Tourists pose in front of the Colosseum in Rome. Photograph: Tony Gentile / Reuters/Reuters
Saturday 25 July 2015 23.22 BSTLast modified on Sunday 26 July 201500.02 BST
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A bar not 300 metres from Rome’s Spanish Steps. Two Russian women – they could be mother and daughter – sip aperitivi. A couple speaking Brazilian Portuguese wait for sandwiches at the counter, while a boisterous party of Chinese makes its way past the glass door, shut against the sweltering heat.
Rome is as good a place as any to observe trends in global tourism, and what the Romans have experienced in recent years is a Bric [Brazil, Russia, India and China] through the window. People from countries whose languages had seldom before been heard on the streets of the Eternal City – Turkey is another – have been arriving in Rome in steadily mounting numbers.
Their presence is the visible evidence of a surge in international tourism, driven by the newly acquired prosperity of the G20 giants, that has confounded predictions of moderate growth in the wake of the global financial crisis. According to the UN World Tourism Organisation, arrivals have exceeded the long-term average in each of the past five years. In 2014, international tourist traffic grew by 4.7%, which was above the top end of the range envisaged by UN forecasters.
Such a flood of humanity sloshing around the planet raises many issues. The environmental challenges have been extensively debated. But there are others relating to equity and discrimination that have so far been barely touched upon. In absolute numbers, Europe is far and away the biggest destination: 588 million tourists poured across its international frontiers in 2014. But the soaring numbers are a global phenomenon.
If there is such a thing as a “typical tourist”, he is no longer an American in a floral shirt with a Panama on his head and a camera round his neck. He – or she – is now a member of the burgeoning middle-class of the nation that now rivals the US for global economic supremacy.
UNWTO estimates that since 2012, China has been supplying the global market with more international holidaymakers than any other nation. And most of them travel not to Miami or Paris, but to other nations in Asia. Like their much-caricatured American predecessors in the postwar era, the behaviour of China’s new travellers is not always sensitive to local Asian traditions and beliefs. In February, there was outrage in Thailand over evidence that a tourist, presumed to be Chinese – a video taken at the time shows him speaking Mandarin – had rung and then kicked the bells of a 14th-century temple in Chiang Mai.
Not that the Chinese have a monopoly on grossly offensive behaviour. Last August, residents came out in spontaneous protest in Barcelona after three Italian touristswandered naked through the La Barcelonetadistrict. Last month, a British woman was arrested in Malaysia for posing naked on top of a sacred mountain. This month, it was the turn of a Bulgarian footballer on holiday in Rome, who was fined for gouging his initials into the fabric of the Colosseum.
Such incidents are extreme. But they focus attention on whether tourism on the scale that the world is now experiencing is the axiomatic benefit it has traditionally been depicted to be. Does it, in fact, broaden the mind, erode people’s belief in national stereotypes and introduce them to other ways of thinking? It is hard to make that case for much of the tourism to be found in Magaluf, Phuket or Cancún.
But, as UNWTO and the travel trade point out, their industry does generate jobs and prosperity. “Over the past years, tourism has proved to be a surprisingly strong and resilient economic activity and a fundamental contributor to the economic recovery,” UNWTO’s secretary-general, Taleb Rifai, said in January. “This has been true for destinations all around the world, but particularly for Europe as the region struggles to consolidate its way out of one of the worst economic periods in its history.”
Nowhere has that been truer than in the countries that have suffered most from the crisis in the eurozone. In the past five years, southern Europe has consistently been among the sub-regions where tourism growth has been strongest.
The turning of the Arab spring into a violent and chaotic winter should ensure the bonanza continues. Holidaymakers who might otherwise have gone to Egypt and Tunisia or more adventurous destinations such as Yemen and Syria have opted for southern Europe instead.
One of the more bizarre aspects of the recent crisis in Greece was the contrast between the air of impending financial apocalypse and the mobs of carefree tourists on the streets of Athens. Directly opposite parliament, on the far side of Syntagma Square, is Ermou Street. Day after day and night after night, as Greece’s MPs wrangled over whether to defy the European institutions and risk exit from the euro, a torrent of holidaying humanity was pouring down Ermou Street to the main youth assembly point of Athens, Monastiraki Square.
Crisis? What crisis? By the time the banks were closed down, it was all but impossible to get a hotel room in the capital. Michael Massourakis, chief economist at the Greek employers’ association, SEV, said tourism in the opening four months of the years had been doing “brilliantly”.
After the true situation became painfully visible and long queues began to form at ATMs throughout the country, tour operators and hotel owners reported a wave of cancellations. But that will only pour yet more people into Italy, Spain and Portugal.
Which is where this tidal wave of holidaymaking humanity is beginning to run up against the first flood defences. In many other parts of the world, people have begun to ask: when does good become just too much? But it is in Mediterranean Europe – paradoxically, an area exceptionally dependent on tourism – that public indignation is starting to translate into political action.
So far, the most radical step has been taken in Barcelona. The city’s new mayor, the anti-eviction activist Ada Colau, has imposed a 12-month moratorium on the granting on new licences for tourist accommodation. In Seville and some other Spanish cities, groups of local activists have succeeded in blocking the conversion of historic buildings into luxury hotels.
The municipal authorities in Venice are considering curbing the number of tourists. One proposal would force visitors to buy an entry ticket and put a ceiling on the number of people allowed in at any one time.
Venice is exceptional. Its biggest problem is made up of the 11 million or so day trippers who visit the city every year, putting an intolerable strain on Venice’s services yet contributing almost nothing to its finances. The problem has been exacerbated in recent years by a new generation of super-cruiseliners, which also represent an affront to the senses, dwarfing the architecture of the city as they make their way past St Mark’s Square.
Venice, though, is just as susceptible as any other tourist city to a new complication. Until a few years ago, the authorities had a hold on the number of people who could stay in their city: hotels, guest houses and other forms of accommodation had to be licensed. All the authorities had to do to limit the numbers of overnight visitors was stop giving out licences.
Then along came the internet, bringing with it couchsurfing and Airbnb.com. The licensing has remained. But it has become increasingly meaningless. The municipal authorities in Rome estimate that there are now 5,000 unregulated establishments offering a bed for the night. All of which argues in favour of a second plan being proposed for Venice. This would involve putting up turnstiles around St Mark’s Square, the “must-see” for most of the tourists who go to the city. Entry would be by means of a card. And cards would only be given out to residents, day trippers who paid and overnighters staying in registered establishments.
The growing popularity of unlicensed accommodation also raises doubts about Ada Colau’s initiative in Barcelona. It was a response to the virtual colonisation of the old city, the Ciutat Vella, and particularly of Barcelona’s Gothic quarter, by mainly young tourists.
But it is a fair bet that, like those who pack Monastiraki square at the other end of the Mediterranean, a high proportion are staying informally in other people’s flats and houses. They are unlikely to be deterred by a halt in the construction of a new Four Seasons hotel, which is among the reported consequences of the ban.
All of which sharpens the focus on the ethical issues cited earlier. Efforts to limit numbers of tourists are going to have to involve selection of some kind – and the easiest way to do that without inviting accusations of discrimination is to price out some tourists, but not others. In that context, young or poor becomes bad, while older and richer becomes good.
If, for example, the turnstile solution were to be applied to St Mark’s Square, rich Japanese CEOs in their five-star hotel on the Grand Canal would be able to drift in and out at leisure while their backpacking compatriots might have difficulty scraping together the funds for a single visit.
As the curbs and bans bite, more-over, they will pose questions similar to – though less vital than – those raised by the debate over global warming. Indians and Chinese understandably balk at the idea of restrictions on the burning of carbon, arguing that the western nations were able to pollute – and prosper – freely for more than a century before discovering their environmental consciences – and deciding that still-poor nations needed to abide by them too.
The same argument can be applied to tourism, and particularly the kind that brings Koreans to admire the glories of Versailles and Kenyans to marvel at the art in the Uffizi. Is it fair to deny, or restrict, access to cultural treasures that we westerners have been able to enjoy for decades?
In the case of global warming, the conclusion has been that we cannot afford to be anything but unfair. And that may be the only way to ensure that historic cities and coastlines all around the world remain worth visiting by anyone.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/25/tourist-hotspots-visitors-developing-countries?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Facebook
