Many good travellers consider any harm they may cause and attempt to counter that with something good. They buy carbon offsets for their flights, and pay to do volunteer work. Ideally they eat and shop in places not frequented by other travellers, and tip well.
Most travellers are sheeple who mostly care about selfies and ticking boxes.
Some destinations are becoming too dependent on tourists, which is not good for their culture, tends to provide mostly minimum wage jobs, and doesn’t work well during a pandemic. As examples, Venetians can no longer afford to live in Venice, and the Maldives gets 32% of its GDP from tourism.
In an ideal, equal, future world, the average person will have much more leisure time and travel will become even more commonplace. We will see, as with Venice, that increased tourism could lead to major downsides.
Here are some ideas:
More places with quotas. This is not new – 30 years ago I turned up at the Grand Canyon wanting to hike to the bottom, and learned I needed to book at least one year in advance – by mail. This is not unusual for nature tourism, but can easily be applied elsewhere. Even countries could have limits on tourist visas.
State levies. Bhutan keeps their visitor numbers low by making it a relatively expensive place to visit for that part of the world – a minimum of $250/day (peak season) for 3-star accommodation, which includes a “$65 per day Sustainable Development Fee that goes towards free education, free healthcare and poverty alleviation.” This can also be achieved via visa fees or airport costs.
State levy x UBI. Imagine if every tourist visa had a UBI cost component – the charge is divided up amongst every person in the country. This allows us to feel good about tourists, or we could decide that it isn’t worth it, and vote for less tourists or a higher levy.
Special Tourist Zones. For decades there have been towns on the Portuguese and Spanish coasts that solely cater to British tourists, who read the Sun, eat fish and chips, drink British beer and watch their regular soap operas in their rooms. And they have a nice holiday, without any need for it to be authentic. By making a few locations compelling to package holiday types, we can keep the rest of the country sane and separated. Maybe Las Vegas already does this to an extent, on desert land that mostly nobody would want otherwise.
Cruise Ships. Personally, I cannot think of anything worse, than these massively polluting cauldrons of disease that orchestrate fun on a journey where not much proper travelling takes place, and the boat might as well be parked somewhere. Maybe we can just park cruise ships, and fill them with people.
What I cannot see happen is people choosing to travel less, or most people treating travel as something that should have ethics. Smart countries will choose to have fewer tourists, for their own dignity, or at least hide them in a corner.
