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.

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.

phuketrichard wrote: ↑Tue Jul 25, 2023 9:38 am NOW there is to much out there and it spoils the trip when all your doing is going where everyone has gone before AND posting a selfie

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phuketrichard wrote: ↑Tue Jul 25, 2023 9:38 am when i fist started travelling, there was no internet, no google, no google maps,

John Bingham wrote: ↑Tue Jul 25, 2023 12:23 pm

phuketrichard wrote: ↑Tue Jul 25, 2023 9:38 am when i fist started travelling, there was no internet, no google, no google maps,

Those things didn't exist when I started traveling a couple of decades later. Some friends gave me a Lonely Planet and a Rough Guide when I went to India/ Nepal in 1996. They were too heavy so I just tore out the pages I wanted and threw the rest away.