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🌎 The truth about tourism

Immigrants, tourists, expats, digital nomads — these are temporary visitors to our homes. Some people treat them all the same — like a common cold they can’t wait to go away. Others treat them as guests, eager to give them some tips and curious about where they’re from.

I like this tweet a lot because it made think about what we mean when we label these people with one of these titles.

Immigrant vs. expat vs. digital nomad vs. tourist.

They mean different things (technically), but there’s one thing that ties them all together, no matter how you feel about them: money

Let’s look at tourism.

Is it good or bad?

🗞️ The headlines: naughty tourism!

🌱 The reality: tourism is mostly good, sometimes bad, and is either loved or hated by locals.

To throw a bone to the haters, there are some negatives with tourists sometimes:

• They get in the way (overcrowding streets and public transportation)

• They sometimes damage the local environment, like Machu Picchu or the Great Barrier Reef

• They can lead to increases in certain goods or services

• And, maybe most importantly, they can be “annoying and cringe,” as spoken by the co-founder of Vox, Matthew Yglesias. I’ll be referencing his writing a lot on this piece.

BUT, it’s funny how you’ll talk about tourism differently, depending on the place.

Take Memphis, Tennessee. It’s where I live, and it struggles to grow and retain people — most businesses and people beg for tourists to come through and provide a boost to the city with their spending and taxes.

Then you have a city like Mexico City, Mexico, where many people I know who are from and live in the City always complain about tourists as the cause of all the problems, like lack of housing and price increases.

Both of these are right… partially, but tourism is usually never the cure or the curse, but

As Matthew Yglesias writes, the key is to “manage tourism, don’t hate it...adjusting policy to maximize the benefits of tourism and minimize the downsides rather than convincing ourselves that demand to visit a place is bad. Because just as with topics like immigration and housing, whatever the downside of being a place that everyone wants to go, it’s a lot worse to be a place that nobody wants to go.”

Tourism is mostly good because:

1. People visit and basically give locals their money by buying food at restaurants, paying for hotels (taxed extra), going to local shops, etc.

2. These means more locals are getting more money

3. This usually leads to more money for the local government, which can go towards local developments

When you see tourists wandering around shoving food in their face, or calling an Uber, or staying in a rental, you just see them consuming and “leeching,” but you forget about the MAJOR flip-side: they spend money.

Tourism is a thing that must be managed, not eliminated.

For example:

• Too many people visiting Machu Picchu and harming the environment? As Yglesias shared, the government limited access, charged visitors more, and used the surplus to invest in preserving the location - it worked

• Too many nerds wanting to go to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where Game of Thrones was partly filmed? The city limited the number of cruise ships allowed to dock.

• Too many couples trying to save their marriage by visiting Venice? They also limited the number of cruise ships allowed to dock and introduced a tourist tax - yay!

Tourism alone isn’t the best path to economic prosperity, like becoming a hub for building advanced tech and manufacturing that’d be worth a lot, like Japan, but it’s definitely helpful!

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Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.