“Everybody’s posting online and I’m like, I want to go. Take me with you. Put me in your suitcase,” said Tate and Camden, two young travelers preparing to embark on a 21-day adventure across Europe. The duo agreed to share their plans with the HPR as they paced around the boarding area at O’Hare Airport restlessly. After drawing inspiration from Pinterest bucket lists, they had created a rough itinerary, scoured Omio for cheap flights, and booked Airbnbs between sites. It would be their first time ever leaving the United States. Nervous but excited, the pair represented the changing face of travel: young, well-informed, and unafraid to seek out unique experiences.
Tate and Camden’s journey took place just as travel has exploded globally. Worldwide increases in real income, loosening of travel restrictions, and rises of low-cost airlines have made travel, regardless of the destination, both easier and cheaper. As a testament to the travel boom, nearly 4.4 billion individual flights were taken in 2018, a stark growth over the 2.6 billion taken at the start of the decade. Tourism brings international attention to cities and money to local economies. Worldwide, the tourism industry contributed to 10.4 percent of global GDP in 2019. Moreover, travel serves as a unique vehicle to exchange local cultures and to bring people together from different walks of life.
However, this is often balanced with decreased quality of life for many residents of “over-touristed” cities, who see their city overrun by visitors. Hallstatt, a picturesque Austrian town, is just one of many cities to fall prey to this issue. The town sees nearly 10,000 tourists a day despite a population of just 780: accordingly, the cost of living has risen and many residents have lost their privacy. Locals dodge selfie-takers on their way home while the museum of village history remains empty.
As more and more travelers journey across the world, it is becoming clear that rejecting the culture of mass tourism and embracing individual experiences in conjunction with local communities uniquely provides for a sustainable and enjoyable future of tourism.
Experiencing the World
As travel has increased in popularity, the average age of travelers has decreased. Data provided to the HPR from the American Society of Travel Advisors shows that millennials are the most likely Americans to travel, while Gen-Xers are right behind. Erika Richter, communications director of the ASTA, explained in an interview with the HPR that “when we look at the different generations and where they are in their life stages, we see millennials wanting to experience the world because they value experiences more than they value things.” Travel provides opportunities for individuals to immerse themselves in another culture, an adventure that cannot be replicated at home.
Travelers now have more access than ever to information about their destinations, which helps in crafting a trip. Beyond traditional sites like TripAdvisor, social media has become a tool for researching travel. A growing source of travel information comes from influencers, who share their personal experiences, while friends seek to share their unique destinations. “Instagram is one of the biggest influencers in determining where millennials are traveling and how they’re traveling,” said Richter. “They do it for the Insta. That’s the game.” Young people feel pressure to travel as a result of what they see on social media, but the diversification of information sources has also greatly influenced travel habits as well. Social media can highlight unique destinations, while other travelers can visit sites off the beaten path that traditional travel media would not cover. As a result, young travelers have resources that greatly increase the potential variety of their travel.
More than Ticking Off Landmarks
With a greater desire to travel and more information at their disposal, young people also travel in a markedly different way from their older peers. They choose to spend time away from major destinations and focus on immersing themselves in the local culture. Young travelers “tend to stay longer and interact more closely with the communities they visit than the average tourist,” according to the U.N. World Tourism Organization; “as such, youth travel has emerged as one of the most promising paths towards a more responsible and sustainable tourism sector.” It seems an authentic sense of community is important for young travelers, and this comes with positive side effects. Staying longer means reduced carbon emissions from travel, while genuine interaction with the local community promotes the actual local culture. Thus, immersive stays should be the goal for all travelers.
The recent growth in tourism can lead directly to a degradation in the local culture if not managed properly. Many sites, like Prague and Venice, have long been tourist hotspots. The duo serve as examples of mass tourism: “an extreme concentration of tourists in one place.” This trend may display itself as a clumping of tourists in just one part of the city, like Prague’s old town, or the entire city, like Venice. In order to serve these tourists within concentrated areas, businesses and cultural institutions cater their offerings to a culture of mass tourism. These often manifest as kitschy tourist shops or tours designed for visitors to snap a quick picture in front of major sites. This culture of “fast tourism” does nothing to share an actual understanding of culture, while at the same time contributing to a decrease in livability for locals.
In contrast, young travelers are more likely to apply their interests to create an immersive experience in the local culture. A majority of young travelers cite meeting locals as important to their reasons to travel. This desire “brings young travellers closer to local communities and means that they have more direct economic, social and cultural impacts on the communities they visit,” according to the WYSE Travel Confederation. In contrast, “fast tourism” does not even attempt to bring locals and visitors together in interaction. Richter also explained that increasingly, “people want to do more than just tick off landmarks on a list of things to do or places to see: they want immersive experiences.” Until now, travelers have often been forging their own paths to get these experiences: In order to promote a sustainable future of travel, cities need to start promote experiential tourism.
Heritage in the City
Cities have started to respond to this new traveler behavior by realizing its benefits to their local communities. Instead of having mass tourism focused on photographing sights, travelers who have a specific interest are likely to interact in authentic ways with the locals and take away more of the culture, which they can then share with the world. As a result, cities have slowly begun to adopt tourism strategies that highlight immersive experiences in order to attract these visitors.
The city of Weimar, in eastern Germany, has adapted their tourism marketing strategy in order to tap into these experiential travelers’ interests. Besides being a picturesque small German town, Weimar is also home to the German classical literary tradition, as well as to the seat of the German modernism movement.
Recognizing its strong heritage on these two fronts, Weimar has tailored its marketing to find travelers with the same interests. “We have created a persona,” shared Serge Strekotin, a tourism marketer of the city, in an interview with the HPR. “Who is a classics lover? It’s mostly the visitors in their golden ages who are into high culture.” Reaching out to this target demographic group, then, increases the chances that a traveler interacts in an authentic manner upon arrival, as opposed to someone visiting just to snap a quick picture of the scenic town center.
Indeed, these tailored experiential visitors look to take part in the local culture. According to Strekotin, the classics visitors “want to have evening programs to the theater or a very good restaurant,” while Bauhaus visitors “would like to visit the ateliers and to buy or see the Bauhaus designs and their modern interpretation.” These tourists then contribute more to the local economy and culture by supporting traditions and businesses that already exist. Weimar’s ties to its cultural heritage are not driven by tourism. Instead, tourism empowers an already salient part of the city’s culture. As a result, travelers who venture to Weimar are able to find experiences tailored to them, and Weimar itself is able to avoid the classic problem of over-tourism, which can lead to a dilution of native culture.
Livable, Lovable, and Valuable
Another solution to over-tourism is to divert travelers from crowded tourist hotspots by highlighting alternatives. Typically, travelers arrive in “gateway cities” with large airports, many hotels, and a large population. Getting travelers out to other cities has been a large focus of many national tourist boards, including the Netherlands. “In the past, Amsterdam was not only a highlight and a very important city for us to promote, but it was one of our icons besides the windmills, the tulips, and the cheese. But that is changing,” said Antonia Koedijk, North American director for the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions, in an interview with the HPR. This iconic status has led to a crowding of the capitol, with residents complaining of the city center only catering to tourists and a treatment of their city as “a naughty Disneyland.”
In order to alleviate the crowding in the capitol, the Dutch board has put forward a plan called Perspective 2030, which aims to allow all Dutch residents to live in harmony with and benefit from tourism. Key to this is managing tourist flows. “If you keep on promoting the same areas, you will eventually run into a problem of too many travelers in one area and another area not benefiting from tourism,” explained Koedijk. Therefore, more attention has been put by the board on cultural experiences away from the capitol, such as visiting cheese farmers in rural Holland. Growing tourism focused on local cultures ensures sustainable development in under-touristed areas as their culture is enhanced and promoted, while the bulk of the returns goes straight to local residents and businesses.
In that way, the plan aims to ensure that tourism enhances the quality of life for locals. “The city should be livable, lovable and valuable, not only to the travelers but even more so to the residents,” shared Koedijk. “We have to be careful that we focus on the quality visitors that incorporate the residents.” Tourism that does not suit the needs of local communities does more harm than good, especially because many communities may feel that their own culture is under attack by a mass tourism culture. Simply growing tourist numbers for the sake of increased tourism ignores the cultural nuances of individual communities, while focusing on immersive experiences hand-in-hand with local communities provides opportunities to share local customs authentically worldwide.
Travelers, Not Tourists
The sustainable and equitable future of tourism must focus on personalized experiences that work in conjunction with local communities. Only by doing so can the problems associated with mass tourism be alleviated. Tourism should seek to empower local communities and to share their unique culture. As such, cities and countries should target visitors that match the cultures and sites unique to them.
For visitors, too, the quality of travel is improved with unique experiences and authentic interactions. The surface-level visits of mass tourism are replaced with an immersive experience led by locals. Furthermore, visitors know that their experiences are unique: their visit is tailored to their individual interests.
Of course, the debate over the future of tourism is multifaceted and brings further questions. Catering to experiences and uniqueness could shut out travelers with fewer resources who may not be able to venture further from gateway airports. Spreading out travelers geographically may not directly solve the environmental impact of travel, but at least it attempts to make visits more meaningful. In spite of the possible questions, though, the future of tourism seems to be headed in a better direction.
For Tate and Camden, the final boarding calls sounded, marking the start of their journey across the Atlantic. Soon enough, they would be visiting the destinations they were most excited about – for Tate, a glacier tour in Iceland, and for Camden, the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland. They would be following a trip of their dreams, just like hundreds and thousands of young travelers before them. One by one, these determined travelers seeking their own experiences have led to a movement, bringing us the tourism revolution that we so desperately need.