• FortyTwo@lemmy.world
    50·
    5 days ago

    Usually people already live there and have normal jobs. Some big attraction is commercialised, a company (often but not always from outside the community) profits off of it. People like it so more and more keep coming, causing prices to jump. Slowly but surely people can’t afford housing. Normal businesses that do normal work can’t remain competitive when their offices get much more expensive, so they depart too, leaving only more tourism-focused companies to be profitable. The locals have to choose between leaving their home or joining the companies that ruined it.

    Mass tourism industries do provide a lot of income for businesses that profit off it. But to do so those businesses have cannibalised the actual life and economic activity of the location. Nice for the businesses, less so for the people who just wanted to live and have a normal job in their home town…

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      5 days ago

      Austin went this way back in the '00s.

      The city leadership decided throwing tons of events would boost business in the city. So you took this kinda quiet college town and juiced up with an endless parade of car races, festivals, and corporate events without ever building out public infrastructure.

      On top of that, downtown kept expanding well past the point that the traffic can accommodate it.

      So you just get these nightmarish jams all through the city constantly.

  • wpb@lemmy.world
    22·
    5 days ago

    So what I’m supposed to kiss your feet because the owning class is raking in bags of cash off of you driving up prices on pretty much everything, while we’re left with you getting shitfaced and acting like complete assholes? Thanks I guess.

    • lauha@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 days ago

      While I hate tourism and owning class as much as the other guy, you have to account for economical realities. A lot of small places would be dying ghost towns without tourism. Only realistic (but not necessarily easy) way to reduce tourism without destroying the economy is to found alternate competing economical activity so that the city is less dependent on tourism and then find a way to limit tourism by some means.

    • Eric
      22·
      5 days ago

      Yea god forbid you don’t want your town turned into a playground for wealthy foreigners. Yay! High rent and plenty of dead end service jobs

      • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
        11·
        5 days ago

        The area I grew up was known for partying in the summer. Tourists would wander around local neighborhoods drunk af and piss in people’s front lawns without a care. They’d drive drunk and our cops hyped up on everyone as a result. The very first time I was pulled over was in such an area, allegedly for running a red light (I turned right, which is legal. So the cop changed gears and said I didn’t stop fully before turning. This was before dash cams were standard, so it was his word vs mine.)

        He asked me three fucking times, “Have you been drinking? ARE YOU SURE?” I was like 18, on my way to work, and had yet to even touch an alcoholic drink in my life. I’d say he went from 0 to 11, but that’d be generous. He initiated the situation already determined that I was a criminal. Add on, the local police department building was on the same street we stopped on, so a crowd of officers ended up standing around watching us. The guy might have been putting on a show for his buddies. It was such an aggressive experience that afterwards, I pulled over somewhere and cried.

        I know, I got off lucky with those American cops. I can’t imagine how it would’ve gone if I’d had a darker skintone. ACAB, but especially cops in tourist areas. They clock in with a bone to pick and a quota to fill.

  • Comrade_Spood@quokk.auEnglish
    133·
    6 days ago

    Thats because the residents didnt choose to have their town be economically dependent on tourism. Tourist economies tend to really fuck over local residents. Be it insane housing prices due to airbnbs. Or lack of necessities like grocery stores, affordable restuarants, etc due to all the stores being knick-knack and commodity shops or gentrified tourist centered restaurants. Lack of decent jobs due to everything being targeted towards tourism (really shitty if its seasonal tourism, cause then you are out of the job for the off season). Not to mention having to deal with the roads being congested with tourists, be they pedestrians or drivers. Plus so so so much more. My take, a place should NEVER base its economy around tourism. I got no problem with tourism, but it should be a byproduct or consequence of having a place worth visiting. Not the whole point of the town existing. An economy around tourism is like an economy built around oil. Yeah its a great boost to income for the place, but it comes at the expensive of QoL for the residents, and eventually the well will dry up and youll have nothing to fall back on.

    • titanicx@lemmy.zip
      32·
      6 days ago

      There are so many places that without tourism, there isn’t a reason to be there. I drive the Western US pretty thoroughly and the difference between small towns where tourists go, and those that have nothing, is stark. They love to complain about it, and hate on tourists, but damn do they want that money. You go am hour down the road and get to the next town and it’s dead, no grocery stores, no real business, most the main streets are boarded up from failed attempts at building something. People are fucking stupid, you have have some reason your town exists, or you end up with those towns in Wyoming I drive through that have 20 population, and won’t last another generation.

      • happydoors@lemmy.world
        11·
        5 days ago

        Reminds me of when I ran into some international students and they asked me “what is in Indiana? Who would ever live there?” Sometimes people just are born or end up places and social ties, debt, or whatever keeps them there. Moving is easy for some, remarkably hard for others.

        • Tiral@lemmy.world
          1·
          4 days ago

          Sure, but also people just like it. I live in Illinois about 2.5 hours out of Chicago and I love it. We have all 4 seasons, the population is roughly 400k, we have basically everything a major city has, way less traffic, cost of living is minimal (comparatively), I can travel 10 miles out and it’s farmland where we can run ATVs and dirt bikes, hunting (not my thing personally), you can easily go into Chicago if there’s a huge concert or event (we get a lot locally too).

          I get that it isn’t everyone’s thing with snowing a few times a year, or you’re not an hour from a beach. But that would eventually get old after a while I’m sure.

          Just saying there are plenty of reasons to pick “why would you live there” places.

      • 0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        14·
        6 days ago

        What a strange take. The people that run businesses are almost never the entirety of the town. If they are, you’re likely in a theme park or a carnival. And of course the businesses want your money.

        Have you interacted with someone that doesn’t run a business there?

        • titanicx@lemmy.zip
          14·
          6 days ago

          Yes, but you do realize that the people that live there work at those businesses. If tourism doesn’t exist in those areas, those jobs that they rely on wouldn’t exist. You don’t have to own a business to profit from it. In many of those areas, there isn’t any other real industry.

          • EldritchFemininity
            7·
            5 days ago

            In many of those areas, there isn’t any other real industry.

            And this is the crux of the issue people have with tourist towns as well. Tourism as an industry drives up CoL through inflated property values and increased prices for basic essentials but is a low wage industry.

            An economy needs money to flow, but you need more than a low wage industry for a healthy area. Otherwise, you’ve basically just reinvented serfdom with a different product.

      • FudgyMcTubbs@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 days ago

        Man, I had to drive from Cody to Casper back in 2013 or so… Shoshoni Wyoming looks like the zombie apocalypse already came and went. Like holy shit, what did those folks do to deserve to be stuck living there?

    • Elting@piefed.socialEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      I definitely have some contempt for the fudgies but it aint all that bad. There is more nuance here to how tourist towns go about managing their population booms.

      • Comrade_Spood@quokk.auEnglish
        11·
        6 days ago

        I live in a state that is very tourism centered, and I’ve lived in and near towns and cities that are tourist economies or trying to be. Speaking from that experience, whatever good they bring is outweighed by the problems they cause. Tourism is nuanced, but tourism economies I don’t feel are. I’ve never once heard a resident of a tourist town talk positively of tourism unless they are a business owner or otherwise have some stake in the game, like landlords or airbnd owners.

        • Elting@piefed.socialEnglish
          7·
          6 days ago

          Some economies can naturally gravitate towards tourism without local intent. If your town is building kitsch then you are probably on the sour end of that spectrum. Here tourism is inevitable, its in the lay of the land. Our town doesnt suck at managing it though, no more than two air bnbs per city block downtown. We have plenty of Inns and Hotels built out to accommodate for short term housing so tourists aren’t competing against locals for space. I would also argue (all be it with some bias) that renting out short term rooms is distinct from being a landlord in a few key ways. A lot more time and effort and care is required from an innkeeper than a landlord, they provide real service to somebody rather than just cornering a resource to sell it back to the community.

          • Comrade_Spood@quokk.auEnglish
            6·
            6 days ago

            Fair. Here, they lean way into it. “Vacation land” being the state motto. Camden, Bar Harbor, and Ogunquit being the three worst towns that I am aware of in terms of tourism, but theres plenty more. Lots of homes here are owned by snowbirds (rich people who own summer homes up here and then live in their homes in Florida or whatever in the winter). The economy is already fucked because of the large elderly population, and then its further fucked by all these rich vacationers who each up the housing. All the recreational stuff around here is very tourist adjacent or targeted like skiing, hunting, hiking, etc. Which the lack of third spaces, non-outdoor recreational activities, and most industry being catered to sustaining the elderly or tourists leads to all the young people moving out of state for better opportunities. Which obviously just makes all these problems worse. The place I live, most of the housing is owned by like one or two huge landlord companies too.

            That is to say though, I feel like an economy that drifts to tourism like you say, while yes is a tourism economy, I feel it also kinda leans into tourism as a byproduct rather than the goal. Unless you feel thats not the case, idk.

            • Elting@piefed.socialEnglish
              3·
              6 days ago

              Yeah we have a disproportionately elderly population and many snowbirds too. Our economy used to be highly industrial, and we do still have a lot of operational factories outside of town which provide a lot of stability for the winter months. We also have a huge state park which soaks up a lot of the tourists as they go camp there instead of staying in town, as well as being a favorite spot for locals to go. If we didn’t have these things then tourism would be a lot more damaging to the area.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      As opposed to economic and cultural deserts? Just look at US’ midwest: no tourism, no anything - just misery. Now take a look at tourist areas even in developing countries that are far ahead of the richest country in the world because people are not fucking stupid there and choose prosperity over exclusivity.

      • Comrade_Spood@quokk.auEnglish
        10·
        5 days ago

        Somebody got a business degree from their local community college (no disrespect to community colleges, major disrespect to business majors). You’re like a rich man telling the poor to count their blessings and pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Fuck off and maybe learn to read before you go trying to lecture me about how great living in a tourist economy is.

        • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          5 days ago

          Nope started with nothing but thousands bucks and a laptop, traveled all around the world working remotely and saw how life changing tourism is all around the world and how many wonderful people work in tourism and most importantly how connecting tourism is in our society. You are free to disagree with me but I gain nothing for argueing in favor of tourism (I don’t work in this niche) other than fight against this injustice and misinformation hateful losers spread online to justify their own bigotry.

          • Comrade_Spood@quokk.auEnglish
            7·
            5 days ago

            Wow, please continue to tell the person living paycheck to paycheck, working in houseless services, living in tourist town, and has never had the money to even step foot outside of New England, how great tourism is. And you very much have stake in the game Mr. “I’ve travelled the world.” You’re literally the person the economy of these places is catering to.

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
        3·
        5 days ago

        no anything

        Well besides absolute shitloads of farms, which some correct people might consider less than glamorous but which still have to go somewhere - and which every developing nation also needs many of. Seriously, this is a deeply apples-to-things-that-aren’t-apples comparison.

  • kittenzrulz123@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    21·
    5 days ago

    To be fair basing an entire economy around tourism tends to make a city shitty. I live in NYC and its a city that people actually live in with an actual economy, when tourists come they stick to the shitty parts that people here tend to avoid so they’re mostly out of the way.

  • AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.socialEnglish
    53·
    6 days ago

    I’d really love you to try and live in one of those cities. Not just spend some days there, but actually live there.

    Housing prices, thanks to fucking airbnb are the highest of your country so buying a house is impossible, but even renting is nearly impossible because nobody wants to rent to a local when they can earn 3x or more by scamming tourists.

    Want to work here? You either work in services (bars, restaurants, or other kind of touristic slavery) or need to look for work out of the city. You might be lucky enough to work in something that’s not tourism related, but it’s pure luck to find one.

    The city centre? Yeah… Don’t go there, you’re not gonna find other than a tourist theme park. Tons of shops created exclusively with the tourist in mind and don’t you dare trying to look for something to eat. All you’ll find are tourist traps.

    I’ve seen this city become the shithole it is today thanks to tourism.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      19·
      6 days ago

      And this is before considering the side effects.

      The high real-estate prices and high cost of living mean high business costs and high personnel costs, so Tourism will actually push out or kill other Industries, even the kind that employs highly qualified people.

      Choosing Tourism as the backbone of a country or city is choosing a 2nd World status of having a low value added Economy that employs only people with little or no specialization or formal Education (about 4 of years of high-school is enough to qualify for even a customer facing job in a non-English language country) - in other words, eternal mediocrity. That might be a dream come true if you’re a dirt poor place whose only product is natural beauty and were people were just fishermen or doing subsistence agriculture, but for a 1st World nation betting on Tourism as a pillar of one’s Economy is choosing to become worse rather than better.

      To add insult to injury, Tourism is a highly variably industry prone to massive and very fast crashes - all it takes is some volcano to start spewing dust in the the athmosphere and stop flights, a Terrorist attack or just an Economic downturn and suddenly the number of tourists coming in collapse to near zero.

      • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        14·
        6 days ago

        Or the Strait of Hormuz closing and jet fuel suddenly skyrocketing in price. According to someone I know who’s taking a flight to the UK next month, it’s really not clear if it’ll be affordable or possible for her to come back. Apparently a lot of flights have already been canceled.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          8·
          6 days ago

          Well spotted!

          I hadn’t noticed that incoming Tourism shitstorm yet.

          Who knows, maybe house prices in Portugal won’t go up 17% for two years in a row…

      • AmosBurton_ThatGuy@lemmy.ca
        12·
        6 days ago

        Whynotboth.jpeg

        Tourists are annoying AF especially cause they don’t know the local roads and they end up slowing down all traffic because of that. Fuck 'em. I just wanna get home after work in a timely manner, hate being stuck behind some ancient murican that doesn’t know their way around town.

      • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        5 days ago

        I once dealt with a hotel guest who was genuinely upset because shuttle service was suspended due to an active shooter across the street, and he had a tee time he was going to miss.

        This is the sort of entitlement people in the service industry deal with every single day. I blame capitalism because it incentivizes this sort of behavior, but I do not absolve tourists.

        • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
          2·
          5 days ago

          People in the service industry have to deal with bad customers no matter if they are tourists or not. E.g. it’s we’ll known that Sunday after-church crowds are very rude and really bad tippers.

          I’d say you shouldn’t be a bad customer no matter where you interact with service personnel.

          • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            4 days ago

            And similarly, it’s known that tourists are shitty customers when compared with business travelers.

            • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
              2·
              4 days ago

              But not necessarily compared with locals. Of course that’s only relevant when you don’t work in a tourist oriented business.

              • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                4 days ago

                But not necessarily compared with locals.

                You make a point. The person who thinks they can pay for a hotel room with a photo of someone else’s credit card or wants to pay in cash in the morning after their stay. The guy who walks in at 12:01 in the morning and wants to stay 2 nights for the price of one because it’s technically the next day. The guy who is there at 2am with a different sex worker every week and wants to rent by the hour. The guy who gets a single king standard room and thinks because we rented him a room, he gets to invite all his extended family around to have a party by the pool. Most bachelorette parties. Those are all locals.

                On the other hand, every children’s hockey team. Every spring breaker who drives drunk into your parking lot and refuses to believe that you’re sold out. Every snowbird whose idea of socializing is demanding that you change hotel policy. Every middle aged racist in town for a fishing tourney who decides to talk politics because they see a captive audience to give them the attention their estranged family no longer will. Bachelorette parties for destination weddings. Those are all tourists.

                Either is likely to sneak pets into their room, but the tourist is way more likely to expect you to buy that their yorkie (it’s always a yorkie) is an “emotional support animal.”

  • The D Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
    38·
    6 days ago

    because tourism is a gentrification economy. it represents that we built something for us that now someone else gets to enjoy while we stand outside cold and shivering. tourism requires colonialism to work

    • deltapi@lemmy.world
      16·
      5 days ago

      tourism requires colonialism to work

      If this were true, why do people go to any of Spain, England, France, Belgium, for touristic purposes? Why wouldn’t they exclusively go to places like the Carribean, the Americas, West & South Africa?

    • shawn1122@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      5 days ago

      A few issues with this analogy:

      1. Colonialism typically does not involve the consent of governed. If you live in a paritcipatory democracy then that doesn’t really fit the idea of being a colony.

      2. Your leaders have the option to pivot your economies to emphasize other sectors for growth. Colonies are forces to become vehicles of extraction of raw materials and the people are often forced into labor. They have no say (or vote) in how the economy is managed.

      3. Under a colonial framework, you don’t even get to the point of building for yourself. You build for another and hopefully live off the scraps the administration throws at you as their indentured / slave labor force.

      I know that colonialism is not emphasized especially in Western education but I’m afraid this analogy does not hold. Well have to find other ways to describe this phenomenon that don’t resort to exaggeration.

    • Diurnambule@jlai.lu
      4·
      5 days ago

      Is being curious of their way of life considering treating people as zoo animal ? (Legit question, I often am very curious of specifity and often end at a local church event or village events sharing a meal with peoples)

      • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
        9·
        5 days ago

        You can definetely join public events. I was talking about taking picture of random people at the street and also littering problems, mainly.

        There is also tourists who visit for “pickup artistry” and those guys pretty much always push it into sexual harrasment territory when rejected. Just wanted to mention that.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    42·
    6 days ago

    For starters, there are no cities “whose economy is entirely based on Tourism”. The closest to 100% Tourism are large resorts made specifically for that.

    Further, this opinion of many locals about Tourism is from cities which used to have little or no Tourism and now have very large numbers of tourists.The reason for it is that, before Tourism became a large fraction of the local economy, such places used to have a far more diversified and robust Economy that didn’t just crash whenever some volcano in Iceland had a burp or something such, neither did they have the overcrowding, high prices and disneyfication of shops, restaurants and attractions that Tourism brings.

    Unless you’re some third world shithole, without limitations Tourism lowers quality of life, makes everything more expensive (pushing out the locals) and destroys the vibe of a city - you don’t need to be that much ahead of 3rd World status for mass tourism to actually make the quality of life for the locals worse: Tourism brings gains to only a fraction of the population but the costs are borne by almost everybody, in a similar way to high polluting industries.

    Further, Tourism is very much a Tragedy Of The Commons situation - the side effects of too much Tourism destroy the environment that attracted tourists in the first place, at the very least over time reducing the quality of the tourists that do come (i.e. as Tourism degrades the place you get fewer high spending tourists interested in the local culture and culinary tradition, and more cheap mass Tourism) - and thus invariably those places where governments and local authorities bet heavily on Tourism are either places that used to be dirt poor (and thus have nothing to lose from even excessive Tourism) or are badly managed and thus, driven by pure greed and “we have found a silver bullet” delusions, never impose the kind of restrictions on Tourism needed to avoid the Tragedy part.

    As it so happens, I live in such a place - Portugal - and come from a city which has suffered exactly what I describe - Lisbon. The government of an European country with high average levels of Education betting on a low value added industry which mainly employs people with low levels of specialization is literally choosing to stay at “just above 3rd World” level even though the population’s level of Education could yield far more than that, which is probably why Portugal has fallen back to being one of the countries with the lowest GDP per-capita of the EU as almost all countries of Eastern Europe have surpassed Portugal in the last 2 decades even though when they joined the EU their GDP per-capita was in average around 70% that of Portugal.

    Tourism is great if you’re a 3rd World shithole because there no matter how much it becomes it will only make things better than before, but the more ahead a place is in terms of Education and Quality Of Life the lower the level of Tourism beyond which for the majority of people living there things actually become worse than before.

    • shawn1122@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      5 days ago

      Hopefully this isn’t lost on the group here but I find it a bit comical that a great colonial empire of the past, which once tortured people around the world into Catholicism, now has tourism accounting for a whopping 15% of its GDP (at the disdain of its locals). If that isn’t a manifestation of karma, I don’t know what is.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        Welcome to post-Empire!

        Portugal is incredibly badly managed and corrupt for an European nation, and this is actually an improvement over the first 3/4 of the XX century when the country was ruled by a Fascist dictatorship and so stupidly poor that it even received Food Aid from other countries in Europe. The country had a marked improvement following the Revolution which overthrew Fascism and another when joining the EU, but it’s been going backwards for at least a decade (roughly ever since the Euro came to be, which coincided with the neoliberalization of mainstream politics here as the short period of genuine idelogies for the common good in Politics ended and was replaced by “greed is good”).

        Look around at almost all the imperial nations of 100+ years ago (for example Portugal, Spain, Greece, Egypt, Italy) and they’re all at best mediocre. Look at the direction of travel of the UK and the US and the same destination can been seen in the distance (and specifically for the UK, it’s pretty noticeable how they’re burning the wealth and institutions built/pillaged during grander years whilt not in fact creating any grand anything anymore).

        Imperial nations rot from the inside and I suspect that once the culture and way of exercising Power shifts to the kind of parasitical behaviours that is only possible when “living of the wealth created/stollen in past times”, it’s very hard for it to shift back to whatever mindset created an empire in the first place.

    • greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      3·
      5 days ago

      I mean I live next to one that barely counts as a “city”. It has a state run organization that exists specifically for developing the area for recreation, tourism, and training athletes. They’ve been doing a lot of good for the community, and I think they’re the largest employer in our county. But they’ve been really bad about building affordable housing (except for the j1s).

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        9·
        5 days ago

        Oh, there are places like that in Portugal too - for example Albufeira in Algarve.

        They’re never large living cities which transformed into pure touristic cities but rather custom made from the ground up Tourism places or places that started as small villages with some small-size primary sector activity (fishing villages being quite common) and were discovered by tourists and just exploded in size catering to Tourism, crowding out the original economic activity of the place.

        Personally I see them as basically Large Resorts (since either there was not even a village there originally, or the built-up area for Tourism vastly exceeds the are of what was originally there), but I’ll grant you and @criticon@lemmy.ca (who mentioned Cancún) that it makes sense to call them cities, in which case I explained myself incorrectly in the first paragraph of my post - what I was really thinking was that there are no places which were originally cities that turned 100% to Tourism and that’s not what I wrote there.

        • greedytacothief@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          5 days ago

          I mean, this has been a tourist destination for over a hundred years making it more organically a tourist town, but I totally get what you’re saying

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        3rd world places which aren’t shitholes either don’t need Tourism or don’t make it the entire pillar of their economies.

        It’s only the badly ruled places that are shitholes.

  • BigBenis@lemmy.world
    10·
    5 days ago

    My county’s economy is based entirely off of maximizing the extraction of the merger wealth of the working class and this is pretty much my face at all times these days.

  • resipsaloquitur@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    21·
    6 days ago

    Who is economy. Baby don’t hurt me. No more.

    Also:

    Europeans: “Americans never travel anywhere. Get a fucking passport!”

    five minutes later…

    Europeans: “Americans?! Here?! Fucking hell!”

  • GraniteM@lemmy.world
    16·
    6 days ago

    Locals who live in a city who’s economy is based entirely on a private prison when they see a new thing being made illegal:

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    4 days ago

    Tourism is fucking awesome - it connects people from different worlds, connects economies and opens up niche areas like cultural preservation and ecology. It also provides flexibility and seasonal work for entire extended area giving people opportunities to temporarily relocate or migrate long term.

    Tourism is the best - don’t listen to the angry entitled boomers.

    Edit: alt right propaganda eating people’s brains huh don’t travel, be afraid, they’ll eat your dogs yadayada

      • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        Nope grew up and still live in a tourist town. The opportunity and cultural exchange of a big city in a small town is awesome - that’s how the world should be. If everyone was more accepting and mobile we’d have less hate, cruelty and misery in the world. Connection is the key not isolation.

        • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          5 days ago

          If everyone was more accepting and mobile we’d have less hate, cruelty and misery in the world.

          Don’t like it? Just be rich! Just be able to afford travel, then all the people who abuse you at work don’t exist!

          • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            5 days ago

            Nah travel is not that expensive and economic activity and connection makes everyone richer, literally. Don’t be a whiny loser and live a bit.

            • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
              10·
              5 days ago

              Nah travel is not that expensive

              Not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to afford the luxuries you take for granted.

              • Dr. Moose@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                5 days ago

                It’s a myth that travel is expensive but if thats the case the ethics of tourism is the least of your worries.

                • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  8·
                  5 days ago

                  Talk to some of the people who are paid to put up with you sometime. Ask them when the last time they had a vacation was. Ask them if they can afford to see a doctor. Ask them if they have insurance, a car, stable housing. And then tell them how great it is that travel is cheap and watch their eyes.

                  Yeah, the cost of travel is the least of my worries, because I actually have worries. And I don’t need some privileged asshole telling me that.

    • EldritchFemininity
      5·
      5 days ago

      Citation needed.

      Seasonal work pushes out other forms of employment. In my hometown, 50% of businesses are closed for 6 to 9 months of the year and basic necessities are overpriced by a major factor because of the tourists. You can literally drive over the bridges into the area and the price of gas drops 30 cents a gallon. It’s called the Bridge Tax. Half of the housing or more is summer homes that are vacant most of the year when they aren’t being rented out as short-term rentals like the 70% of all rental property. Rates of addiction and homelessness in the surrounding area are the highest in the state, and this is in a state where the capital city has a street literally called Methadone Mile. Outside of the tourist season there just isn’t really anything to do except drink, and the infrastructure isn’t built for the number of people during the tourist season, which makes it difficult for locals to do anything without dealing with major traffic. The tourists are also a major source of party drugs in the area. There are two major industries in the area: retirement homes and the service industry. So unless you’re a nurse or similar profession, or are content to work mostly seasonal jobs at near minimum wage, there is little opportunity. There just isn’t enough real estate for other businesses, and the real estate is largely too expensive anyway compared to locations a few hours away. It works out well for the migrant workers who come to work the service industry during the tourist season, but that just makes it even harder for locals to find a job. The locals have a saying: “Too poor to move, can’t afford to stay.”

    • 0x0@lemmy.zip
      6·
      5 days ago

      opens up niche areas like cultural preservation and ecology.

      Niche, you say?

  • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
    14·
    6 days ago

    Tourists are fine, it’s the assholes we don’t like. The ones that drive like fucking maniacs, and blast music in their Airbnb’s.

    The worst are the people who buy vacation houses and fuck the locals over with extortionate rent and houses too expensive to consider.

    Fuck vacation houses. If you own one of these, the locals fucking do hate you.