Paige McClanahan, a journalist and travel writer, is much too diplomatic to phrase it this way, so allow me to be the grump: you鈥檙e the reason locals so often dislike tourists.
鈥淭ravel has become a consumerist exercise where the goal is to get our money鈥檚 worth out of a place,鈥� McClanahan says in a phone interview from her home in France. 鈥淲e need to wake up. Paris owes you nothing.鈥�
The tourist-local tension has been around since before Marco Polo, but in her debut book, , McClanahan shows us just how bad things have gotten. Globally, travelers will log some 1.5 billion trips abroad by the end of 2024鈥攖he largest movement of people the planet has ever seen. In a handful of years, that number could reach 1.8 billion. Closer to home, Americans are on track to take almost two billion domestic leisure trips annually by 2025. Despite the buzz around mindful experiences and sustainable travel, locals from Athens to Zermatt have had enough of us. Some Hawaiians have requested that we stay home. Romans fine tourists up to $280 for clogging the Spanish Steps. In July, an annoyed mob roamed Barcelona鈥檚 boulevards dousing visitors with squirt guns.
McClanahan, who writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, has plugged her journalistic pen into this bursting dike with empathy, not by shaming or lecturing anyone. Nor does she ask people to stay put, which would be detrimental to conservation work, prosperity, and cultural bridge building. Instead, McClanahan uses the voices of locals adversely affected by tourism to inspire us to travel with more curiosity, humility, and appreciation for how our holiday can be hell on the climate and local residents. Above all, she wants us to know that we have the power to make travel a force for good.
This elevated mindset is the hallmark of the new tourist. Becoming one isn鈥檛 hard. It means visiting Iceland in the off-season or trading the line at the Louvre for a Paris Noir walking tour to soak up the city鈥檚 Black history. You can control your partying in Amsterdam and stay behind the fence at the Grand Canyon. You can insist on supporting local guides and locally owned hotels, restaurants, and food carts. (The Barcelona mob targeted people eating at a Taco Bell, among other spots.)
鈥淓ven if you鈥檙e a low-budget traveler, you can still be a high-value visitor,鈥� McClanahan says.
McClanahan, who left the United States at age 26 and has spent the past 17 years writing from Africa and Europe, admits that she has made plenty of old-tourist mistakes鈥攍ike posting a self-serving Instagram reel from Angkor Wat that barely showed Angkor Wat. 鈥淚 live in a glass house,鈥� she says.
McClanahan casts no aspersions on the types of trips you like but does bristle at people who consider themselves 鈥渢ravelers鈥� and not tourists. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 deny that people travel for a huge range of reasons, some higher-minded than others,鈥� she writes in The New Tourist. 鈥淪o, sure, call yourself a traveler but never forget you鈥檙e a tourist, too.鈥� What matters is that we make informed decisions on how to travel in ways that put places and the people who live there first.
鈥淥ne of the most constructive things we can do in our flickering moment of life is to embrace the chance to leave our comfort zones鈥攖hose dangerous lairs where we learn to languish,鈥� she writes. She adds to me: 鈥淣one of us can wave a magic wand and change the behavior of millions of other people, but each of us can be that change.鈥�