibiza is the latest Spanish hotspot to fight back against overtourism
‘Tourists have no power to transform Barcelona’: Is rage at digital nomads misdirected?
QSintra join scores of locals across Europe who are protesting against the negative impacts of overtourism on their lives.
There is a strong movement in Barcelona where tourists have been sprayed with water and an overcrowded bus route has been taken off Google maps to try and hide it from tourists. In response, local authorities have raised tourist taxes and vowed to stamp out Airbnb rentals.
Last year, Mallorca residents placed fake signs on local beaches warning tourists to stay away, while in neighbouring Ibiza there have also been protests against overtourism.
Related
Japanese town builds giant screen to block views of Mount Fuji and deter tourist crowds
Fairytale castles and unspoiled nature: Where should you go to escape overtourism in Europe?
What is overtourism?
Overtourism describes the tipping point at which visitors and their cash stop benefitting residents and instead cause harm by degrading historic sites, overwhelming infrastructure and making life markedly worse for those who live in the destination.
But look a little deeper and you'll find knottier issues for locals and their leaders, none more universal than housing prices driven up by short-term rentals like Airbnb, from Spain to South Africa.
Some locals are asking authorities to encourage higher quality tourism, meaning visitors stay for longer in one place and spend more while they are in the destination.
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2024/08 ... vertourism
Re: Tourism / Travel
What’s the Best Way to Explore Kenya? Join a Local Hiking Club.
The author sought an authentic experience, and found it in Lets Drift, “an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise” of people living in and near Nairobi.
Hikers embark on the Kahunira trail through the agrarian countryside near Githunguri in Kiambu County, Kenya. The outing was organized by a local hiking club called Lets Drift.Credit...Rolf Potts
By the time we reached the third waterfall on the Kahunira trail, my wife, Kiki, and I had been walking through the forested backcountry of Kiambu County, Kenya, for nearly three hours. Along the way, we had tasted sweet lady finger bananas in the market town of Githunguri, sipped a sour Kikuyu home brew called muratina proffered by laborers at a rural gravel quarry and made a heart-pounding shortcut across rust-flecked irrigation pipes that traversed a steep gorge fringed with tea plantations.
Our companions were two dozen young Kenyans who’d learned of the excursion through Lets Drift, an outdoor recreation community that creates weekly hikes, bicycle excursions and mountaineering treks in the countryside outside Nairobi.
Upon arriving at the forest-shaded waterfall, some members of our cohort stripped down to swimsuits, performed acrobatic dives off boulders that edged the cascade pool and posed for selfies in the midafternoon sun.
In a part of Africa where the conventional tourism industry was built around a wildlife-focused, British colonial footprint, Lets Drift stands out as an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise. Its aim is to celebrate outdoor recreation and, at the same time, generate a sense of community among the country’s growing urban middle class.
ImageFive hikers traverse a low grassy wilderness area, balancing themselves on rusty pipes that are positioned several feet above the ground.
One challenge of the Kahunira trail is walking across rust-flecked water pipes to traverse a gorge en route to the waterfalls.Credit...Rolf Potts
Created in 2018 by Alex Kamau and Paul Njuguna, both from greater Nairobi, Lets Drift attracts roughly 8,000 participants each year, many of whom participate in activities like hiking, e-biking, backcountry camping and digital detox retreats. “Our mission is to make adventure more accessible and affordable for Kenyans,” Mr. Kamau said.
Lets Drift also welcomes international travelers looking for an unconventional experience in Kenya. Within the traditional model of East African tourism, outsiders endeavoring to “meet the locals” often wind up having roadside photo-and-souvenir encounters with Kenyans wearing traditional Masai or Samburu costumes. But on the Kahunira waterfall trail, the Kenyans we interacted with wore Lycra and hiking boots, and carried day packs. Like us, they were tourists; unlike us, they weren’t traveling all that far from home.
‘Affordable and accessible’
The decision to begin our Kenya sojourn by joining a Nairobi hiking club flowed out of my habit of perusing online local newspapers of the places I one day hope to visit. After reading a December 2020 Business Daily Africa feature about Lets Drift, I began to follow the Kenyan hiking community on Instagram. The outdoor images posted there resonated, not because I found them exotic, but because I found their celebration of exploring the wilderness within driving distance of Nairobi relatable to my own youthful summertime explorations of the backcountry trails of the Colorado Rockies.
Indeed, just as the notion of who was able to travel long distances was democratized by railroad and steamship technologies in the 19th century, social media has democratized the kinds of stories — and storytellers — that can inspire and inform us about places before we go there. In giving us a peek into what local people do for fun in the places we seek to visit, hiking clubs like Lets Drift (or similar communities tied to things like sports, art or cuisine) enable us to explore ways that we, as tourists, can respectfully join in.
Ten young people in bathing suits cool off in a natural pool of water fed by a low waterfall. Woods surround the pool, and three other people can be seen hanging out on the rocks surrounding the water.
Lets Drift hikers relax near a waterfall along the Kahunira trail.Credit...Rolf Potts
Our relaxed five-hour Kahunira waterfall hike looped us back to the town of Githunguri, where we shared a classic Kenyan meal of nyama choma (barbecued goat) and ugali (cornmeal porridge) with our fellow hikers as we waited to catch a shared minivan back to Nairobi. In keeping with Lets Drift ritual, we addressed each other by alliterative trail names — Dazzling Daisy, Jolly John, Kurious Kiki, Relaxed Rolf.
When I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the Kahunira waterfalls described in any guidebooks or on any travel websites, Wango Alfred, a 25-year-old artist and photographer from Nairobi who’d served as our guide, told me that Lets Drift scouts out its own routes. “We rarely seek out the same places as international tourists,” he said. “We like to keep things affordable and accessible for everyday Kenyans. Sometimes this means walking across private agricultural lands, so establishing relationships with local leaders and spending money at the village level — like we are right now — counts for a lot.”
I asked him: “Was it strange to have a couple of Americans come along?”
“All kinds of people join us,” he said, noting that Nairobi is a cosmopolitan place that mixes cultures within Kenya, which means Lets Drift hikes might involve people from various ethnic groups socializing with those from other groups: Kikuyu with Kalenjin, Luo with Kenyan Somalis and Kenyan Asians — all of them learning about one another’s cultures as they go. “When Americans or Europeans join us, it feels like we get to travel outside of Kenya and learn things about those places, too. The goal is simply to relax and be present, to feel the ground as we get to know new people, whoever those people might to be.”
The mission: ‘To evangelize outdoor adventure’
In the days following our hike, Kiki and I combined day visits to Nairobi sights like the Karen Blixen Museum and the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage, with evening meet-ups with our new Kenyan hiking friends.
At a restaurant called the Talisman in the city’s Karen suburb, we had beef stir-fry with a 27-year-old foreign-relations lawyer who’d hiked under the name “Malignant Marc” Chirchir. At the BigFish in Westlands, we had brown ugali and tilapia that had been “wet-fried” in a vegetable stew with “Radiant Ruth” Kuria, a 34-year-old study-abroad administrator. Our conversations mixed the local (Ruth had recently been married in a traditional Kikuyu ceremony; Marc’s Kalenjin family hailed from a tea-growing area) with the global (Marc had spent time in Rwanda and Britain, Ruth in Malaysia and Turkey).
Image
Two young women sit at a table eating traditional Kenyan food. In the background are several other people sitting at tables and walking through a doorway in the background.
Kiki Bush and Ruth Njeri Kuria have a classic Kenyan meal of nyama choma (barbecued goat) and ugali (cornmeal porridge) in the market town of Githunguri.Credit...Rolf Potts
Kiki and I also paid a visit to the Nairobi Garage, a Silicon Valley-style co-working space not far from Nairobi’s central business district. There, on a breezy veranda full of young Africans doing business on their laptops and smartphones, we met Mr. Kamau, the 30-year-old Nairobi native who helped found Lets Drift in 2018.
“Our first goal was to evangelize outdoor adventure among Kenyans,” Mr. Kamau said. “And at the same time, we’re trying to decolonize that idea of travel. At popular tourist destinations like the Masai Mara, three out of every five safari outfitters are operated by Western companies, not by Kenyans. I don’t take it personally, but I want to shift the dynamics with what we are doing with Lets Drift. We are fighting hard to make sure people aren’t looking at just one dimension of our country.”
Alex told us how Lets Drift started as a WhatsApp group of recent university graduates who enjoyed hiking together as a way to stretch their comfort zones and experience new places. As word of mouth grew, Mr. Kamau and Mr. Njuguna asked for a small subscription fee to cover group expenses. The turning point for Lets Drift came in 2020, when dusk-to-dawn Covid curfews compelled scores of Kenyans to seek outdoor diversions by day.
“Before Covid we would have maybe five people on a hike,” Mr. Kamau said. “The first hike after Covid attracted 50 people. I remember calling Paul and asking him, ‘Do you know anyone we can hire? We need more guides.’ So instead of having one hike on a single day, we’d organize five.”
Rich stories
Lets Drift operates on a subscription model, with Kenyan members gaining access to a variety of beginner, moderate and challenging hikes for the 2,000-shilling monthly fee (about $15; non-Kenyans pay the equivalent of $20 to $40 per excursion, depending on the type of experience and the distance from Nairobi).
Hikes are organized around attractions, accessibility and safety; some offerings also include yoga, mountain biking and photography excursions. “We want more people to travel,” Mr. Kamau said, “so we’re experimenting with all the things we can do for them.”
Image
Three women pose for a cellphone photo on a trail in the woods. Behind them are ferns and other vegetation, and in the foreground, the person taking the photo is wearing a backpack and light jacket.
Kiki Bush, Ruth Njeri Kuria and Nina Mwango pose for a photo on the Kahunira trail.Credit...Rolf Potts
“We’ve seen a shift in the way Kenyans view their own wilderness,” he added. “People used to view hiking and mountaineering as a mzungu thing,” he added, using the Swahili term for foreign people. “Now we see it as something that’s accessible for everyone.”
Mr. Kamau went on to describe some of the reasons members have given for joining Lets Drift. “One member told me she joined Lets Drift because it was a more enjoyable way to work out than going to the gym,” he said. “Another joined so she could have a day each week where she could just be herself, instead of being seen as someone’s mother or daughter or employee. And of course, people like you and Kiki are just looking for a different way to experience our country.”
“When you match all these perspectives together,” he said, “the stories people hear about Kenya become so much richer.”
Rolf Potts is the author of five books, including “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Word Travel” and, most recently, “The Vagabond’s Way.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/trav ... 778d3e6de3#
The author sought an authentic experience, and found it in Lets Drift, “an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise” of people living in and near Nairobi.
Hikers embark on the Kahunira trail through the agrarian countryside near Githunguri in Kiambu County, Kenya. The outing was organized by a local hiking club called Lets Drift.Credit...Rolf Potts
By the time we reached the third waterfall on the Kahunira trail, my wife, Kiki, and I had been walking through the forested backcountry of Kiambu County, Kenya, for nearly three hours. Along the way, we had tasted sweet lady finger bananas in the market town of Githunguri, sipped a sour Kikuyu home brew called muratina proffered by laborers at a rural gravel quarry and made a heart-pounding shortcut across rust-flecked irrigation pipes that traversed a steep gorge fringed with tea plantations.
Our companions were two dozen young Kenyans who’d learned of the excursion through Lets Drift, an outdoor recreation community that creates weekly hikes, bicycle excursions and mountaineering treks in the countryside outside Nairobi.
Upon arriving at the forest-shaded waterfall, some members of our cohort stripped down to swimsuits, performed acrobatic dives off boulders that edged the cascade pool and posed for selfies in the midafternoon sun.
In a part of Africa where the conventional tourism industry was built around a wildlife-focused, British colonial footprint, Lets Drift stands out as an exuberant Kenyan-centered enterprise. Its aim is to celebrate outdoor recreation and, at the same time, generate a sense of community among the country’s growing urban middle class.
ImageFive hikers traverse a low grassy wilderness area, balancing themselves on rusty pipes that are positioned several feet above the ground.
One challenge of the Kahunira trail is walking across rust-flecked water pipes to traverse a gorge en route to the waterfalls.Credit...Rolf Potts
Created in 2018 by Alex Kamau and Paul Njuguna, both from greater Nairobi, Lets Drift attracts roughly 8,000 participants each year, many of whom participate in activities like hiking, e-biking, backcountry camping and digital detox retreats. “Our mission is to make adventure more accessible and affordable for Kenyans,” Mr. Kamau said.
Lets Drift also welcomes international travelers looking for an unconventional experience in Kenya. Within the traditional model of East African tourism, outsiders endeavoring to “meet the locals” often wind up having roadside photo-and-souvenir encounters with Kenyans wearing traditional Masai or Samburu costumes. But on the Kahunira waterfall trail, the Kenyans we interacted with wore Lycra and hiking boots, and carried day packs. Like us, they were tourists; unlike us, they weren’t traveling all that far from home.
‘Affordable and accessible’
The decision to begin our Kenya sojourn by joining a Nairobi hiking club flowed out of my habit of perusing online local newspapers of the places I one day hope to visit. After reading a December 2020 Business Daily Africa feature about Lets Drift, I began to follow the Kenyan hiking community on Instagram. The outdoor images posted there resonated, not because I found them exotic, but because I found their celebration of exploring the wilderness within driving distance of Nairobi relatable to my own youthful summertime explorations of the backcountry trails of the Colorado Rockies.
Indeed, just as the notion of who was able to travel long distances was democratized by railroad and steamship technologies in the 19th century, social media has democratized the kinds of stories — and storytellers — that can inspire and inform us about places before we go there. In giving us a peek into what local people do for fun in the places we seek to visit, hiking clubs like Lets Drift (or similar communities tied to things like sports, art or cuisine) enable us to explore ways that we, as tourists, can respectfully join in.
Ten young people in bathing suits cool off in a natural pool of water fed by a low waterfall. Woods surround the pool, and three other people can be seen hanging out on the rocks surrounding the water.
Lets Drift hikers relax near a waterfall along the Kahunira trail.Credit...Rolf Potts
Our relaxed five-hour Kahunira waterfall hike looped us back to the town of Githunguri, where we shared a classic Kenyan meal of nyama choma (barbecued goat) and ugali (cornmeal porridge) with our fellow hikers as we waited to catch a shared minivan back to Nairobi. In keeping with Lets Drift ritual, we addressed each other by alliterative trail names — Dazzling Daisy, Jolly John, Kurious Kiki, Relaxed Rolf.
When I mentioned that I hadn’t seen the Kahunira waterfalls described in any guidebooks or on any travel websites, Wango Alfred, a 25-year-old artist and photographer from Nairobi who’d served as our guide, told me that Lets Drift scouts out its own routes. “We rarely seek out the same places as international tourists,” he said. “We like to keep things affordable and accessible for everyday Kenyans. Sometimes this means walking across private agricultural lands, so establishing relationships with local leaders and spending money at the village level — like we are right now — counts for a lot.”
I asked him: “Was it strange to have a couple of Americans come along?”
“All kinds of people join us,” he said, noting that Nairobi is a cosmopolitan place that mixes cultures within Kenya, which means Lets Drift hikes might involve people from various ethnic groups socializing with those from other groups: Kikuyu with Kalenjin, Luo with Kenyan Somalis and Kenyan Asians — all of them learning about one another’s cultures as they go. “When Americans or Europeans join us, it feels like we get to travel outside of Kenya and learn things about those places, too. The goal is simply to relax and be present, to feel the ground as we get to know new people, whoever those people might to be.”
The mission: ‘To evangelize outdoor adventure’
In the days following our hike, Kiki and I combined day visits to Nairobi sights like the Karen Blixen Museum and the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust elephant orphanage, with evening meet-ups with our new Kenyan hiking friends.
At a restaurant called the Talisman in the city’s Karen suburb, we had beef stir-fry with a 27-year-old foreign-relations lawyer who’d hiked under the name “Malignant Marc” Chirchir. At the BigFish in Westlands, we had brown ugali and tilapia that had been “wet-fried” in a vegetable stew with “Radiant Ruth” Kuria, a 34-year-old study-abroad administrator. Our conversations mixed the local (Ruth had recently been married in a traditional Kikuyu ceremony; Marc’s Kalenjin family hailed from a tea-growing area) with the global (Marc had spent time in Rwanda and Britain, Ruth in Malaysia and Turkey).
Image
Two young women sit at a table eating traditional Kenyan food. In the background are several other people sitting at tables and walking through a doorway in the background.
Kiki Bush and Ruth Njeri Kuria have a classic Kenyan meal of nyama choma (barbecued goat) and ugali (cornmeal porridge) in the market town of Githunguri.Credit...Rolf Potts
Kiki and I also paid a visit to the Nairobi Garage, a Silicon Valley-style co-working space not far from Nairobi’s central business district. There, on a breezy veranda full of young Africans doing business on their laptops and smartphones, we met Mr. Kamau, the 30-year-old Nairobi native who helped found Lets Drift in 2018.
“Our first goal was to evangelize outdoor adventure among Kenyans,” Mr. Kamau said. “And at the same time, we’re trying to decolonize that idea of travel. At popular tourist destinations like the Masai Mara, three out of every five safari outfitters are operated by Western companies, not by Kenyans. I don’t take it personally, but I want to shift the dynamics with what we are doing with Lets Drift. We are fighting hard to make sure people aren’t looking at just one dimension of our country.”
Alex told us how Lets Drift started as a WhatsApp group of recent university graduates who enjoyed hiking together as a way to stretch their comfort zones and experience new places. As word of mouth grew, Mr. Kamau and Mr. Njuguna asked for a small subscription fee to cover group expenses. The turning point for Lets Drift came in 2020, when dusk-to-dawn Covid curfews compelled scores of Kenyans to seek outdoor diversions by day.
“Before Covid we would have maybe five people on a hike,” Mr. Kamau said. “The first hike after Covid attracted 50 people. I remember calling Paul and asking him, ‘Do you know anyone we can hire? We need more guides.’ So instead of having one hike on a single day, we’d organize five.”
Rich stories
Lets Drift operates on a subscription model, with Kenyan members gaining access to a variety of beginner, moderate and challenging hikes for the 2,000-shilling monthly fee (about $15; non-Kenyans pay the equivalent of $20 to $40 per excursion, depending on the type of experience and the distance from Nairobi).
Hikes are organized around attractions, accessibility and safety; some offerings also include yoga, mountain biking and photography excursions. “We want more people to travel,” Mr. Kamau said, “so we’re experimenting with all the things we can do for them.”
Image
Three women pose for a cellphone photo on a trail in the woods. Behind them are ferns and other vegetation, and in the foreground, the person taking the photo is wearing a backpack and light jacket.
Kiki Bush, Ruth Njeri Kuria and Nina Mwango pose for a photo on the Kahunira trail.Credit...Rolf Potts
“We’ve seen a shift in the way Kenyans view their own wilderness,” he added. “People used to view hiking and mountaineering as a mzungu thing,” he added, using the Swahili term for foreign people. “Now we see it as something that’s accessible for everyone.”
Mr. Kamau went on to describe some of the reasons members have given for joining Lets Drift. “One member told me she joined Lets Drift because it was a more enjoyable way to work out than going to the gym,” he said. “Another joined so she could have a day each week where she could just be herself, instead of being seen as someone’s mother or daughter or employee. And of course, people like you and Kiki are just looking for a different way to experience our country.”
“When you match all these perspectives together,” he said, “the stories people hear about Kenya become so much richer.”
Rolf Potts is the author of five books, including “Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Word Travel” and, most recently, “The Vagabond’s Way.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/trav ... 778d3e6de3#
Re: Tourism / Travel
Greece to Restrict Cruise Visits as Islands Struggle With Tourist Crowds
In a country where vacationers are a keystone of the economy, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is embracing a European trend toward tighter tourism regulation.
Watching the sunset in Santorini, Greece, in July.Credit...Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters
With the treasures of its history, the beauty of its islands and the golden sands of its beaches, Greece offers tourists many reasons to visit. But a seemingly endless influx in recent years has caused headaches at some of its most popular destinations.
So this weekend, its prime minister proposed an array of measures aimed at curbing some effects of the growing crowds.
The changes include hefty increases to docking fees for cruise ships at some of Greece’s most popular islands, and limits to daily cruise ship arrivals. The rules aim to reduce the strain that the vacation industry places on communities and echo a pushback against overtourism in several other major European destinations.
“Tourism supports the economy with significant resources and jobs, but it has its own particular social impact,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said during his annual state of the economy speech in Thessaloniki on Saturday night. He added that he was “very concerned about the image on some of our islands some months of the year due to cruise ships.”
More details will be announced next week, he said.
Image
Tourists climbing a steep hillside walkway overlooking the sea. A gigantic cruise ship is visible in the background.
A cruise ship arriving in Santorini, where docking fees are to be raised.Credit...Aris Oikonomou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Discontent over tourism has flared across Europe since pandemic-related travel restrictions receded. In April, Venice introduced an entry fee of 5 euros, about $5.50, on certain days. In July, protesters in Barcelona marched in exasperation with tourist numbers.
And after those cities diverted cruises from busy ports, officials in Amsterdam decided to cut cruise traffic in half by 2026, before eventually closing its terminal, citing worries about overcrowding and pollution.
The issue carries particularly high stakes in Greece, where tourism accounts for about a fifth of economic output. A record 33 million people visited last year, according to the Bank of Greece, which said numbers were up a further 15.5 percent in the first half of 2024.
Vacation rentals and foreign buyers have also driven home prices to a level that many locals say they struggle to afford on many islands, while a wave of villa construction has contributed to water shortages.
Image
People sitting and standing on a hill overlooking the classical ruins of the Acropolis.
Visitors near the Acropolis. Tourism accounts for about a fifth of Greece’s economic output.Credit...Louiza Vradi/Reuters
“We’ve had yet another extremely successful tourism year,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, noting that the sector was going “from record to record.”
To address overcrowding, disembarkation fees for cruises would be increased, he said, with larger rises for particularly popular islands like Mykonos and Santorini, where the authorities and residents have been pushing for constraints.
Fees will rise to 20 euros for those islands during the high season, he told a news conference on Sunday, a steep hike from the current charge of 35 cents for Santorini. Some of the additional revenue will go toward local infrastructure, he said.
The government will also increase a lodging tax paid by hotels and rental accommodations on the islands, with those proceeds going toward local communities to help them during the peak season, Mr. Mitsotakis said.
And property owners who offer long-term leases, rather than the short-term rentals generally given to international visitors, will be exempt from paying rental tax for three years, he said.
Mr. Mitsotakis also heralded restrictions, to be announced in coming weeks, on runaway construction on the most overdeveloped islands, apparently targeting vacation homes. “Let’s take action and put the brakes, wherever needed, on islands where we believe that the situation has reached a point that the infrastructure is essentially being tested,” he told reporters.
The map highlights the islands of Santorini, Sifnos, Amorgos, and Serifos, off the southeast coast of Greece.
BULGARIA
NORTH
MACEDONIA
TURKEY
Aegean Sea
GREECE
Athens
SERIFOS
AMORGOS
SIFNOS
SANTORINI
1OO MILES
By The New York Times
The cruise industry is booming in Greece, with a projected increase of 20 percent in ship arrivals this year, totaling more than eight million passengers, according to Giorgos Koubenas, the president of Greece’s union of cruise-ship owners, who said revenues this year were projected at €2 billion.
Santorini, with its volcanic beaches and dramatic caldera, is Greece’s most popular cruise destination, with 1.3 million cruise visitors last year, according to the Hellenic Ports Association. An official there provoked an angry backlash on a particularly busy July day when he urged residents — population 15,500 — to stay home to make way for an expected 17,000 visitors.
The mayor, Nikos Zorzos, said that the authorities did what they could to keep daily visitors under 8,000, but that itineraries were set two years in advance, causing some “very difficult days.”
“It’s important that each island has the ability to regulate the situation locally,” he said, “that local authorities have control in such significant issues that directly influence the daily lives of residents.”
Image
A clump of buses parked by a quayside, seen from above.
Transfer buses for cruise passengers in Santorini.Credit...Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters
Some residents of smaller islands, however, say they fear that restrictions will push the problems of cruise traffic onto them.
“I’m very worried,” said Thodoris Halaris, a 64-year-old resident of Amorgos, an island of about 2,000 that received its first large cruise ship last month. Cruises risk crowding out the regular visitors he rents to, he said, and don’t suit the island’s relatively small beaches.
“It’s like the theater of the absurd,” he said. “Fifty people swimming on a beach and a 250-meter cruise ship docked in front of them.”
Konstantinos Revinthis, the mayor of Serifos, said he was persuaded to oppose cruise visits after a medium-size liner brought some 2,000 passengers to his island of roughly 1,000.
“We don’t have the infrastructure to host so many people,” he said.
Image
The sun setting over a large cruise ship, with a crowd of people watching and photographing in the foreground.
The sunset seen from the village of Oia, on Santorini.Credit...Aris Oikonomou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
In a country where vacationers are a keystone of the economy, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is embracing a European trend toward tighter tourism regulation.
Watching the sunset in Santorini, Greece, in July.Credit...Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters
With the treasures of its history, the beauty of its islands and the golden sands of its beaches, Greece offers tourists many reasons to visit. But a seemingly endless influx in recent years has caused headaches at some of its most popular destinations.
So this weekend, its prime minister proposed an array of measures aimed at curbing some effects of the growing crowds.
The changes include hefty increases to docking fees for cruise ships at some of Greece’s most popular islands, and limits to daily cruise ship arrivals. The rules aim to reduce the strain that the vacation industry places on communities and echo a pushback against overtourism in several other major European destinations.
“Tourism supports the economy with significant resources and jobs, but it has its own particular social impact,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said during his annual state of the economy speech in Thessaloniki on Saturday night. He added that he was “very concerned about the image on some of our islands some months of the year due to cruise ships.”
More details will be announced next week, he said.
Image
Tourists climbing a steep hillside walkway overlooking the sea. A gigantic cruise ship is visible in the background.
A cruise ship arriving in Santorini, where docking fees are to be raised.Credit...Aris Oikonomou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Discontent over tourism has flared across Europe since pandemic-related travel restrictions receded. In April, Venice introduced an entry fee of 5 euros, about $5.50, on certain days. In July, protesters in Barcelona marched in exasperation with tourist numbers.
And after those cities diverted cruises from busy ports, officials in Amsterdam decided to cut cruise traffic in half by 2026, before eventually closing its terminal, citing worries about overcrowding and pollution.
The issue carries particularly high stakes in Greece, where tourism accounts for about a fifth of economic output. A record 33 million people visited last year, according to the Bank of Greece, which said numbers were up a further 15.5 percent in the first half of 2024.
Vacation rentals and foreign buyers have also driven home prices to a level that many locals say they struggle to afford on many islands, while a wave of villa construction has contributed to water shortages.
Image
People sitting and standing on a hill overlooking the classical ruins of the Acropolis.
Visitors near the Acropolis. Tourism accounts for about a fifth of Greece’s economic output.Credit...Louiza Vradi/Reuters
“We’ve had yet another extremely successful tourism year,” Mr. Mitsotakis said, noting that the sector was going “from record to record.”
To address overcrowding, disembarkation fees for cruises would be increased, he said, with larger rises for particularly popular islands like Mykonos and Santorini, where the authorities and residents have been pushing for constraints.
Fees will rise to 20 euros for those islands during the high season, he told a news conference on Sunday, a steep hike from the current charge of 35 cents for Santorini. Some of the additional revenue will go toward local infrastructure, he said.
The government will also increase a lodging tax paid by hotels and rental accommodations on the islands, with those proceeds going toward local communities to help them during the peak season, Mr. Mitsotakis said.
And property owners who offer long-term leases, rather than the short-term rentals generally given to international visitors, will be exempt from paying rental tax for three years, he said.
Mr. Mitsotakis also heralded restrictions, to be announced in coming weeks, on runaway construction on the most overdeveloped islands, apparently targeting vacation homes. “Let’s take action and put the brakes, wherever needed, on islands where we believe that the situation has reached a point that the infrastructure is essentially being tested,” he told reporters.
The map highlights the islands of Santorini, Sifnos, Amorgos, and Serifos, off the southeast coast of Greece.
BULGARIA
NORTH
MACEDONIA
TURKEY
Aegean Sea
GREECE
Athens
SERIFOS
AMORGOS
SIFNOS
SANTORINI
1OO MILES
By The New York Times
The cruise industry is booming in Greece, with a projected increase of 20 percent in ship arrivals this year, totaling more than eight million passengers, according to Giorgos Koubenas, the president of Greece’s union of cruise-ship owners, who said revenues this year were projected at €2 billion.
Santorini, with its volcanic beaches and dramatic caldera, is Greece’s most popular cruise destination, with 1.3 million cruise visitors last year, according to the Hellenic Ports Association. An official there provoked an angry backlash on a particularly busy July day when he urged residents — population 15,500 — to stay home to make way for an expected 17,000 visitors.
The mayor, Nikos Zorzos, said that the authorities did what they could to keep daily visitors under 8,000, but that itineraries were set two years in advance, causing some “very difficult days.”
“It’s important that each island has the ability to regulate the situation locally,” he said, “that local authorities have control in such significant issues that directly influence the daily lives of residents.”
Image
A clump of buses parked by a quayside, seen from above.
Transfer buses for cruise passengers in Santorini.Credit...Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters
Some residents of smaller islands, however, say they fear that restrictions will push the problems of cruise traffic onto them.
“I’m very worried,” said Thodoris Halaris, a 64-year-old resident of Amorgos, an island of about 2,000 that received its first large cruise ship last month. Cruises risk crowding out the regular visitors he rents to, he said, and don’t suit the island’s relatively small beaches.
“It’s like the theater of the absurd,” he said. “Fifty people swimming on a beach and a 250-meter cruise ship docked in front of them.”
Konstantinos Revinthis, the mayor of Serifos, said he was persuaded to oppose cruise visits after a medium-size liner brought some 2,000 passengers to his island of roughly 1,000.
“We don’t have the infrastructure to host so many people,” he said.
Image
The sun setting over a large cruise ship, with a crowd of people watching and photographing in the foreground.
The sunset seen from the village of Oia, on Santorini.Credit...Aris Oikonomou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Tourism / Travel
As received:
MANDATORY ONLINE VISA SERVICE TO TANZANIA FROM 30 November 2024. https://visa.immigration.go.tz/ Since Tanzania Visa Application Service on online enables visitors to apply, pay for and receive answers to their visas without going through Immigration Offices or Tanzanian Embassy in accredited countries, from 30 November 2024 provision of visa on arrival service will not be available, and instead the service will be provided electronically, that means, only online visa application service will be available.
MANDATORY ONLINE VISA SERVICE TO TANZANIA FROM 30 November 2024. https://visa.immigration.go.tz/ Since Tanzania Visa Application Service on online enables visitors to apply, pay for and receive answers to their visas without going through Immigration Offices or Tanzanian Embassy in accredited countries, from 30 November 2024 provision of visa on arrival service will not be available, and instead the service will be provided electronically, that means, only online visa application service will be available.
Re: Tourism / Travel
Important Visa update for United Kingdom for Canadian/USA Nationalities
From 8th January 2025, as per UK entry requirements, Travelers need an Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) to visit United Kingdom for tourism, visit family and friends, business,
or transit through the UK.
Beginning 27th November 2024, travelers of Canada / USA Nationalities can submit an ETA application online. Everyone travelling needs to get an ETA, including babies and children.
Once the application is approved, travellers receive their ETA confirmation electronically. An ETA is electronically linked to the passport and valid for up to 2 years for multiple entries.
If travellers receive a new passport, they must apply for a new ETA.
Source: For complete information, please visit: www.gov.uk/electronic-travel-authorisation.
From 8th January 2025, as per UK entry requirements, Travelers need an Electronic Travel Authorization (ETA) to visit United Kingdom for tourism, visit family and friends, business,
or transit through the UK.
Beginning 27th November 2024, travelers of Canada / USA Nationalities can submit an ETA application online. Everyone travelling needs to get an ETA, including babies and children.
Once the application is approved, travellers receive their ETA confirmation electronically. An ETA is electronically linked to the passport and valid for up to 2 years for multiple entries.
If travellers receive a new passport, they must apply for a new ETA.
Source: For complete information, please visit: www.gov.uk/electronic-travel-authorisation.