# data[].attributes.body
Check out our key concepts here, which will help you to apply a critical thinking lens to this topic, and articulate your ideas about it. These concepts are highlighted.

# data[].attributes.headline
An FT article, assessing China's challenge to the West when it comes to developing self-driving technology. 

# data[].attributes.subject
An FT article, assessing China's challenge to the West when it comes to developing self-driving technology. 

# data[].attributes.body
We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
China challenges the west for driverless car supremacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Experts believe carmakers and tech companies are closing gap with US rivals despite Beijing's safety concerns

# data[].attributes.headline
A Forbes article, explaining the technology behind self-driving cars. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Forbes article, explaining the technology behind self-driving cars. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An autonomous vehicle is broadly defined as one equipped with technology that senses the conditions around it, including traffic, pedestrians, and physical hazards and can adjust its course and speed without a human at the controls. The terms "autonomous" and "self driving cars" are often used interchangeably.

However, as defined by the SAE, formerly known as the Society of Automotive Engineers, there are six levels of automated driving ranging from full control of a vehicle by a physical driver, assisted by advanced safety technology, to a vehicle that can operate without any on-board human input. Only that top level represents a driverless, or fully autonomous vehicle.

In this feature we'll define the six levels of what the SAE terms "automated driving," or AD, the pros and cons of self-driving vehicles, where they're being used, effects on traffic and the environment and what the prospects are of private citizens being able to own a car that drives itself.

What Is An Autonomous Vehicle?

An autonomous vehicle is defined by the University of Michigan Center for Sustainable Systems as one that uses "technology to partially or entirely replace the human driver in navigating a vehicle from an origin to a destination while avoiding road hazards and responding to traffic conditions."

The SAE's six levels of what it terms "automated" driving ranges from the first three levels (which start with zero), where a driver is behind the wheel and in control, but is aided by various automated warnings or safety features such as blind spot warning and automatic emergency braking. Levels 3 and 4 represent technology in which the vehicle is self-driving under certain circumstances but may require a human driver to take over. Finally, level 5-a fully autonomous, or self-driving, vehicle that does not require a human to operate the controls. This is the only level at which a vehicle is considered fully autonomous.

How Do Self-Driving Cars Work?

Self-driving cars see what's going on around them using three main electronic "eyes"-radar, cameras and laser-based LiDar, which stands for light detection and ranging. All three feed data into on-board processors, using sophisticated software, algorithms and machine learning to send signals to the vehicle's actuators to trigger appropriate actions such as braking, steering and acceleration.

The array of sensors can detect a wide variety of road features and obstacles such as lane markings, curbs, pedestrians, cyclists or other vehicles. This is done either visually, through cameras, or by bouncing light impulses or radar signals off of surrounding objects. While self-driving automation technologies help improve safety, they are not 100% infallible, and their effectiveness can be diminished when sensors or lane markings are covered by snow or other heavy precipitation.

What Are The Pros and Cons of Driverless Cars?

Self-driving vehicles where there is either what's known as a "safety driver" on board or no driver at all are currently in use, mainly by fleets that include warehouse yard trucks that transport goods from one contained location to another. Companies such as Kodiak Robotics and Gatik operate self-driving commercial trucks on certain routes with safety drivers on board.

While Kodiak and Gatik aspire to run their trucks with no human on board, taxi services such as Waymo and Cruise are examples of when self-driving technology goes awry. Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors Co., was forced to shut down its robotaxi service after one of its cars was involved in an accident that injured a pedestrian. In 2018 a driverless Uber robotaxi with a safety driver aboard struck and killed a bicyclist in Tempe, Arizona. Conversely, Ann Arbor, Michigan-based May Mobility recently launched a transit service in Sun City, Arizona, using self-driving Toyota Sienna minivans with no backup driver aboard after successful testing.

Advantages of Self-Driving Cars

Self-driving cars offer a number of advantages over vehicles requiring hands-on drivers including convenience, access to mobility, efficiency, cost-savings and traffic congestion.

For those incapable of driving due to age or disabilities or without access to conventional methods of public transportation, self-driving taxis and other transit vehicles are seen as a way to provide mobility to get to errands, work or medical appointments. Commercial operators see self-driving vehicles as boosting cost-savings and efficiency because they can run for longer hours without having to stop for meals or breaks, and they require fewer employees.

Cars and trucks with self-driving safety technology called automated driver assistance systems, or ADAS, are already reducing traffic congestion and accidents. A report by the National High Traffic Safety Administration notes ADAS helps reduce traffic accidents because they "assist a driver by anticipating imminent dangers and working to avoid them."

The combination of reducing traffic jams due to accidents and potentially decreasing the number of vehicles on the road when self-driving transit becomes more prevalent provides promising environmental benefits. A University of Michigan study concluded that when "savings from the driving efficiencies associated with self-driving vehicles are factored into the equation, the net result is a reduction in lifetime energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions of up to 9% compared to the conventional vehicles."

Challenges of Self-Driving Cars

The notion of widely available fully autonomous cars relieving travelers from any of the duties and stresses of driving remains fraught with challenges that range from cost to safety concerns. No matter how well any of the technology works, none of it so far emulates human thought, logic or instincts to make split second decisions.

However, taking the human element out of the equation also eliminates distractions or emotions from affecting the vehicle's operation. For that reason, fully self-driving cars are viewed as potentially safer since the technology is designed to operate the vehicle safely and logically by detecting and reacting to traffic conditions and the route it's programmed to follow.

That brings up a question of ethics. Since self-driving cars are basically robots programmed to react a certain way in a given situation, they cannot make an ethical decision, for instance, to avoid a collision. Should the car take action to prevent it from striking a person or a group of people? Germany passed a law prioritizing saving human lives over animals.

Serious accidents such as those in California and Arizona have contributed to fear and concern on the part of many communities that would just as soon not have driverless vehicles plying their streets.

Other challenges to wider adoption of self-driving cars include weather, where sensors and road markings could be obscured by snow, sleet or a hard rain. Overall cost remains a major obstacle to private ownership of fully automated vehicles as well. A 2023 study by McKinsey and Company predicts "By 2030, 12% of new passenger cars are sold with L3+ autonomous technologies, and 37 percent have advanced AD technologies in 2035."

What Autonomous Car Companies Are On The Market?

GM's Super Cruise system can temporarily take over driving on certain roads and during certain ... [+]
Frenak/Cadillac

Right now the highest level of automation available to consumers are systems such as GM's Super Cruise, Ford Motor Co.'s BlueCruise and Tesla's Full Self Driving-all Level 2. With those systems a driver can temporarily engage the systems to operate the car under certain conditions.

There are several companies building or operating self-driving vehicles for commercial deliveries and robo transit services.

One of the most successful is Waymo. It operates robotaxi service in San Francisco, Metro Phoenix, and is ramping up in Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. As noted above, GM's Cruise unit has been less successful after a series of traffic accidents. Gatik operates autonomous trucks that deliver goods from distribution points to retail locations, while Kodiak Robotics adds its autonomous technology to semi-trucks running long-haul and local routes for such companies as Kroger and Ikea. Swedish tech company Einride's autonomous electric pods deliver goods in Europe and North America. Pods are driven by remote operators and have no cabs for human drivers.

The Future of Self-Driving Cars

Consumer appetite for leaving the driving to technology is growing and they're willing to pay for it, leading automakers to boost ADAS and other automation offerings, perhaps paving the way for fully self-driving cars and trucks to one day be available and affordable for individuals.

Based on consumer interest in automated driving features and commercial solutions available on the market today, in its report, McKinsey predicted ADAS and AD could generate between $300 billion and $400 billion in the passenger car market by 2035.

Indeed, the world will likely be affected in five key ways, according to artificial intelligence company Allerin: fewer traffic accidents, reduced car ownership, automated logistics including deliveries, improved livability due less noise and air pollution from fewer vehicles on the road and no parking or traffic tickets since autonomous vehicles can pick up and drop off passengers then go on their way.

It's not certain if all cars will eventually operate without a human behind the wheel and at least partially in control. According to McKinsey, any transition will be at a snail's pace, projecting that in 2030, only 4% of new passenger cars sold will be installed with level 3 or higher automation functions, increasing to just 17% in 2035.
Bottom Line
Don't discard your favorite driving cap yet. While automakers are rapidly offering more sophisticated automated driver assist technologies, full, self-driving vehicles are likely to remain primarily in the realm of fleets and commercial operators for the foreseeable future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Are Self-Driving Cars? The Technology Explained

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What exactly is a self-driving car? Uncover the technology, challenges, and advancements shaping the future of the automotive revolution.

# data[].attributes.headline
A DW article, looking at how the tourism industry in the Middle East is struggling to survive. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A DW article, looking at how the tourism industry in the Middle East is struggling to survive. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
November 30, 2023

Tourism plays an important role in the economies of countries like Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. But visitor bookings are falling because of fears around the nearby conflict in the Gaza Strip.

Ratings firm S&P Global has warned that a fall in tourism due to the Gaza war could cause significant issues in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon

Moustafa Hassan is slowly starting to worry.

"Sharm [el-Sheikh] is safe, it is a city of peace," insisted the Egyptian man who works as a food and beverage manager at a hotel in the popular resort town. But potential visitors seem to be thinking twice about coming, the 50-year-old father of four told DW.

"The number of tourists to Egypt has decreased due to the Gaza war," Hassan noted. Sharm el-Sheikh is about a three-hour drive from the Israeli border and, of all of Egypt's traditional tourist sites, closest to Israel's border with Egypt.

In early October the militant, Islamist Hamas group, classified as a terrorist organization by the US, the EU, Germany and others, launched attacks on Israel that resulted in the deaths of around 1,200 Israelis and foreigners. Since then Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip, where Hamas is based, and at latest count, around 14,000 Palestinians have been killed as a result, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. A temporary truce that was due to expire on Thursday has been extended by a day, but the conflict is expected to be ongoing.

Some resorts in Sharm el-Sheikh depend on visitors from Israel, Hassan continued, and these guests are not coming because of what is happening back home. Other hotels, catering mostly to European holidaymakers, are suffering because those tourists are worried about their safety in the Middle East.

But as Egypt slips further into an economic crisis and the Egyptian pound continues to devalue, a slump in the sector is the last thing locals need. Tourism makes up between 10% to 15% of Egypt's gross domestic product every year.

Impact only just starting to be felt

"Tourism is a source of income for workers in the tourism sector but also for those connected to it from afar, such as in taxis, supermarkets, diving centers and amusement parks," Hassan explained.

Right now, it seems the slowdown is only just starting, possibly because those travelers who couldn't get a refund still went ahead as planned. The problem will become more apparent as future reservations are tallied, travel agents and tour operators said, adding that these have already fallen over the past two months.

It is still too early to tell what the impact will be, Dubai- and Beirut-based financial consultancy Nasser Saidi & Associates confirmed in a market briefing at the end of October. But the early signs are worrying, the briefing added, noting that since early October ticket purchases for Egypt had fallen 26%, for Jordan by 49% and for Lebanon by 74% compared to the same period last year.

This is despite the fact that there are few official travel warnings issued by governments for anywhere outside of the main sites of the conflict - that is, Israel, Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

The US government has also advised its citizens not to go to Lebanon because of the presence of the Hezbollah group there; before the current cease-fire, Hezbollah's armed wing and the Israeli army were exchanging fire over the southern Lebanese border.

As a result, even after a particularly successful summer, Lebanese visitor numbers have plummeted. Local media report hotel occupancy rates of between zero and 7%, compared to hotels usually being at least a quarter full.

Hezbollah is an Iran-backed Shiite political party and militant group in Lebanon. Hezbollah is considered a terrorist organization by the US, Germany and several Sunni Arab countries, while the EU lists its armed wing as a terrorist group.

Lebanon's crisis-riven economy remains heavily dependent on tourism with the sector providing as much as 40% of its national income, which has decreased during the current financial crisis.

Travelers have also been advised to avoid going to any areas of Egypt or Jordan directly bordering Israel. But most popular tourist destinations tend to be a good distance away from those locations.

Jordan tourism 'sluggish'

Next door to Israel, Jordan has also seen around half its hotel reservations canceled in October, Hussein Helalat, spokesperson for the Jordan Hotel Association, told local media earlier this month.

After finally recovering from the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jordan's hoteliers had been expecting an almost 95% occupancy rate during the final quarter of this year. Now, they might possibly hit 80%, Helalat said. Sites like Petra, with its world-famous archeology, were particularly affected because it was mostly Americans and Europeans who came to see these.

In Jordan, tourism regularly brings in between 11% and 15% of the country's national income.

Jordanian tourism entrepreneur and marketing consultant Najwan al-Masri has also been watching the numbers carefully. The figures for November, as compiled by the local tourism board, are not yet out, she told DW, but there was a slight decline, from September to October. It's gone from 760,000 visitors in September to 730,000 in October, al-Masri noted.

"As a stakeholder in the tourism industry, I've observed a significant downturn in activity from the beginning of this month," al-Masri continued, "including a sluggish movement from international visitors and also within the local market."

Other destinations have also been hard hit, like Israel, for obvious reasons. Bethlehem, which Christians believe to be the birthplace of Jesus Christ, usually sees its busiest time during the Christmas holiday. However, in the middle of November, Palestinian Christians in the city decided there should be no public celebrations while the conflict goes on in Gaza.

So far, impact on other countries restricted

Some other nearby destinations have also felt the impact but it's been less pronounced. Morocco and Tunisia both experienced a drop of bookings between 15% and 20%, tour operators told France's Le Monde newspaper earlier this month. And in nearby Cyprus, Israeli tourists previously made up around 15% of all visitors and were the second biggest group to holiday there after Britain; they're not coming now because of fighting at home.

As to how long the slump in this all-important sector will go on in the region, or what the end effect will be, that remains as uncertain as a lasting resolution to the conflict in Gaza.

For now, things still seem to be alright, Hassan, the hospitality manager in Sharm el-Sheikh, said. "But when hotel owners find their source of income is decreasing due to the lack of tourists, they will think about reducing expenses. And they see that salaries are the primary expenses," he suggested.

"In the event of a prolonged war, the entire tourism industry - and especially small businesses that have been thriving in recent years with significant investments from young Jordanians - stands to suffer," Jordanian tourism consultant al-Masri concluded.

The Christmas period is always an important time for tourism and if the conflict continues, "the jeopardy extends to our next season," she said.
Edited by: Rob Mudge

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gaza conflict: Middle East tourism struggles for survival - DW - 11/30/2023

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tourism plays an important role in the economies of countries like Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon. But visitor bookings are falling because of fears around the nearby conflict in the Gaza Strip.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, looking at Cruise's decision to recall all their self-driving cars after an accident and ban in California. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, looking at Cruise's decision to recall all their self-driving cars after an accident and ban in California. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
General Motors' Cruise autonomous vehicle unit is recalling all 950 of its cars to update software after one of them dragged a pedestrian to the side of a San Francisco street in early October and a subsequent ban by California regulators.

The company said in documents posted by US safety regulators on Wednesday that with the updated software, Cruise vehicles will remain stationary should a similar incident occur in the future.

The 2 October crash prompted Cruise to suspend driverless operations nationwide after California regulators found that its cars posed a danger to public safety. The state's department of motor vehicles revoked the license for Cruise, which was transporting passengers without human drivers throughout San Francisco.

In the crash, another vehicle with a person behind the wheel struck a pedestrian, sending the person into the path of a Cruise autonomous vehicle. The Cruise initially stopped but still hit the person. But it then pulled to the right to get out of traffic, pulling the person about 20ft (six meters) forward. The pedestrian was pinned under one of the Cruise vehicle's tires and was critically injured.

Cruise says in documents posted by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it already has updated software in test vehicles that are being supervised by human safety drivers. The driverless fleet will get the new software before resuming operations, the company says.

In a statement on Wednesday, the GM unit said that it did the recall even though it determined that a similar crash with a risk of serious injury could happen again every 10m to 100m miles without the update.

"We strive to continually improve and to make these events even rarer," the statement said. "As our software continues to improve, it is likely we will file additional recalls to inform both NHTSA and the public of updates to enhance safety across our fleet."

Cruise said that after examining its system, it has decided to add a chief safety officer, hire a law firm to review its response to the October crash, appoint a third-party engineering firm to find the technical cause, and adopt companywide "pillars" to focus on safety and transparency.

Problems at Cruise could slow the deployment of fully autonomous vehicles that carry passengers without human drivers on board. It also could bring stronger federal regulation of the vehicles, which are carrying passengers in more cities nationwide.

NHTSA opened an investigation on 16 October into four reports that Cruise vehicles may not exercise proper caution around pedestrians. Agency documents cited two injuries, including the 2 October crash. The complaints involved vehicles operating autonomously and "encroaching on pedestrians present in or entering roadways, including pedestrian crosswalks in the proximity of the intended travel path of the vehicles", the agency said.

In documents filed with NHTSA, Cruise said its automated driving system was designed in some cases to pull over and out of traffic to minimize safety risks and disruption after a crash, with the response dependent on the characteristics of the crash. But in certain circumstances such as a pedestrian positioned on the ground in the vehicle's path, pulling over is not the desired response.

The Cruise system "inaccurately characterized the collision as a lateral collision and commanded the AV to attempt to pull over out of traffic, pulling the individual forward rather than remaining stationary," the company said.

While the department of motor vehicles did not elaborate on specific reasons for its suspension of Cruise's license, the agency accused Cruise of misrepresenting safety information about the autonomous technology in its vehicles. The revocation followed a series of incidents that heightened concerns about the hazards and inconveniences caused by Cruise's robotaxis.

The DMV and others have accused Cruise of not initially sharing all video footage of the accident, but the robotaxi operator pushed back - saying it disclosed the full video to state and federal officials.

General Motors Co, has ambitious goals for Cruise. The Detroit automaker had been expecting annual revenue of $1bn from Cruise by 2025 - a big jump from the $106m in revenue last year.

GM recently paused production of the Origin, a fully autonomous van designed for Cruise to carry multiple passengers. The company is expected to resume production at a Detroit-area factory once Cruise resumes autonomous ride-hailing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cruise recalls all self-driving cars after grisly accident and California ban

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
All 950 of the General Motors subsidiary's autonomous cars will be taken off roads for a software update

# data[].attributes.headline
A Silicon Republic article, looking at the future of mobility. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Silicon Republic article, looking at the future of mobility. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Electric vehicles, micromobility options and self-driving cars are being adopted more frequently, though some have an easier path than others.

As technology advances and the push to reduce emissions grows, new milestones are being reached in various types of transport worldwide.

Various ambitious start-ups are working to lay the infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs) to shine, while regulation is moving toward a future where self-driving vehicles take to the world's highways.

In Ireland, long-awaited regulation for e-scooters was signed into law last month, giving hope for the various mobility companies eying the Irish market, though these e-scooters have faced hurdles in other parts of Europe.

In April, consultancy company McKinsey shared a report which suggests many people are open to shifting their current forms of transportation to new options in the future.

With so many different types of mobility on the horizon, let's take a look at some of the key forms that look set to take a leading role in the future.

EVs

The McKinsey analysis claims that - unsurprisingly - private cars remained the most popular form of mobility worldwide last year, being the most popular for roughly 45pc of people.

Combined with a growing focus on curbing emissions worldwide, it seems likely that the use of EVs will continue to grow and have an important place in future mobility. A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) claimed that global electric car sales jumped by 40pc in 2020, despite the struggles facing the automotive industry at the time.

This growth has continued since 2020, with the IEA expecting a 35pc increase in sales for 2023 after a "record-breaking 2022".

In anticipation for rising demand, many companies are working to install EV charge points across Ireland. Earlier this week, start-up Go Eve raised £3m in seed funding to expand the production of its charging technology called DockChain.

In May, Smartzone announced plans to install 25,000 EV chargers for homes across Ireland by 2025. These chargers will be supported by Monta, which has developed its own platform to let users manage and set up charge points.

Earlier that month, Belfast start-up Weev received a pledge of up to £50m to install and maintain thousands of EV charging points over the next five years.

Looking overseas, the Irish-founded company Jolt Energy recently raised €150m to expand its charging network across Europe and North America.

Micromobility

While private cars will likely remain a dominant form of transport into the future, the McKinsey report predicts that this will decline in the coming years.

"Governments are already enacting regulations to reduce the number of vehicles on the road to ease congestion and reduce emissions, and consumers are also voicing preferences for more efficient, green, and convenient transportation options," the report said.

In this report, 30pc of respondents said they plan to increase their use of micromobility over the next decade, while 46pc said they would be open to replacing their private vehicles with other forms of transport.

A batch of micromobility companies have spread across Europe in recent years, with many bringing their fleets of e-bikes to Ireland. Estonian start-up Bolt recently raised the number of e-bikes available in its Sligo and Kilkenny fleets, bringing the total in each town to 100 and 80 respectively.

Other start-ups like Voi and Zeus have been eyeing the Irish market for years, hoping to hit the roads with their e-scooters once regulation allows for it.

But e-scooters have faced legal troubles in Europe. In April, Paris voted to ban rental e-scooters from its streets after many raised concerns the battery-operated devices were unsafe as a mode of transport and causing a nuisance on the roads.

"It's very expensive - five euros for 10 minutes - it's not very sustainable, and above all, it's the cause of a lot of accidents," city mayor Anne Hidalgo told reporters at the time.

According to figures from An Garda Síochána released last month, there have been 16 collisions involving e-scooters in Ireland which resulted in either a fatality or serious injury since the beginning of the year.

Self-driving tech

Advances in technology have given hopes to a future where self-driving cars become a reality on our roads. As a result, regulators have taken steps to prepare for their arrival.

Last year, the UK revealed planned changes to its highway code to pave the way for fully self-driving cars to hit the roads. By July 2022, the EU revealed it was working on technical rules that would allow 1,500 fully driverless vehicles per car model to be registered and sold in a member state each year.

Companies like Finnish self-driving tech company Sensible 4 have been testing these vehicles in extreme and dramatically changing weather conditions, while autonomous taxi-services have been tested in parts of the US.

But this form of future mobility continues to have a bumpy journey. Last year, an activist hedge fund urged Alphabet to pull the brakes on its 'Other Bets' division, which includes autonomous vehicle company Waymo.

The hedge fund claimed enthusiasm for self-driving cars had "collapsed" and noted that Ford and Volkswagen made the decision to pull the plug on their self-driving car ventures.

Cruise, the self-driving car business owned by General Motors, suffered a hit to its driverless taxi service last year, when a swarm of its self-driving vehicles blocked several lanes of traffic at a San Francisco intersection for hours.

The Verge reports that city leaders are sharing concerns about robotaxi troubles, ahead of a vote that could see Cruise and Waymo offer a 24/7 robotaxi service in San Francisco.

But while self-driving technology is having some setbacks, the McKinsey report claims technology advances could see a rise in the use of roboshuttles and "urban air taxis".

The report predicts that - in terms of the most popular form of mobility - new forms of transport such as self-driving robotaxis will grow from 1pc last year to 8pc by 2035.
10 things you need to know direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of essential sci-tech news.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What does the future of mobility look like?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Electric cars, e-bikes and self-driving vehicles could all become future forms of mobility, though some have an easier path than others.

# data[].attributes.headline
An East Asia Forum article, reporting on the ways Japan is taking action to combat the negative effects of overtourism. 

# data[].attributes.subject
An East Asia Forum article, reporting on the ways Japan is taking action to combat the negative effects of overtourism. 

# data[].attributes.headline
A Euronews article, reporting on the introduction of Bali's tourist tax, and looking at where else will introduce a similar charge during 2024.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Euronews article, reporting on the introduction of Bali's tourist tax, and looking at where else will introduce a similar charge during 2024.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From Venice to Bali, new fees are being chged to try and combat overtourism.

Overtourism could have been 2023's word of the year in the travel industry.

News of the negative impacts of too many tourists was everywhere. The world's most popular destinations, like Venice, Barcelona and New Zealand, are struggling to keep visitor numbers under control.

What is the problem with overtourism? Well, local residents suffer as property becomes unaffordable due to landlords buying up holiday lets. Authorities struggle to manage the rubbish left behind by tourists, and pollution contributes to the climate crisis.

One tactic that destinations are banking on, literally, is tourist taxes: fees that visitors have to pay, on top of the usual expenses like accommodation and food.

This is not a new concept, of course. If you've travelled abroad, you've likely paid a tourist tax before. You may never even have noticed it - as it's sometimes worked into airline tickets or the taxes you pay at your hotel.

Read on for the places that introduced tourist taxes in 2023, and those that are to come in 2024.

Barcelona is increasing its tourist tax (again) in 2024

In 2022, city authorities announced that Barcelona's tourist tax would be increased over the next two years.

Since 2012, visitors to the Catalan capital have had to pay both the regional tourist tax and an extra city-wide surcharge.

On 1 April 2023, city authorities increased the municipal fee to €2.75.

A second increase will happen on 1 April 2024, when the fee will rise to €3.25.

The tax applies to visitors staying in official tourist accommodation.

The council said the proceeds will be used to fund the city's infrastructure, including improvements to roads, bus services and escalators.

Valencia will impose a tourist tax in 2024

Valencia will introduce a tourist tax for travellers staying in all types of accommodation in the region, including hotels, hostels, apartments and campsites.

Officially called the Valencian Tax on Tourist Stays (IVET), it will come into effect in 2024, though an exact date has not been announced yet.

Visitors will have to pay between 50 cents and €2 per night depending on their chosen accommodation, for up to seven nights. Cruise ship passengers will pay €1.50 per day.

Authorities say the fee will go towards the sustainable development of the region's tourism sector. Proceeds will also be used to provide more affordable housing for locals in tourism hotspots.

Olhão, Portugal, introduced a tourist tax in 2023

Olhão, a Portuguese fishing town popular with tourists, has started charging visitors €2 a night between April and October.

The tax is reduced to €1 between November and March. It will not apply to children under the age of 16 and it will be capped at five nights - so a maximum of €10 - per trip.

The fee is being used to minimise the impact of tourism on the Algarve town, including improving cleanliness and security, according to local authorities.

Two of the Algarve's 16 municipalities already charged a tourist tax: Faro (€1.5 per night up to seven nights between March and October) and Vila Real de Santo António (€1 per day up to seven days).

Bali: Tourist tax to be introduced in February 2024

Known as the Land of the Gods, Bali attracts visitors from all over the world to its beaches, islands and spiritual culture.

But tourism also means problems and Bali is hoping to solve some of these with a new tax that must be paid to enter the country.

From 14 February 2024, international and domestic arrivals will have to pay a fee of IDR 150,000 (€8.80). This will need to be paid at special booths at Bali's Ngurah Rai International Airport. Authorities have promised the process will take less than 30 seconds.

They said the proceeds will go towards projects that 'preserve the environment, nature and culture as well as improving quality' of Bali.

Is Thailand introducing a tourist fee in 2024?

Back in 2022, it was rumoured that a tourist tax would be introduced in June 2023. This didn't happen, then the next deadline of October didn't happen either.

and there have been no confirmed plans for 2024, either.

Airlines and airline-representing bodies are said to have challenged the fee.

When it was first rumoured, it was said the tax would be 300 Baht (€8).

In 2022, the governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand told Reuters news agency that part of the fee will "be used to take care of tourists" as there have been times when health insurance didn't cover them. It will also help finance further developments of tourist attractions, such as the Grand Palace in Bangkok.

Venice's tourist tax: When will visitors have to pay to enter in 2024?

Venice's tourist tax has been the subject of much debate and delays. The city is one of the most overtouristed in Europe, forcing locals out of the city centre's narrow and crowded streets.

It is now confirmed that the lagoon city will trial an entry fee for part of 2024.

Visitors will have to pay a fee of €5 to enter on peak weekends and other days between April and mid-July - 29 days in total.

The day-tripper fee will be in force during peak hours (8.30 am - 4 pm), meaning visitors who come into Venice for dinner or a concert won't have to pay.

The entry fee aims to reduce crowds, encourage longer visits and improve quality of life for residents.

Proceeds from the entry fees will go towards services that help the residents of the city, like maintenance, cleaning and reducing living costs.

Read this article for full details on Venice's tourist tax.

These are all the countries where you already have to pay a tourist fee to get in

Many countries already have a tourist fee in place, for a variety of reasons.

For some, it's to do with trying to curb the number of tourists and to prevent overtourism.

For others it's almost like a sustainability tax on each visitor. The money from these taxes goes towards maintaining tourism facilities and protecting natural resources.

Austria

In Austria you pay an overnight accommodation tax, which varies depending on which province you're in. In Vienna or Salzburg, you'll pay an extra 3.02 per cent on the hotel bill per person.

The tourism levy is also known as Tourismusgesetz and Berherbergungsbeiträge.

Belgium

The tourist tax in Belgium is also applied to accommodation, for every night you stay there.

The fee is sometimes included in the room rate of the hotel but some separate the cost out and make it a supplemental charge, so you need to check your bill carefully.

Antwerp and Bruges charge a rate per room. The rate in Brussels varies depending on the hotel's size and rating.

In general it's around €7.50.

Bhutan

While most countries' tourist fees are below around €20, Bhutan's tax is sky high in comparison.

The minimum daily fee for most foreigners is: $250 (€228) per person per day during high season and slightly less in low season.

But it covers a lot, including accommodation, transportation in the country, a guide, food, and entry fees.

Bulgaria

Bulgaria applies a tourist fee on overnight stays.

It's very low and varies depending on area and hotel classification - up to around €1.50.

Caribbean Islands

Most Caribbean islands have tourist taxes added to the hotel cost or a departure fee.

Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Bonaire, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Maarten, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and the US Virgin Islands all have some form of fee for visitors.

Fees range from €13 in the Bahamas to €45 in Antigua and Barbuda.

Croatia

Croatia raised its tourist tax in 2019. The increased rate only applies during peak season in the summer though.

Visitors pay around 10 kuna (€1.33) per person per night.

Czech Republic

You only need to pay a tourist fee in the Czech Republic when visiting the capital city, Prague.

It is very small (under €1) and paid per person, per night, up to 60 nights. The tax does not apply to children under 18.

France: Higher tourist tax in Paris thanks to the 2024 Olympics

There is a 'taxe de séjour' to pay in France. It is added to your hotel bill and varies depending on which city you are in.

The rates range from €0.20 to around €4 per person, per night.

Tourist hotspots like Paris and Lyon use the money to maintain tourism infrastructure.

In anticipation of the 2024 Olympics, the tourist tax on hotel rooms have increased by 200 per cent, as of January 2024.

Depending on the type of accommodation, the fee ranges from €0.75 to €15 per night.

Germany

Germany has what they call a 'culture tax' ('kulturförderabgabe'), and also a "bed tax" (a bettensteuer), in cities including Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Berlin.

The fee is around 5 per cent of your hotel bill.

Greece

The tourist tax in Greece is based on the number of hotel stars or number of rooms you're renting. It can be anything up to €4 per room.

It was introduced by the Greek Ministry of Tourism to help cut the country's debt.

Hungary

Tourist fees in Hungary only apply in Budapest.

Travellers have to pay an extra 4 per cent every night based on the price of their room.

Italy

Tourist taxes in Italy depend on where you are. In Sicily, fees range from €1 to €3 per night.

Whereas, Rome's fee ranges from €3 to €7 per night depending on the type of room, but some smaller cities charge more.

Japan

In Japan it comes in the form of a departure tax. Visitors to Japan pay 1,000 yen (around €8) as they leave the country.

The official tourism website claims this small tax makes "a significant difference" to the economy.

Malaysia

Malaysia's tourist tax is a flat rate and applied per night you stay.

It's not much more than about €4 a night.

New Zealand

Many tourists, people on working holidays, and some students and workers coming to New Zealand must pay an International Visitor Conservation and Tourism Levy (IVL) when they arrive.

But people from Australia are exempt.

It's $35 New Zealand dollars which is around €21.

The Netherlands

The Netherlands has a land tourist tax and a water tourist tax.

In Amsterdam, this currently amounts to 7 per cent of the cost of a hotel room. It's called 'toeristenbelasting'.

In 2024, it will rise to 12.5 per cent, making it the highest tourist tax in Europe. It will apply to cruise passengers and overnight visitors alike.

Portugal

Portugal's low tourist tax is paid per person per night and is only applicable to guests who are 13 and over.

It's around €2 and currently applies in 13 of Portugal's 308 municipalities, including the cities of Porto, Lisbon and Faro.

You only have to pay it on the first seven days of your stay.

Slovenia

The tourist tax in Slovenia varies based on location and hotel rating.

It's slightly higher in larger cities and resort towns, including Ljubljana and Bled - around €3.

Spain

If you're heading to Ibiza or Majorca, you'll have to pay a tourist tax.

The Sustainable Tourist Tax, which applies to holiday accommodation on Spain's Balearic Islands (Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza, Formentera), also applies to each holidaymaker aged 16 or over.

During the high season, the tax can reach up to €4 per night.

Switzerland

The tourist tax in Switzerland varies depending on the location. The cost is per night and per person and is around €2.20.

Quotes for accommodation usually do not include the tourist tax - it is specified as a separate amount, so it's easier to keep track of.

And it only applies to stays under 40 days.

USA

A hotel tax or lodging tax for travellers renting accommodation is charged in most of the United States. It's also called an occupancy tax.

The fees apply at hotels, motels and inns. The highest rate is reportedly paid in Houston, with a 17 per cent tax on your hotel bill.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
All the countries where you have to pay a 'tourist tax' in 2024

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From Venice to Bali, new fees are being chged to try and combat overtourism.

# data[].attributes.headline
An El Pais article, looking at the way Barcelona copes with droughts by reducing tourist consumption and preserving trees.

# data[].attributes.subject
An El Pais article, looking at the way Barcelona copes with droughts by reducing tourist consumption and preserving trees.

# data[].attributes.headline
A McKinsey article, evaluating the impact of AI on the travel industry in the present and the future. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A McKinsey article, evaluating the impact of AI on the travel industry in the present and the future. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Revenge travel." It's what a lot of people are doing these days-hitting the runways in big numbers to make up for travel time lost during the pandemic. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey partners Alex Cosmas and Vik Krishnan join global editorial director Lucia Rahilly to discuss a new report on travel in the age of AI: what the technology's promise and pitfalls are and what it may mean for the travel industry overall.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

The McKinsey Podcast is cohosted by Roberta Fusaro and Lucia Rahilly.

The promise of AI

Lucia Rahilly: Much of the research for the report drew from interviews with executives at 17 companies across five types of travel businesses. One of those executives is Luca Zambello, CEO of Jurny-an AI-fueled hospitality platform. He says AI will be the new normal.

Luca Zambello: We're at the very beginning of the hockey stick. Economically, we are at the start of what is potentially the biggest technology disruption that humanity has ever seen.

Lucia Rahilly: So everyone is talking about the disruptive juggernaut that is AI, and particularly gen AI [generative AI]. At a super-high level, and acknowledging that we're still in early days, what do we expect this to mean for the travel industry in particular?

Vik Krishnan: The travel industry is unquestionably going to be significantly disrupted by AI. Whether it's gen AI or other forms of AI that have been around for some time remains to be seen. It's quite clear that if you work through the customer journey and the process of trying to understand where you want to go, where you want to stay, what are the things you want to see, how you want to plan your day-by-day itinerary, gen AI significantly eases the process of travel discovery.

If you then step into what this means for travel suppliers, which includes airlines and hotels and cruises and car rentals and rideshare providers, the promise of AI is very much to help them deliver on the promises, both explicit and implicit, that they make to their customers.

Gen AI significantly eases the process of travel discovery.

What I mean by that is, very often, the expectations of travel are that your flight is on time, your bags get delivered to you safely, you then get to your hotel, your hotel room is available to check into when you get there, and you have a room that provides exactly what you asked for. That baseline expectation is one that many travel companies have historically struggled to meet.

What AI can do is help airlines ensure that planes are on time. It can help hotels ensure that what they deliver in terms of staffing and the product promise is consistent with what they advertise in their marketing and branding strategies.

Alex Cosmas: Not only is travel and hospitality the world's largest sector, but it's actually the most intimate sector. That means the answer for each of us to what a good experience looks like-whether I'm traveling for leisure or for business-is, by definition, fundamentally different. And the promise of AI has been to take the pattern of history, take the pattern of millions, and boil that down to the individual response that is relevant to me as a segment of one.

Nowhere is that promise needed more than in travel, where the experience should be a segment of one. That's what makes it magical. To be clear, AI is already being applied in the travel sector in spades-specifically, in the operation of schedule assets and the optimized allocation of rooms and crews. That's been true for decades, and it's only getting better.

But the customer-facing applications of AI are only now really becoming next-generation. And for the most part, in travel, the best AI applications will largely be opaque to customers, because they'll still be delivered through the mediums that customers prefer: often through humans, through the front line, through desk agents, through guest agents.

AI is already being applied in the travel sector in spades-specifically, in the operation of schedule assets and the optimized allocation of rooms and crews.

That's ideally the promise. But the starting point is to say we can't suddenly expect that customers will prefer to interact through more digital channels than they have in the past. Travel is a very human-centric business. And so the best AI, the best models, will be delivered through traditional channels.

How AI can change travel-for the better

Lucia Rahilly: What kind of value might come from using gen AI in the travel industry?

Alex Cosmas: Our latest estimates suggest that gen AI alone, across sectors, is bound to unlock $2 trillion to $4 trillion of incremental value.

Lucia Rahilly: Wow.

Alex Cosmas: Therefore, not surprisingly, capital is chasing the disruptive sector of AI.

Lucia Rahilly: What are some good examples of products that customers might expect to be using or that might be in the background enhancing customers' experiences in the future?

Vik Krishnan: Imagine the last time any of you tried to book a trip. You probably started on a search engine such as Google, or you started at an online travel agent such as Expedia, or you started at an actual supplier website if you had some certainty on what airline you wanted to fly or which hotel you wanted to stay at. You probably started with a little box where you put in your destination, you put in your approximate dates, and then you had the search engine present to you a series of results that may or may not have met your needs.

What we're imagining in a future with gen AI or AI in general is that you start with something much more free-form and say, for example, "I'm looking to plan a trip with my family to New Orleans for a week in October. Can you help me find a hotel that has a pool for my seven-year-old and is within walking distance of the French Quarter?"

Wouldn't that experience be much easier in terms of trying to figure out where you want to stay and what you want to do, as opposed to getting a list of a thousand hotels in an order that may or may not meet your specific preferences and what you actually want out of that trip? It is one of the most obvious examples wherein customers can see a real difference in what gen AI can do to help them with the travel discovery process.

Alex Cosmas: The other application of AI that I'm excited about is this: every customer gives tells. They drop digital breadcrumbs of things they like and don't like when they bounce off of the page of a dot-com when they're shopping; when they abandon a cart; when they return less frequently to search; when they arrive on a page only to check a single itinerary on a single day, on a single fare, rather than browsing for 20 minutes.

All of these are small tells that we as consumers provide travel brands. And so the ability to record, "I actually know what Alex is keen on in general and frankly less keen on and less likely to convert on," and turn that into relevant offers is really important.

AI is only part of the answer

Lucia Rahilly: Where are we in terms of companies really embracing the use of this next-gen AI and other related technologies?

Alex Cosmas: We're pretty far down the path of companies both embracing traditional AI and experimenting with gen AI. Very few of the airlines, hotels, cruise lines, and suppliers that I've interacted with are not already embracing deployment and actively experimenting with advanced tech. It's only going to grow.

But there is risk. More is not always better. Faster is not always better. There's a bit of, let's say, a cautionary tale that we've learned from other sectors, which is that first off, AI is only part of the answer.

I like to say it doesn't matter if you got the answer right if you got the delivery wrong.

The digital-delivery mechanism is how I go about delivering the answer: a mobile app, a push notification, an e-commerce experience, a kiosk, digital signage, or data just given to the front line. Those mechanisms are as equally important as or, I'd argue, even more important than the predictive and gen AI models behind them.

I like to say it doesn't matter if you got the answer right if you got the delivery wrong.

Vik Krishnan: To build on Alex's point about getting the delivery wrong, many of you listening have probably been on an airplane in the last year. How many times have you experienced the outcome of landing, pulling toward the gate, stopping short on the tarmac somewhere, and it turns out the gate's not available yet. Therefore, you have to wait for the other aircraft to taxi out, so your plane can then pull into the gate.

The reality is that putting together an operational execution plan involves data from so many different sources that aren't necessarily pulled together in a large model. So it doesn't necessarily enable or unlock this type of orchestration. And this is where AI can be enormously helpful.

There are companies out there that try to understand turning an aircraft, which is the process of essentially getting it from arrival to departure for the next flight. That involves actions both above the wing-for example, getting passengers off and onto the plane, getting the aircraft catered-and below the wing-for example, getting bags on and off the plane.

It involves refueling aircraft. It involves a number of other maintenance-related and ground-handling-related activities that many consumers don't see. All of that is an extremely delicately orchestrated ballet that happens at an airport every single day, while involving multiple third parties and several different suppliers. It involves a fuel provider. It involves a ground handler. In some instances, it involves a different gate agent than the airline itself. That orchestration requires data and communication of very, very large volumes of information.

There are companies out there that are now saying, "We can actually identify when, during an aircraft turn, something didn't happen according to schedule." In other words, that catering truck didn't pull in three minutes after arrival as it was expected to, which induced a delay. And that delay then allowed for a replanning of the entire turn process, so as to deliver an on-time departure. AI has an extremely large role to play in helping deliver on that promise in a way that suppliers have historically struggled to.

Don't be AI stranger

Lucia Rahilly: In order to deliver on that process, understanding the data is critical. Here's Ella Alkalay Schreiber, the GM of fintech at Hopper.

Ella Alkalay Schreiber: Machine learning is important, gen AI is important, predictive AI is important-but the actual challenge is to understand the data, ask the right questions, read prediction versus actual, and do this in a timely manner. The actual challenge is the human thinking, the common sense.

Lucia Rahilly: "Know your customer" is really a business axiom at this point. What does understanding your customers mean specifically for the travel industry?

Alex Cosmas: It means a few things. AI models learn the same way humans learn. It's a test-and-learn process. I ask a question. I observe a behavior. That reinforces either my false or positive conception of who you are and what makes you tick. If you can't measure cause and effect precisely, then avoid running an experiment entirely.

This is what our general advice is to our clients. I'd rather they experiment correctly on something small than swing for the fences and have no idea where the ball lands. That's particularly true in microexperiments, where I have individual customers, where I provide individual treatments, but I have to be able to measure the response. If you can't measure it, don't bother. Focus your energy and resources on a different experiment.

This is what our general advice is to our clients. I'd rather they experiment correctly on something small than swing for the fences and have no idea where the ball lands.

If a brand, for example, doesn't have the digital tech to be able to send a tailored offer to me as an individual, then you don't really need to know my personal willingness to pay. In that case, stick to the microsegment or the macrosegment and take action that way. If you can't send a personalized message without making it feel generic, then don't.

Vik Krishnan: The experience of hyper-personalization has to feel authentic. So in other words, a flight attendant coming up to you and saying, "Hey, I know you normally like a Diet Coke with a slice of lime. Is that what you'd like this time?" is different from presuming what your preferred drink might be. That might be an example of how AI actually delivers on hyper-personalization, but with a bit of a human touch so it doesn't appear creepy.

Lucia Rahilly: Both of you are deep in this industry. Any examples that come to mind of companies that are really doing AI right? And if so, how?

Vik Krishnan: Hotels that actually understand or acknowledge your past history of staying at that specific property-that's quite a personal touch I really appreciate. But the reality is many hotels struggle to even understand basic facts such as the frequency, duration, and purpose of a recent stay. Many hotels don't easily make that type of information available to their frontline staff. And so empowering those employees to use that information to deliver a hyper-personalized greeting or experience is a good example of companies using AI well.

Alex Cosmas: If done right, the frontline workforce should look and feel like superheroes powered by AI. There's a luxury fashion retailer that arms its sales associates with iPads to link shoppers to the styles and the sizes they searched for online. That's pretty cool. Now, augment that with the propensity models in the background that give the agent a steer to what a customer wants, and suddenly they appear clairvoyant. Think about that application in travel. There are far more interactions on average in a travel journey.

So as consumers, how do we preserve the magic of travel, which is more about heads-up time and being immersed in our surroundings, rather than about heads-down time and researching on a device? It means more agents who surprise and delight; say, "Welcome back"; say, "Happy birthday"; know you arrived earlier than planned; and swap the room preemptively so you could get in and get on your way. And that's what we call knowing your customers like you know your friends.

I'll share one example. When I check into a hotel, I really don't like the kiosk and the app check-in. But I love it for checking out. For other customers, the complete inverse is true. My hotel can know that. It certainly knows how I check in and check out. It should act on that or understand the why, just as you understand your friends. This is the test-and-learn experiment that we talked about earlier and that most suppliers can begin right now.

AI and talent: What's next?

Lucia Rahilly: Alex, that makes a very nice segue to Christiaan Hen, chief customer officer at Assaia, talking about frontline talent using AI as an assistant.

Christiaan Hen: Sometimes, people say automation might be a risk to people's jobs, but that's not the case here, because there are not going to be enough people to do these jobs in the first place. I like to see it as we're equipping people with the right tools to do their jobs in a better way to accommodate for the additional workload that is coming.

Lucia Rahilly: This clip invokes the palpable fear that AI and automation will eliminate people's jobs. We hear that time and again. How do you see these advanced technologies changing things for the front line in the travel industry?

Vik Krishnan: I see technology helping frontline employees do a better job more than I see it eliminating those jobs. We don't necessarily see, for example, AI reducing flight attendant staffing any time soon, because those flight attendants are on the airplane to provide primarily for your safety, followed by the guest experience.

We see AI in many instances allowing those flight attendants to deliver a better customer experience, because they know that passenger in seat number 17C better as a result of the information provided to them. But it's not replacing their jobs.

In certain pockets of the economy, technology and AI will end up replacing people. The reality in travel, though, is that the quality of the guest or passenger experience for so many people is tied to human interaction. Consequently, we don't necessarily see a large-scale replacement of people here by technology and AI.

Alex Cosmas: Let's look at the facts for a moment. Post-COVID-19, the travel sector employs 12 percent fewer staff than pre-COVID-19. And that's not necessarily by choice. It is hard to find folks with the hospitality gene who genuinely want to deliver for guests, engage with them, and serve at the highest level day in and day out.

That's part of the reason we see a smaller workforce in travel today than we have in the past. It takes twice as long, an average of five to six weeks, to fill roles as it did before the pandemic. Those with that hospitality gene would love nothing more than spending less time fixing broken itineraries, fixing issues that frankly could be automated. They'd rather spend their energy serving, which is what travel and hospitality is all about.

It should be a net-positive growth. The travel sector itself should grow as a result, creating jobs. We estimate the travel sector to grow at roughly 6 percent over the next decade, which is twice the rate of the overall economy.

Lucia Rahilly: Could AI and related technologies help with training folks who don't come by that gene naturally but could be trained to fill those roles more efficiently?

Alex Cosmas: Absolutely. We're already seeing applications of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI coming together to offer more efficient ways to enhance and accelerate employee training, because you can throw live, immersive scenarios in front of employees at a higher clip than they would get organically on the job.

Oftentimes, the same is true not just of the front line but also of training corporate and call center employees. AI can learn from the patterns of thousands upon thousands of call-ins and transcripts-which no single human can ever be expected to go through-boil them down to the top ten core issues and suggest outcomes that seem to resolve 70 percent of situations. That's the power of AI in training.

Lucia Rahilly: Alex, you mentioned virtual reality. Would travel drop if you could experience Bhutan from your sofa rather than actually having to take an arduous flight?

Alex Cosmas: Here's my honest read on it. We've been able to visit Bhutan virtually for over a decade through YouTube and through National Geographic. And yet, travel is at an all-time high. And it's because we all, as social animals, continue to enjoy experiencing new things, meeting new people, hearing new stories, and being inspired by a new site's history and cuisine.

The numbers also suggest that we are in an unprecedented growth phase for travel. We are also in a phase where, over the past 15 years, customer satisfaction has steadily grown, despite how much we all like to beat up on our travel suppliers.

Consumers are admitting that the area they want to splurge on in the next year is travel and hospitality, such as experiences and restaurants. So they're giving us that gift of their wallets and their trust. We have to deliver on that expectation as a sector. Gen AI, traditional AI, augmented reality, virtual reality, and digital technologies are going to help us deliver on the promise.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What AI means for travel-now and in the future

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The travel industry is facing new disruptions from AI. We look at the promises and pitfalls of artificial intelligence when it comes to the travel industry.

# data[].attributes.headline
A CNN article, exploring the designs for a new plane, which will have the largest wingspan ever. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A CNN article, exploring the designs for a new plane, which will have the largest wingspan ever. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There's a global energy crisis and onshore wind farms are a potential growth option. Larger wind turbines produce more power than standard ones, but the components are too big to be transported by road.

What's the solution? A Colorado-based energy startup named Radia has an idea. It's developing the biggest aircraft in aviation history.

Meet the WindRunner airplane, whose mission will be to deliver gigantic 300-foot-long blades directly to wind farms.

To help the world meet its decarbonization targets, it'll use sustainable aviation fuel and needs only a simple packed-dirt or gravel runway to land on.

It'll operate from regional hubs, says Radia, delivering where needed - and "can land on airstrips as short as 6,000 feet (1,800 meters), something no other large commercial aircraft can achieve."

Let's talk about specs, baby

When it comes to carrying the largest payloads ever moved by air, dainty just isn't going to cut it.

So WindRunner will have a cargo bay volume of 272,000 cubic feet, enough to hold three Olympic swimming pools. That's 12 times the volume of a Boeing 747-400 and - at 356 feet in length, it's 127 feet longer too.

As for the wingspan, that's 261 feet - imagine four bowling lanes laid end to end.

It will also dwarf the Antonov An-225, the heaviest aircraft ever built, which was destroyed at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The aircraft's scale might be groundbreaking, but the engineering is not - and that's by design. Radia says it's focusing "on existing technology and safety by using, where applicable, tried-and-true aviation materials, components and fabrication techniques that have FAA [US Federal Aviation Administration] approval, are already in mass production and are lowest-risk."

The idea is to hit the ground running with a fast, well-built fleet that meets aerospace industry standards. Online reports say commercial operations as soon as 2027, but there's no timeline confirmed on Radia's website. CNN has reached out to the company for comment.

There she blows

Radia is banking on research organisation Bloomberg NEF's estimation that up to $10 trillion will be spent on onshore wind through 2050. The development of WindRunner is to enable GigaWind, the XXL turbines made by Radia's partners, which include five of the world's top six turbine manufacturers.

Currently, turbine blades today are ordinarily 230 feet or less (70 meters), but Radia wants to deploy blades of up to 104 meters (341 feet). The company says GigaWind turbines could potentially be two to three times more powerful - and two to three times more profitable than those typically deployed today.

So who are the folks behind these ambitious claims? The founder and CEO is Mark Lundstrum, a cross-industry entrepreneur and MIT aerospace engineer who founded Radia in 2016. The company says its team of advisers include former top brass from Boeing, MIT, Rolls-Royce and the FAA, as well as former US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull.

It's an impressive lineup and the decision to focus on safe, existing technology is a smart one. Might we see a WindRunner take off before the end of the decade? Could its distinctive shape one day be as popular as the Beluga XL transporter planes created by Airbus? Watch the skies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gigantic new aircraft design aims to create the largest plane ever to fly | CNN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A Colorado-based energy startup named Radia is developing the biggest aircraft in aviation history. Say hello to the WindRunner airplane, with a payload 12 times that of a 747.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Sky News article, exploring whether 2024 will really be the worst year ever for 'overtourism'. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Sky News article, exploring whether 2024 will really be the worst year ever for 'overtourism'. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are few better ways to cure the January blues than by booking a holiday - with millions of people likely to be planning their next break as they return to work in 2024.

Whether you enjoy relaxing on a beach or strolling through a historic city - the chances are other tourists will be visiting the exact same place at the exact same time.

When the amount of visitors descending on an area has a harmful impact it becomes known as "overtourism" - a problem faced by destinations across the world.

And it could be about to get worse - with the UN's World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) telling Sky News that 2024 could be a record year for international arrivals across the globe.

Here we take a look at overtourism and what can be done about it.
What is overtourism?
Overtourism refers to when those living in an area, or those visiting, feel the experience has become worse because of the amount of tourists.

The negative impacts vary from place to place.
What problems are caused by overtourism?
Amsterdam in the Netherlands has had a huge problem with overtourism in recent years. The city has an estimated population of around 1.1 million but was visited by around five million tourists in 2022, according to data gathering company Statista.

The city now hosts many apartments which are rented out solely to tourists - causing a housing shortage and driving up rent prices. Locals are therefore finding it difficult to secure affordable accommodation.

The US state of Hawaii, which has a population of around 1.4 million people, attracted around 9.2 million tourists in 2022, the islands' government has said.

Hawaiians have complained that once-pristine beaches are now so busy they are practically unusable.

The island city of Venice in Italy is home to around 55,000 people but was visited by some 4.6 million tourists in 2022, Statista has said.

The number of visitors is putting a strain on the city's infrastructure and is hampering the experience for both locals and tourists.
What other places are struggling with overtourism?
The port city of Dubrovnik in Croatia has a population of around 28,400 people but was visited by more than one million tourists in 2022, the Dubrovnik Times reports.

One of the main causes of overtourism has been cruise ships offloading thousands of passengers a day.

Most visit the city's Old Town - where the formerly rough limestone main street has been buffed by the footfall that comes with huge crowds of tourists.

Barcelona in Spain, which has a population of around 5.6 million people, was visited by around 9.7 million tourists in 2022, according to the city's council.

The number of apartments being rented out solely for tourists means rents are soaring, while the number of visitors is also said to have led to a rise in antisocial behaviour.

Outside of Europe, iconic destinations such as Machu Picchu in Peru have struggled with overtourism.

As of 2020, the number of tourists visiting the ancient Inca site had jumped from less than 400,000 tourists a year to over 1.4 million visitors in 20 years, The Real World travel advice website reports.
Are parts of the UK badly affected?
The UK is one of the most popular destinations in Europe - with just over 30 million tourists visiting in 2022, according to the national tourism agency VisitBritain.

Although millions descend on central London, smaller cities across the UK are also popular.

Bath in Somerset, which has a population of around 109,000 people, attracts around six million visitors a year, the local council has said. The number of tourists means the city centre becomes very busy with crowds.
What factors are driving overtourism in different parts of the world?
Justin Francis, the chief executive of Responsible Travel, a company which specialises in sustainable travel, says one problem is that flying is "artificially cheap" because the aviation fuel kerosene is one of the few untaxed fuels in the world.

Mr Francis also said the rise of social media influencers wanting to build their brand has also played its part.

He added that the tourism industry itself has worked to increase tourism with "very little regard for the impact on destinations".
Why might 2024 be one of the worst years for overtourism?
In 2019, the number of international tourist arrivals across the world reached its highest ever level at nearly 1.5 billion.

Since then the industry has been recovering from the pandemic, with Sandra Carvao, director of market intelligence and competitiveness at UNWTO, saying the figure for 2023 is likely to be at "around 88% of that volume".

Looking ahead to 2024, Ms Carvao told Sky News: "There is a lagging tourism recovery in Asia, which pre-pandemic was the second biggest region in terms of travel after Europe... but if Asia keeps recovering at the rate it has been, the global figure will most probably surpass the 1.5 billion figure we had in 2019."

A record number of international arrivals around the world could mean more visitors to some of the most popular destinations which are struggling with too many tourists.
What have destinations been doing to tackle overtourism?
In 2018, Mato Frankovic, the mayor of Dubrovnik, introduced a cap on the number of cruise ships allowed to stop at the port to two a day, carrying a total of 5,000 tourists, to reduce overcrowding.

Meanwhile, authorities in Barcelona have taken measures to allow locals to continue to enjoy the city despite the presence of tourists.

Measures include putting restaurant tables in roads rather than on the pavement, which narrows the road but allows pedestrians to continue to walk down the streets in their city.

Peru previously limited the number of tourists allowed to visit Machu Picchu to 3,800 a day. However, the country announced earlier this month this will increase to 4,500 a day in January 2024 - with the potential for a further hike to 5,600 on specific dates.
What can you do to limit the impact of overtourism?
Other than stopping going on holiday, there are a few things people can do to help limit the impacts of heavy tourism.

An obvious thing to do would be to go places that are not struggling with overtourism - but people can also look to see when the quieter periods are for popular destinations in order to limit the negative impacts of their stay.

Dr Harold Goodwin, professor emeritus and a senior fellow at the Institute of Place Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, has urged people to consider the impact they are having on the local economy while travelling.

He told Sky News: "Buy local, if you do that, you will have a much better experience and you'll be contributing to local economic development and people's livelihoods in the places you've chosen to visit."
What impact does overtourism have on climate change?
The tourism industry is responsible for around 8% of global carbon emissions.

Mr Francis says one of the things driving this problem is the fact people appear to be taking shorter and more frequent breaks rather than fewer, but longer, holidays.

This in turn leads to a larger number of flights.

Mr Francis said: "At Responsible Travel, our view is that we should go back to the way we used to travel in the past, or at least how I remember traveling, which is having fewer overseas trips, but to stay longer because fewer trips means less carbon emissions."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wish you weren't here! Why 2024 could be the worst year ever for 'overtourism'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The UN's World Tourism Organisation has told Sky News that 2024 could be a record year for international arrivals across the globe - here we take a look at the impact huge levels of tourism are having on popular destinations.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Noema article, looking at the impact of tourists on destinations around the world. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Noema article, looking at the impact of tourists on destinations around the world. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ONE

The announcement appeared in the Journal Officiel de la République Française in the spring of 1886. To mark the forthcoming Universal Exposition of 1889, the burghers of Paris were holding a competition to design a colossal centerpiece, something bold and eye-catching to occupy the riverine end of the Champ De Mars.

In the northwestern suburb of Lavallois-Perret, the advertisement caught the eye of an entrepreneurial engineer with a taste for the grandiose. Now in his 50s, he had already secured a place in history. He'd overseen capital projects from Portugal to Peru, designed the metal substructure for the Statue of Liberty. But Gustave Eiffel was not one to turn down an opportunity to create what he instantly understood could be "the tallest edifice ever raised by man."

A few years earlier, two of Eiffel's engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, had drafted plans for a tapering wrought-iron tower constructed from latticework girders. At first skeptical of the design, it now struck Eiffel as the perfect candidate. When he submitted it to the competition, the panel of judges, reviewing more than a hundred proposals, agreed. (A 1,000-foot guillotine, conceived in commemoration of the French Revolution's centenary, was discarded as a little gauche.)

The construction team broke ground for the foundations in January 1887. Over the next two years, teams of perspiring riveters worked to assemble the 18,038 pieces, each prefabricated to within a hundredth of an inch in Eiffel's factory across town. Visiting the site, the journalist Émile Goudeau described being "deafened by the din of metal screaming beneath the hammer."

As the giant structure grew beside the Seine, public reactions were mixed. Few could deny it was a miracle of engineering, but to some its monumental presence begged a question: What was the point of it? Eiffel's justification - that it could be used as a laboratory for various scientific and meteorological experiments - seemed inadequate to the scale of this expensive boondoggle, which would eventually loom 984 feet above the Paris skyline. In an open letter, a coalition of writers and artists, among them Guy de Maupassant and Sully Prudhomme, protested "against the erection in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower."The poet Paul Verlaine slammed it as a "belfry skeleton."

Upon its inauguration, however, the tower defied the cynics. No sooner had the final hot rivet cooled than the great and the good of Paris convened at the tower's summit to present Eiffel with the Legion of Honor. Almost two million visitors paid the five-franc fee to climb it during the Exposition alone.

Afterward, people kept coming. Parisians frequented the four large restaurants on the first floor. Boutiques offered souvenirs, refreshments and rental binoculars on the upper levels. Originally intended to stand for 20 years, the "Iron Lady" had, by the middle of the 20th century, become indelible. Its scientific pretexts forgotten, it existed now merely as an object to gaze upon, and to gaze from. It was a monument to a new raison d'etre: tourism.

The question of utility receded because the object itself became hallowed, a secular icon transported into the homes of people around the world in the form of tourist photos and a million die-cast replicas. "Glance, object, symbol," wrote the semiotician Roland Barthes. "Such is the infinite circuit of functions which permits it to be something other and something much more than the Eiffel Tower." It remains today the most visited paid monument in the world.

The question of what motivates so many journeys to see the Eiffel Tower is more nuanced than it may first appear. Certainly, no one ought to begrudge a visitor for thrilling at its architectural charisma or for coveting the sprawling views of Paris from its balconies. But something about being drawn moth-like to a foreign object speaks to a deeper, more metaphysical yearning of a sort that propelled human movement long before the word tourism entered the lexicon. This is the traveler as pilgrim, who lights out not just to look upon beautiful and interesting things, but to glimpse some essence, to be enriched.

How strange, then, that prevailing ideas of travel are also contemptuous. While tourism is often romanticized, it is equally reviled and disparaged as shallow - or, worse, rapacious. Sometimes it seems as if the "tourist gaze" cannot help but despoil whatever it fixes on. Perhaps this, too, echoes a more ancient incarnation: the traveler as colonizer, a vector of destruction.

From the beginning, recreational travel has been Janus-faced, straddling this dichotomy between the profound and the profane, the ennobling and the transgressive. But it is the dark shadow that is now ascendant amid a gathering sense that tourism's drawbacks are starting to outweigh its rewards.

Inessential by definition, responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions, tourism has become bound up with all manner of anxieties about human behavior and the damage we wreak on the world around us. In places that have been overwhelmed or remolded in ways its inhabitants regret, there is growing resistance; taxes, prohibitions and no end of local antipathy are now as much an inconvenient feature of the holiday season as sunburn and gastroenteritis.

This past summer, as holidaymakers flocked back to Europe in their tens of millions, heatwaves and wildfires interrupted hallowed periods of rest with pressing temporal dread. Two contradictory statements felt simultaneously true. Tourism has never been more integral to society - but neither has it ever felt so problematic.

"[T]he cognitive dissonance of summer travel in a warming world is catching up to us," conceded an article in The New York Times. "Tragic headlines and statistics are prompting hard looks at the nature of tourism: who benefits and who gets to participate."

An inveterate traveler myself, I felt a need to learn how we got here, but to also probe the more consequential question: Where the hell are we all going?

TWO

For the great span of history, innate curiosity has always drawn people toward the unknown. Prior to the industrial age, most human movement was compelled, whether by disaster, scarcity or enslavement. During interludes in the wars of empires, however, travel could also mean seeking respite, spiritual enrichment and intellectual stimulation - at least for the wealthy. Contemporary chroniclers describe rich Romans sating their curiositas with forays to Egypt. Before it was engulfed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, Herculaneum was renowned for its littoral pleasure palaces.

The genesis of "tourism" as we have come to understand it can be traced to a series of social phenomena that emerged in the United Kingdom in tandem with its precocious modernity. It began with the practice that became known as "the Grand Tour." For moneyed young gentlemen in the 17th-19th centuries, travel was a rite of passage - and a finishing school. By journeying overland, ordinarily to Italy via France, Britain's aristos would set out callow and come home urbane.

The contemporaneous ideal of the traveler is often said to be embodied by the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog." In the painting, composed by Caspar David Friedrich in 1818, a lank figure stands on an outcropping before a pastel sea of mist-wreathed mountains. In this image, we get a sense of travel's post-Enlightenment values. Undaunted by terra incognita, the wanderer looks outward at the inscrutable horizon. However, it is also possible to discern a duality that would characterize the traveler's motivations until the present day. The cocked leg. The jaunty walking cane. This figure is somehow both intrepid and effete, curious and self-absorbed. The focal point is not the landscape, but the individual, hero of his own story.

This hint of travel as a fount of vanity illuminates another of its enduring facets: the preoccupation with surface. From the outset, tourism was enmeshed with the image - both the object of the tourist's gaze and the forms by which they chose to project their experience to others.

For a time during the 18th century, it became fashionable among travelers to carry upon their person a " Claude Glass," a small convex mirror darkened with a smoky grey patina. Turning their back to any given view, the viewer could look at the reflection in the glass and see the scenery's edges magically smoothed, its texture gauzy, the sky deepened to reflect the picturesque ideal of the landscapes of the French painter Claude Lorrain, for whom the device was named. The glass, according to Arnaud Maillet, "allowed tourists - those quickly passing visitors - to discover in an instant the luminous effects produced by nature, for which they would otherwise have to wait."

In the age of the Grand Tour, which later spread among the upper classes of continental Europe and America, participants often commissioned paintings of themselves. The sitters were portrayed in postures of intellectual contemplation or in heroic repose, emulating the swagger of Friedrich's wanderer against backdrops of unfurling scrolls and Greco-Roman ruins. But if travel was outwardly expressed in the iconography of classical education, its inner life was often one of solipsism and the indulgence of illicit appetites. To cynical eyes, there was always ample cause to interpret the Grand Tour as something vacuous: a foppish performance undertaken primarily in pursuit of cultural cachet. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, observing the Tourers' peccadilloes from her vantage among the overseas aristocracy, wrote acidly that their main pursuit was "to buy new cloaths, in which they shine in some obscure coffee-house, where they are sure of meeting only one another. ... I look on them as the greatest blockheads in nature."

It was therefore in a spirit of repudiation as much as emulation that the early architects of mass travel would set out their stall. In mid-19th century England, as coastal resorts in places like Blackpool and Morecambe sprang up to cater to a new industrial working class, the upwardly mobile set their sights further afield. Innovations in mass transit, notably the railway and ocean liner, opened the continent to new classes of traveler.

Many of these tourists, or "excursionists" in the parlance of the time, followed the contours laid down by their affluent predecessors. The kind of trips organized by pioneers like Thomas Cook sought out the classic sites of antiquity and the Renaissance, but also wild places like the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coastline, liminal zones that appealed to those seeking temporary escape from a bewildering modernity.

"People saw before their very eyes pastoral Britain being covered by urbanization, by smokestacks, by a new way of living," Lucy Lethbridge, the author of " Tourists" (2022), told me. "Nineteenth-century writers often describe people at the time feeling like the cogs and wheels of a vast machine. But there remained some collective memory of the pre-industrial life, which made us seek the unspoiled. That memory is with us still."

For Cook, the temperance campaigner turned travel magnate who is widely credited with inventing the package tour, taking tourism to the masses was a project both capitalist and egalitarian. "God's earth, with all its fullness and beauty, is for the people," he wrote, responding to the elitist sneers that so often pursued his tour groups. Over the coming decades, a consensus grew that the holiday should be a universal right, due recompense for a life of labor. Our very concept of mass movement was assuming a new, voluntary impetus driven not by conquest or coercion but by free will and the pursuit of leisure.

By the 1930s, progressive legislators across the developed world began to introduce statutory paid holiday leave. Léon Blum's socialist government in France authorized two weeks of paid vacation in 1936. Britain passed the Holidays with Pay Act two years later. After the Second World War, America committed billions of dollars to rebuild the economic capacity of a ravaged Europe, and Marshall Planners plowed investment into hotel building, holiday advertising and subsidized airfares. But any vestige of Thomas Cook abstinence - of the holiday as a vehicle for sobriety and self-improvement - soon evaporated. Henceforward, pleasure and indulgence came to the fore in what would prove to be an eternal cycle: After the tide of upheaval recedes, the wave of hedonism crashes in.

Tourism's new sybaritic spirit found expression in sun worship. In South Florida and the Mediterranean rivieras, a proliferation of new resorts would become loci for bacchanals, offering the covetable combination of sun, sand, sea and sex. The preferred skin tone was no longer porcelain, connoting the delicacy of sheltered privilege, but "the tan," a signal of vigor and eroticism. Increasingly, wrote Simon Carter in " Rise and Shine " (2007), sun-browned skin became part of the bourgeoisie's "cultural repertoire," a means of showing themselves "distinct from either the 'debauched' aristocracy or the 'disease-ridden' working classes."

In turn, an onus on fun and abandon meant lax moral standards and opportunities for the unscrupulous. In 1946, the opening of the Flamingo on an underdeveloped highway in Las Vegas kickstarted the era of the luxury casino. Its bankrollers? A consortium of East Coast gangsters led by Bugsy Siegel. This would prefigure a common pattern in resort development. No matter its provenance, capital was always welcome at the tourism frontier, where eager, transient punters seeking fun and frolics were willing to look the other way.

Throughout the decades, tourism continued to provoke the disdain of jaundiced commentators. D. H. Lawrence, writing to his friend Mary Cannon after an unhappy spell in Lombardy, described travel as "a splendid lesson in disillusion." Vladimir Nabokov channeled a similar ennui through his character Humbert Humbert's summary of a yearlong American road trip in "Lolita": "We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing." Evelyn Waugh pinioned the traveler's habitual self-regard in six words: "The tourist is the other fellow."

As the acceleration of mass travel started to irrevocably alter landscapes both social and geographical, these anxieties redoubled. In "The Image" (1962), his critique about the rise of artificiality in America, Daniel J. Boorstin portrayed tourism as an arena increasingly pervaded by "pseudo-events," the reductive illusions that now plagued a consumerist society. Hotels were homogenizing, becoming "models of American modernity and antisepsis." The purpose-built tourist attraction was "an artificial product to be consumed in the very places where the real thing is free as air." What was left, he claimed, was merely a soulless residue of reality: "The American tourist in Japan looks less for what is Japanese than for what is Japanesey."

To Boorstin, whose thesis prefigured the intellectual despair of late-century Postmodernists, the innovations and changes that were making travel cheaper and more widely available were simultaneously anesthetizing people to the challenge and happenstance that made it all worthwhile. In "Come Fly with Me," released in 1958, Frank Sinatra's velvet voice ushered in the jet age, depicting the quickening process of transcontinental flight as a dream space in which travelers could simply "float down to Peru" and "beat the birds down to Acapulco Bay." Long-distance movement, once the work of weeks and months by land and sea, had become stupefying in its speed and ease.

The mobsters' Vegas would soon evolve into the apotheosis of this surreality. Mega-casinos themed around historical treasures - Venetian canals, Egyptian pyramids, of course the Eiffel Tower - appeared as little more than backdrops to hermetic gambling halls. In bringing the world to their customers, the casinos reduced it to a vulgar caricature.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the east's tilt towards consumer capitalism, the whole world opened up to the tourist. The number of people taking foreign vacations every year continued to climb rapidly - from 69 million in 1960 to 286 million in 1980 to almost 1.5 billion in 2019.

Amidst it all, a growing nag: a suspicion that all this going and seeing was devouring the very diversity it professed to covet, a snake eating its own tail. "International tourism is like King Midas in reverse," wrote Louis Turner and John Ash in " The Golden Hordes " (1975), "a device for the systematic destruction of everything that is beautiful in the world."

THREE

In " Overbooked " (2013), the journalist Elizabeth Becker traced the first true realization of tourism's vast economic consequence to the founding of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), a business forum for some of the industry's biggest players, which held its first annual meeting in 1991. Previously, there had been a reluctance to acknowledge the industry's importance, as if travel, with its inherent carefree and escapist overtones, was beneath sober assessment.

Soon after its inauguration, the WTTC commissioned the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School to develop a means of substantiating tourism's economic contribution as a whole. By the turn of the millennium, the statisticians had refined a formula known as the Tourism Satellite Account system (TSA), which could consolidate the economic value of multifarious tourist-dependent industries - hotels, airlines, agents, vendors and more, all operating in different currencies and across borders - into an aggregate dollar amount. "Its calculations were nothing short of a revelation," Becker wrote.

By 2019, as the TSA revealed, tourism accounted for 10.4% of global GDP and 334 million jobs worldwide. A combination of individualism, technological advancement and a hardening ethical consensus built around the pursuit of happiness had transformed the tourist gaze into one of the most valuable commodities on Earth. What many tended to dismiss as a frivolous sideshow in fact ranked among the biggest industries in the world.

Today, the comforting bromide we tell ourselves to counteract any unease about the burgeoning scale of travel remains unchanged. At its heart, any celebration of it is founded on an ethical ideal that a global human heritage should be open to everyone, exempt from the private marketplace. As the anthropologist Dean MacCannell has written: "The inclusiveness and openness of the modern tourist compact is twinborn with the modern project of democracy."

Why, then, does the modern figure of the tourist find themselves forever anathematized? "Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot," wrote the cultural critic Jonathan Culler. "They are said to move in droves, herds, swarms or flocks; they are as mindless and docile as sheep but as annoying as a plague of insects."

In " The Tourist Gaze " (1990), among the most seminal modern works on the social theory of tourism, John Urry explained how the democratic ideal of tourism was subject to multiple complicating factors. Chief among them was space. The view might be free, but the context for its appreciation, and often the very survival of the environment, is indivisible from its finite geography. (Three decades later, it is notable that many of the places most synonymous with "overtourism" are definitively circumscribed: Venice by its canals, Dubrovnik by its medieval walls.)

In this analysis, much of the problem with modern travel is spatial and aesthetic - a tragedy of appearances. Behold Angkor, built by generations of master stonemasons as a seat of gods and kings, the divine metropole of an empire that dominated Southeast Asia for 600 years. And here, centuries later, is a 50-strong tour group in matching baseball caps, murmurating at the behest of a tannoy-wielding guide, jostling to take their identikit photos of the sunset over the moat while their very presence threatens to precipitate the temples' subsidence into the mud.

Here is tourism's intractable contemporary paradox - that the democratization of our geographical and cultural riches too often precipitates their ruination. Again and again, tourism sacralizes the objects of its gaze, then desecrates them with footprints.

A crowd's contaminating tendency does not necessarily correspond to weight of numbers, but how those numbers behave. People abroad are people at play, and the anonymity of being far from home invites disinhibition. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so the maxim goes, and this inevitably means that holidays often provoke our most gluttonous, selfish and ignorant impulses. Camera phones have turned every tourist into a potential chronicler of the profane, meaning that each instance of touristic barbarism is now caught on film. Hence, in a video of a man scratching his initials into the nearly 2,000-year-old masonry of the Colosseum or a woman's smiling selfie at Auschwitz, we see all of human perfidy distilled.

Age-old observations about the narcissistic tendencies of travel - of tourism as a means of self-actualization and a marker of status - have only been amplified by digital phenomena as more layers of mediation pile on top of those that came before. Each revolution designed to make travel more accessible and convenient seems, in time, to exact lamentable collateral costs. Airbnb-style rentals hollow out the very neighborhoods their users profess to cherish. Google Maps, online translators and internet reviews diminish host-visitor interaction and nullify the process of getting lost that is a non-negotiable precondition of serendipitous discovery.

The appetite for self-delusion foreshadowed by the Claude Glass - for manipulating the object of the tourist gaze until it subscribes to preconceived desires - has become universalized. People converge on celebrated sites, taking turns to have their photo taken at the viewpoint, while out of shot a queue of other aspiring influencers await their turn. What is this if not travel as pure aesthetic performance? The poser knows that the romantic communion with the view - the golden-hour light, the sibilant surf - was fatally marred by the impatient multitude off-stage. Only the Instagram follower, seeing the soft-filtered image, is fooled.

"Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we're at our best," the philosopher Agnes Callard wrote in an essay titled "A Case Against Travel" in The New Yorker last June. Citing misanthropic antecedents from Emerson to Pessoa, Callard portrayed travel as an exercise in mimesis and banal one-upmanship. Whatever a traveler's professed motives, she argued, they are more truthfully engaged in the most egocentric pursuit imaginable: escaping (or at least postponing) the "certainty of annihilation." By removing us from the routine of domestic life, travel disguises the ineluctable fact of mortality "in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it."

Meanwhile, the closed environments decried by Boorstin continue to multiply. In recent decades, the fastest growing sector in tourism has been arguably its most mediated, the cruise, where customers can enjoy Italian food with a Jamaican sunset, then go ice-skating in the morning. It's a floating pseudo-event that does nothing so much as echo Humbert Humbert: You have been to the Caribbean. You have been nowhere at all.

"None of the folderol about finding oneself," Becker wrote about the burgeoning desert playground of Dubai, "or disappearing from the troubled world to discover anew the beauty of Mother Nature or the wisdom of an exotic culture." Here is travel completely detached from the "tourism compact" of democratic ideals and curiosity, characterized as much by labor exploitation and offshored profits as the visitors' incuriosity about where they are. And people are becoming desensitized to the fakery the more it becomes the norm. According to Google Ngram, use of the phrase "tourist trap," which grew in lockstep with the explosion of tourism between the 1960s and 2004, has since dropped by about a third.

Out in the real world, there persists a sense that every tourist cheapens the objects they light upon. The more the crowd swells, the more value is placed on bypassing it. Each stride in travel's democratization persuades some people, keen to advertise their discernment, to seek yet more esoteric, "bespoke," brag-worthy experiences. The wreckage of a century-old travel disaster like the Titanic latterly becomes yet another diversion for multimillionaires to seek out, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. War, genocide, poverty, industrial decline, nuclear fallout: all become valid objects for the tourist's gaze in its thirst for originality and "authenticity."

As MacCannell wrote: "Tourism, leisure and travel are the fastest growing and most profitable sectors of the global economy because of their easy adaptability to neoliberal economic schemes that seek to transform every aspect of human existence into a commodity."

The contradictions pile up. The traveler is a paragon of curiosity and generosity of spirit; the tourist is a facile automaton, a constituent of a witless herd. Travel is an expression of democratic freedom and the economic lifeblood for millions; tourism is an instrument of capitalist expropriation, an engine of inequality. The act of travel opens the heart and the mind to the lives of others, but it can equally be regarded as an exercise in selfishness, pursued for the accrual of personal gratification and cultural capital. Travel was better when there were fewer people doing it, but saying so out loud is nothing but snobbery.

It is impossible to count how many communities worldwide are caught on the horns of these dilemmas. Last summer's terrible wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, to take one stark example, exposed tourism as a Faustian bargain in which local calls for tourists to stay away were quickly followed by petitions for them to return.

Today, we are witnessing this endless tug-of-war between selfish desire and moral doubt culminate in the whispered sentiment, at once covetous and perverse, of tourists in an age of collapse: See it now before it's gone.

FOUR

One morning in early November, I walked into the west entrance of the ExCel Centre, a giant hangar in east London. A Mexican band in traditional dress was playing in the atrium, serenading a crescent of onlookers with their phones out, filming. It was day one of the World Travel Market, an annual expo where travel agents, vendors and marketers congregate to glad-hand and cut deals, and where, I hoped, some indication of tourism's future might be divined.

This year, the country with the glitziest stand, and one of the event's major sponsors, was Saudi Arabia. The kingdom's section of the cavernous exhibition space was wrapped in 20-foot-high video screens showing footage of desert scenery and Red Sea fauna. Functionaries in pristine thobes served aromatic tea from golden ewers to passersby.

My eye was drawn to an elevated section of the display. A tanned man in outdoor gear, holding a pair of skiing poles, stood beside an architectural mock-up of a gigantic multi-level resort capped with a tapering white dome. This was the ski village Trojena, currently under development in Saudi Arabia's mountainous northwest corner. It forms one part of Neom, the much-vaunted "giga project" that is central to the country's ambition to attract 70 million international visitors a year by 2030. Like Vegas and Dubai before it, a stretch of desert has become a blank slate for a Promethean enterprise, the realization of a lurid fantasy. Much of the region, including the ski village, is due to start welcoming guests in 2026. Upon that sweeping white roof, a network of pistes will operate year-round.

"It'll use a mixture of real and fake snow," the man with the poles explained. "Most ski resorts use some fake snow nowadays," he added, with a shrug.

"So you're a ski instructor?" I asked.

"Oh, no, I've never been," he said, sheepishly. "I just look the part."

Nearby, a tall screen previewed another component of Neom's purpose-built paradise. The video toggled between jungled coastlines, some Greco-Roman ruins and a row of Moai on Easter Island. "Islands ... home to advanced civilizations," a caption announced. Then the screen faded to black, and a landscape erupted from the picture in a matrix of fiery lines - "a new world is unveiled" - like a continent being born from lava. Out of this primordial cauldron sprang the outline of Sindalah, Neom's island development, with futuristic lodgings surrounding a nine-hole golf course. Cut to a superyacht gliding through a calm sea. A snorkeler chased a turtle, fireworks exploded, a chef garnished a plate of haute cuisine with a purple flower. The caption read: "An island where you can be the hero of your own story," and I imagined Boorstin turning in his grave.

A few days earlier I'd spoken to Ian Yeoman, a futurist at the Dutch university NHL Stenden who has spent two decades writing and teaching about tourism futures and scenario-planning for national tourist boards. The future of travel, he believes, is likely to be shaped by two perennial but now accelerating forces: "the culture of fear," an anxiety that foreign places are becoming scarier, less enticing, which is exacerbated by the invasive tenor of digital culture; and "the assault on pleasure," the idea that, in an era of growing panic about overconsumption, leisure travel - unnecessary, conspicuous - is destined to become increasingly stigmatized.

Yeoman foresaw that these social forces had the capacity to steer tourism toward several divergent pathways. The potential future that had haunted me since I began researching this story, and which seemed to be embodied by the kind of purpose-built luxury monoculture gestating at Neom, represented "the path to exclusivity." This would be "a very volatile world, where wealth in the middle class has fundamentally eroded," Yeoman told me. "Tourism will continue in clusters of gated communities, but it's basically tourism for the rich - apartheid tourism."

A rosier forecast was embodied in what Yeoman called "adaptive masses," a future in which the tourism marketplace responds wholesale to customers' growing demands for ethicality. Maybe the incipient forces of degrowth and mandated sustainability that are taking hold in some over-touristed destinations become mainstream. Yeoman was optimistically adamant that this would be the eventual trajectory. After all, if tourism's defining characteristic is its shape-shifting versatility, surely the right confluence of consumer demand and sage policy could twist the kaleidoscope until it settles on something better.

I explained my bleaker intuition that tourism's history suggested a gathering momentum toward meaninglessness, in which the incurious and self-indulgent side of travel was given free rein, but then the professor interjected: "Can you imagine if we stopped going on holiday?"

Yeoman is an avowed science-fiction fan; he proposed another possible future. As artificial intelligence evolves, it could reach a point of "technological singularity," wherein experiences within a digital metaverse are sensorially indistinguishable from reality. "It would be like the Holodeck in Star Trek," he said.

Such a scenario would yield some obvious benefits, he went on. All of the environmental degradation wrought by tourism? Reset to zero. Perfect conditions wherever and whenever you want? Yours at the press of a button. "Go to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute in the red-light district," said Yeoman, highlighting sex tourism as one of the industry's most abject symptoms. "But there's no human trafficking, no H.I.V. There's no issues of morality."

In the meantime, though, the costs would be unconscionable. What the thought experiment served to underscore was the extent to which tourism has become more than just one of several economic options for places with little else to sell. Oftentimes, it is the only option. For every hermetic purpose-built playground there are a thousand older and more precious communities that, having lost whatever economic purpose might have led to their original establishment and growth, had bet the house on foreign visitors. Shorn of those visitors' gaze, there was a chance that such places - our most prized natural and cultural treasures among them - would simply atrophy.

Endless quandaries surfaced in my mind. Without tourists, there would be no more safari vehicles bundling across the savannah to rubberneck at animals, it's true. But would the national park still exist? And what is worse: the tourist with a telephoto lens or the poacher with a gun? For somewhere to matter, it had to be beheld, Yeoman insisted. "If you want people to genuinely care about a place, they need to make the physical effort to go there," he said. Would anyone bother to repaint the Eiffel Tower, or would it be left to rust?

Drifting among the stalls at the ExCel Centre, I was at a loss to predict where the circus was heading. I only knew that it would continue, in one form or another, for as long as people have agency and borders stay open - and that it will always be fraught, for one person's respite would forever be another's bane.

In the afternoon, I entered one of the side stages, cordoned off from the main exhibition space by a black curtain. Up on the dais, travel company executives and thought leaders were holding forth on tourism's sustainability problem. Over and again, speakers stepped up to vaunt exemplars of best practice from around the world, but I couldn't help but notice that all of these laudable case studies were niche, with customers in the dozens and none of the terraforming heft of the Saudi destination-builders out on the floor.

A spokesperson from California laid out the stakes. No one in the Golden State could be in any doubt about the shelf-life of the current tourism model, he explained. With each passing season, California's glorious landscapes, not to mention its very habitability, were coming under greater threat from wildfires, drought, floods, rising sea levels. "Next year, California is bringing in a ban on hotels using plastic toiletry bottles," he said.

Somewhere at the back of the auditorium, someone stifled a laugh.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nice View. Shame About All The Tourists. | NOEMA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The travel industry is facing existential questions as it becomes more & more problematic. How did it get here, & where are we headed?

# data[].attributes.headline
An Economist article, exploring how the ocean tourism industry tries to balance profit and planet. 

# data[].attributes.subject
An Economist article, exploring how the ocean tourism industry tries to balance profit and planet. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
During this summer period, I find myself on the Tuscan coastline, where the beaches are consistently crowded and showing growing signs of degradation. Alongside coastal erosion, this year has also seen an invasion of blue crabs-a species introduced by humans. Summertime often means having more time for closer contact with nature, but it's now evident that this is occurring in an unsustainable manner, to the detriment of both the environment and ourselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Balancing profit and planet in the ocean tourism industry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
During this summer period, I find myself on the Tuscan coastline, where the beaches are consistently crowded and showing growing signs of degradation. Alongside coastal erosion, this year has also seen an invasion of blue crabs-a species introduced by humans.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Economist article, looking at the viability of sustainable tourism.

# data[].attributes.subject
A Economist article, looking at the viability of sustainable tourism.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sustainable tourism-heading in the right direction or a flight of fancy?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
IATA, the airline industry's trade body, predicts that 4bn passengers will take to the skies next year, as many as did in 2019, before covid-19 brought air travel to a halt. Long-haul flights are particularly an issue, with emissions from the longest set to quadruple by 2050-accounting for only 4% of trips but 41% of tourism's total emissions.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, arguing that tourists are ruining the world's greatest destinations. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, arguing that tourists are ruining the world's greatest destinations. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ivan Vera, 24, has always loved the feeling of being naked. He says that when he was about 17, he " decided to try it in public", with his then girlfriend. Since then, "I have been very busy with the associations in Catalonia," he tells me. The Catalan naturist-nudist scene is rich, decades-old and organised. Vera is a member of Joves Naturistes, which is for 18- to 35-year-olds; last week the all-ages Naturist-Nudist Federation of Catalonia made a public appeal for tourists wearing swimsuits to stay away from their beaches.

"Legally, we can practise it everywhere: there is no law against nudism in Spain," Vera says. "But most naturists prefer to practise it in secluded areas with a tradition of it. Those areas are being invaded, mostly in the summer months, by tourists who not only wear swimsuits, but also have a very disrespectful manner to nudists. We feel displaced in our own spaces and we fear losing them."

For many naturists, the presence of people wearing bikinis is enough to alter the beach for the worse, although Vera says he doesn't mind having clothed people around. But the behaviour isn't great - "there are some people who harass nudists, and there are voyeuristic activities and suchlike" - and the insensitivity extends to the natural environment. "In general terms, people who are disrespectful to nudism are disrespectful to nature, and they pollute the area in all kinds of ways."

It is especially galling because the traditionally nudist beaches are chosen for their seclusion, which often coincides with picture-postcard beauty. So visitors come for the postcard (for younger readers: the Instagram backdrop), and in so doing, turn the beach from three dimensions - a place with history, community and a counter-culture - to two.

The public appeal for tourists in swimsuits to stay away caught the world's attention. It animated a question playing out in beauty spots and heritage sites all over the world: when tourists flock to a place, do they change its character, wipe out its idiosyncrasies, without even noticing what those idiosyncrasies are? Is there an impact on the residents more important than a boost to ice-cream sales? Can you commodify beauty without tainting it? When does tourism become overtourism?

In the 20 years running up to Covid, international tourism doubled, to 2.4 billion arrivals in 2019. Overall, tourism last year was at 63% of its pre-Covid levels. Every place has its own post-Covid recovery story: Thailand has taken a while and is, at a state level at least, very welcoming to visitors; France has yet to see the same numbers of Chinese and Japanese visitors as before; in Paris - the most popular destination in the world - numbers this year are expected to be almost exactly as they were four years ago, 38.5 million. But people increasingly don't want a bounce back. Tourist transport accounts for 5% of global emissions, and people are flying into the heatwaves those create. It is all a bit on the nose.

"I think it really helps to think of travelling as a kind of consumption," says Frederik Fischer, CEO and founder of the social enterprise Neulandia, which connects creative digital workers to rural communities in Germany. "If you only consume another country, or you only consume a city, I'm not sure you're really doing a benefit to the people and the place."

Every location has a different challenge with tourists. On Catalan beaches, it may be that they are wearing too many clothes; in Barcelona, there are simply too many people. Whether that turns the entire place into a giant hotel (9.5 million people stayed in Barcelona's hotels in 2019, a fivefold increase on 1990) or a human traffic-jam (one-way walking systems have been introduced in Barcelona's city centre), it is impossible to imagine that being a pleasant, livable experience for the host citizens.

In Dubrovnik, tourists are just too annoying. The story went around this summer that wheelie suitcases had been banned from the cobbled old town, an interdiction with quite a substantial fine (€265). In fact, it was just a video suggesting that if people would only pick up their bags, that would be a lot less grating. All the pleas in Croatia's Respect the City campaign are modest - please don't fool around on our statuary, or walk around shirtless - but you can hear the quiet desperation you might predict, when a city of 41,000 people greets 1.5 million tourists a year.

Jon Henley, the Guardian's Europe correspondent, based in Paris, says there is a similar story to Dubrovnik in places such as Prague and Budapest: "Wherever you've got a medieval city centre, those become unbearable." Paris, with its wide boulevards and relatively large city centre, suffers less; when the French tourism minister, Olivia Grégoire, announced a strategy to prevent overtourism earlier this year, her focus was on sites such as Mont-Saint-Michel abbey in Normandy and the Channel beach Étretat, which aren't large enough for everyone who wants to see them. In the capital, at peak tourist season, all the Parisians, including many in hospitality and retail, are away. "I quite like it in August in Paris for precisely that reason," Henley says. "Confused-looking tourists wondering why everything's shut." If Paris is very tolerant of tourists, Saint-Tropez is getting close to its hard limit on the ones who don't tip properly.

Amsterdam is at the vanguard of the stay-away movement. The city council decided this summer to close the cruise ship terminal in the city centre, specifically citing its sustainability goals. But there is always a subtext, which is often the text, with Dutch imprecations about tourism, which is that people (especially British people) go there specifically to behave like animals. There possibly isn't a city in the world, medieval or not, that could cope with a visit from a group of Britons who had gone there specifically to get off their heads for 72 hours without stopping. An online campaign launched in the spring, with ads triggered whenever anyone in the UK entered "stag party Amsterdam" or "pub crawl Amsterdam" into a search engine, warned people of the possible consequences - fines, arrests, hospitalisation, making life completely miserable for residents - of hedonistic frenzy. The deputy mayor for economic affairs, Sofyan Mbarki, released a statement at the time: "Visitors are still welcome, but not if they misbehave and cause nuisance. As a city, we are saying: we'd rather not have this, so stay away."

Other cities can increasingly relate to this. A video did the rounds this week in which a woman walks across the Trevi fountain in Rome to fill her water bottle. In June, a guy was filmed carving his and his girlfriend's names into the Colosseum. Before you even consider the destinations that people go to specifically to behave badly - Aiya Napa, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Ghent (the Belgian city is considering banning stag party-friendly beer bikes) - there is always this problem that, as Cornish business owner Mati Ringrose says: "When you go on holiday, it's not your place, it's not your community, so you act completely differently, and out of character." It cannot go unremarked that British tourists are notorious for this. The streets of "Europe's latest booze hotspot", Split, in Croatia, are festooned with signs in English warning of fines for public drinking, vomiting and urinating. One girl complained to a reporter this week that the fines were unfair, as she was quite likely to vomit, having had too many "anus burners" (shots of tequila, orange juice and tabasco).

Then there are digital nomads, itinerant workers who, every month or two, move between beauty spots in locations such as Bali, Mexico City, Lisbon, Chiang Mai in Thailand and Medellín in Colombia. These people would style themselves as the opposite of tourists, although as Dave Cook, an anthropologist at University College London, says: "I'd speak to the Chiang Mai coffee shop owner, and they'd say: 'they're in a coffee shop and they're speaking English, so as far as we're concerned, they're just tourists.'" Before the pandemic, Cook says, lifestyle migration was a very niche phenomenon, which would include expats but was more of a counter-cultural movement, people specifically rejecting the worker-bee ethic of life in an office. Since Covid, there have been more strands: the freelance knowledge worker, the digital nomad business owner and the salaried digital nomad, which was more or less unheard of pre-pandemic. "Digital nomads talk about 'dating' locations: they're geographically polyamorous," Cook says. "Resentment can creep in, but what happens in reality is digital nomads might fall in love, but the locals have an intuitive understanding that they're going to be left."

What people often object to about visitors, whether they are tourists, expats, retirees or digital nomads, is what they do to property prices. Lisbon is the prime example of a city altered beyond recognition, to many people's eyes denatured by an influx of people who could just afford higher rents. Michael Oliveira Salac, who is half-British, half-Portuguese and splits his time between London and the Algarve, says it was a combination of tourists and nomadic financial technology workers, who, between creating Airbnb demand and being able to afford much higher long-term rents, forced Lisbon residents out of the city. The minimum wage in Portugal is €760 (£650) a month. It is not possible to compete with an influx of people paying €1,000 a month for a two-bed and laughing about how cheap that is. That creates a cascade effect, Oliveira Salac says. "The main avenue, where there used to be old multibrand boutiques, now Gucci has come in, Prada has come in, so that's shot the rents up." The newcomers "want sushi, they want Thai food, they want vegan. The old lot can't cater to that, so they've shut down. Lisbon has lost its soul." And that picture has played out in Porto, even in some towns in the Algarve: Portugal sits on this axis, where it is comparatively cheap, very beautiful and in the right time zone for a lot of nomads, which from a resident's perspective is a curse, like sitting on a fault line.

Venice is probably ground zero of the overtoured effect; tourists and residents have hit bed-for-bed parity, which makes normal life in the service of anything other than a tourist unviable. It creates a theme-park effect, to which even Rome - home to the most melodramatic monuments - hasn't succumbed. In Rome, you can still at least glimpse the life underneath the day trip; in Venice, despite a recent clampdown on city-dwarfing cruise ships, Unesco recently threatened to "blacklist" the city as a world heritage site, citing Italy's failure to protect it from mass tourism and the climate crisis.

You have to wonder whether it is worth it. Ringrose, who runs a shop in Redruth in Cornwall, isn't technically homeless because she lives in a van with her seven-month-old child, but she says even parking charges have skyrocketed. "I have so many friends in emergency housing, it's insane," she says. In the summer, Cornish resort towns such as St Ives are so crowded that Ringrose has a disabled friend who has to move out because she can't get down the street. Then, in the winter, she says: "There are whole towns that you go in and there's no lights on half the year. There's nothing open. There are no pubs there. Whole swathes of what used to be communities are shut down. It massively affects the mentality of the county."

Redruth is relatively untouched by tourism because it is not coastal, and "it's a really deprived area," Ringrose says, "but it's not deprived of community. Redruth is ridiculously rich in nice people, because it's not a tourist town." Ringrose tells me about a beach in Polzeath with a fence in the middle that someone built to stop people walking along the bottom of their garden. She tells me about the woman at a car boot sale who bought a jumper off her for a tenner, and asked her to split a £50 note. "I have never been given a 50 in a car boot, ever." At the planning level, at the level of society, every desirable place on earth will have a variant of the Cornish question: if tourism brings in 12% of its income, yet takes up almost all of its housing, so that the lives of the residents don't function any more, how can that be OK. At the level of the tourist or the nomad, the proposition is as simple, but an easier fix: look around - if everyone else is naked, either get naked or go away.

This article was amended on 18 August 2023. An earlier version misspelled Ivan Vera's surname as Bera.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Wish you weren't here! How tourists are ruining the world's greatest destinations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Overtourism has long been a problem - and besieged cities are fighting back. But can angry locals stop the tide of stag parties, 'anus burners', noise and graffiti?

# data[].attributes.headline
A National Geographic article, investigating the phenomenon of 'overtourism', and whether it is a problem for the world. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A National Geographic article, investigating the phenomenon of 'overtourism', and whether it is a problem for the world. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As major cities are starting to impose bans, fines and taxes to combat tourism, we take a look at what it means for locals - and visitors.

Photograph Maxiphoto, Getty Images

When locals in the charming Austrian lakeside village of Hallstatt staged a blockade of the main access tunnel, brandishing placards asking visitors to 'think of the children', it highlighted what can happen when places start to feel overrun by tourists. Hallstatt has just 800 residents but has opened its doors to around 10,000 visitors a day - a population increase of over 1,000%. And it's just one of a growing number of places where residents are up in arms at the influx of travellers.

The term 'overtourism' is relatively new, having been coined over a decade ago to highlight the spiralling numbers of visitors taking a toll on cities, landmarks and landscapes. As tourist numbers worldwide return towards pre-pandemic levels, the debate around what constitutes 'too many' visitors continues. While many destinations, reliant on the income that tourism brings, are still keen for arrivals, a handful of major cities and sites are now imposing bans, fines, taxes and time-slot systems, and, in some cases, even launching campaigns of discouragement in a bid to curb tourist numbers.

What is overtourism?

In essence, overtourism is too many people in one place at any given time. While there isn't a definitive figure stipulating the number of visitors allowed, an accumulation of economic, social and environmental factors determine if and how numbers are creeping up.

There are the wide-reaching effects, such as climate change. Coral reefs, like the Great Barrier Reef and Maya Bay, Thailand, made famous by the Leonardo DiCaprio film, The Beach, are being degraded from visitors snorkelling, diving and touching the corals, as well as tour boats anchoring in the waters. And 2030 transport-related carbon emissions from tourism are expected to grow 25% from 2016 levels, representing an increase from 5% to 5.3% of all man-made emissions, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO). More localised issues are affecting locals, too. Renters are being evicted by landlords in favour of turning properties into holiday lets, and house prices are escalating as a result. As visitors and rental properties outnumber local residents, communities are being lost. And, skyrocketing prices, excessive queues, crowded beaches, exorbitant noise levels, damage at historical sites and the ramifications to nature as people overwhelm or stray from official paths are also reasons the positives of tourism can have a negative impact.

Conversely, 'undertourism' is a term applied to less-frequented destinations, particularly in the aftermath of the pandemic. The economic, social and environmental benefits of tourism aren't always passed on to those with plenty of capacity and, while tourist boards are always keen for visitors to visit their lesser-known attractions, it's a more sustainable and rewarding experience for both residents and visitors.

Scenic views of Hallstätter See, Dachstein Mountains and the town itself is what draws the crowds to Hallstatt.

Photograph by Alan Tow, Getty Images

What's the main problem with it?

Overcrowding is an issue for both locals and tourists. It can ruin the experience of sightseeing for those trapped in long queues, unable to visit museums, galleries and sites without advance booking, incurring escalating costs for basics like food, drink and hotels, and faced with the inability to experience the wonder of a place in relative solitude. The absence of any real regulations has seen places take it upon themselves to try and establish some form of crowd control, meaning no cohesion and no real solution.

Justin Francis, co-founder and CEO of Responsible Travel, a tour operator that focuses on more sustainable travel, says "Social media has concentrated tourism in hotspots and exacerbated the problem, and tourist numbers globally are increasing while destinations have a finite capacity. Until local people are properly consulted about what they want and don't want from tourism, we'll see more protests."

A French start up, Murmuration, which monitors the environmental impact of tourism by using satellite data, states that 80% of travellers visit just 10% of the world's tourism destinations, meaning bigger crowds in fewer spots. And, the UNWTO predicts that by 2030, the number of worldwide tourists, which peaked at 1.5 billion in 2019, will reach 1.8 billion,likely leading to greater pressure on already popular spots and more objection from locals.

Who has been protesting?

Of the 800 residents in the UNESCO-listed village of Hallstatt, around 100 turned out in August to show their displeasure and to push for a cap on daily visitors and a curfew on tour coach arrivals.

Elsewhere, residents in Venice fought long and hard for a ban on cruise ships, with protest flags often draped from windows. In 2021, large cruise ships over 25,000 tonnes were banned from using the main Giudecca Canal, leaving only smaller passenger ferries and freight vessels able to dock.

In France, the Marseille Provence Cruise Club introduced a flow management system for cruise line passengers in 2020, easing congestion around the popular Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde Basilica. A Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) spokesperson said, "Coaches are limited to four per ship during the morning or afternoon at the Basilica to ensure a good visitor experience and safety for residents and local businesses. This is a voluntary arrangement respected by cruise lines."

While in Orkney, Scotland, residents have been up in arms at the number of cruise ships docking on its shores. At the beginning of 2023, the local council confirmed that 214 cruise ship calls were scheduled for the year, bringing around £15 million in revenue to the islands. Following backlash from locals, the council has since proposed a plan to restrict the number of ships on any day.

Large cruise ships have been banned in Venice's Giudecca Canal since 2021.

Photograph by Bruce Hodd, Getty Images

What steps are being taken?

City taxes have become increasingly popular, with Barcelona increasing its nightly levy in April 2023 - which was originally introduced in 2012 and varies depending on the type of accommodation - and Venice expects to charge day-trippers a €5 fee from 2024.

In Amsterdam this summer, the city council voted to ban cruise ships, while the mayor, Femke Halsema, commissioned a campaign of discouragement, asking young British men who planned to have a 'vacation from morals' to stay away. In Rome, sitting at popular sites, such as the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps, has been restricted by the authorities.

And in Kenya's Maasai Mara, meanwhile, the Narok County governor has introduced on-the-spot fines for off-roading. He also plans to double nightly park fees in peak season.

What are the forecasts for global tourism?

During the Covid pandemic, tourism was one of the hardest-hit industries - according to UNWTO, international tourist arrivals dropped 72% in 2020. However, traveller numbers have since been rapidly increasing, with double the number of people venturing abroad in the first three months of 2023 than in the same period in 2022. And, according to the World Travel Tourism Council, the tourism sector is expected to reach £7.5 trillion this year, 95% of its pre-pandemic levels.

While the tourism industry is forecast to represent 11.6% of the global economy by 2033, it's also predicted that an increasing number of people will show more interest in travelling more sustainably. In a 2022 survey by Booking.com, 64% of the people asked said they would be prepared to stay away from busy tourist sites to avoid adding to congestion.

Are there any solutions?

There are ways to better manage tourism by promoting more off-season travel, limiting numbers where possible and having greater regulation within the industry. Encouraging more sustainable travel and finding solutions to reduce friction between residents and tourists could also have positive impacts. Promoting alternative, less-visited spots to redirect travellers may also offer some benefits.

Harold Goodwin, emeritus professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, says, "Overtourism is a function of visitor volumes, but also of conflicting behaviours, crowding in inappropriate places and privacy. Social anthropologists talk about frontstage and backstage spaces. Tourists are rarely welcome in backstage spaces. To manage crowds, it's first necessary to analyse and determine the causes of them.

Francis adds: "However, we must be careful not to just recreate the same problems elsewhere. The most important thing is to form a clear strategy, in consultation with local people about what a place wants or needs from tourism."

As it stands, overtourism is a seasonal issue for a small number of destinations. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, a range of measures are clearly an option depending on the scale of the problem. For the majority of the world, tourism remains a force for good with many benefits beyond simple economic growth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With visitor numbers around the world increasing towards pre-pandemic levels, the issue of overtourism is once again rearing its head.

# data[].attributes.headline
A World Economic Forum report into the way the shipping industry is adapting to tensions in the Red Sea.

# data[].attributes.subject
A World Economic Forum report into the way the shipping industry is adapting to tensions in the Red Sea.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Suez Canal and the Red Sea channel approximately 30% of the world's container traffic and facilitate the annual movement of over $1 trillion.

Houthi forces in Yemen have attacked at least 33 ships in the Red Sea, disrupting global shipping.

This incident highlights the need for resilience in supply chains, particularly in the operations of shipping firms.

The Red Sea has emerged as a key focal point of geopolitical tension. Houthi militants in Yemen are employing sophisticated weaponry, including hijacks, ballistic missiles, anti-cruise missiles and drones to target international shipping routes.

These attacks, ostensibly in support of Hamas against Israel, began on 19 November 2023, with the hijacking of the Galaxy Leader cargo vessel by Houthi forces. This act of piracy redirected the vessel to Hodeidah port in Yemen, leading to the ongoing detainment of its crew.

Since the initial incident, reports from the UK Maritime Trade Operations indicate that over 33 vessels have been assaulted in the region, with 16 experiencing direct hits from missiles or drones. These incidents have significantly disrupted global trade, underscoring the strategic importance of the Red Sea as a critical maritime corridor.

International response and operational challenges

In response to escalating tensions, the United States and the United Kingdom launched Operation Prosperity Guardian on 18 December 2023, a strategic initiative designed to secure maritime navigation and safeguard trade flows. This move was further bolstered by the European Union's launch of Operation Aspis on 19 February 2024, demonstrating a unified international commitment to restoring regional stability. Despite these concerted efforts, several challenges loom large:

Allied forces have conducted targeted aerial and naval strikes against Houthi military installations in Yemen, attempting to quell the threat to maritime security. Nonetheless, these measures have yet to halt the Houthi's maritime assaults.

The Houthis' ability to execute precise attacks on vessels indicates their access to sophisticated tracking technology, enhancing their capability to disrupt shipping with alarming accuracy.

The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a vital chokepoint in global shipping, remains acutely vulnerable. Though increased military presence might reduce the risk of attacks, it cannot guarantee the pre-crisis level of security for passing vessels.

Economic ripple effects

The Suez Canal and the Red Sea channel approximately 30% of the world's container traffic and facilitate the annual movement of merchandise valued at over $1 trillion. Disruptions here reverberate across the global economic landscape, underscoring the interconnected nature of international trade and its susceptibility to geopolitical tensions.

The emerging threat landscape has compelled major shipping conglomerates to navigate around the Cape of Good Hope, introducing delays of 1-3 weeks to standard transit times. This strategic shift not only amplifies operational expenditures for shipping entities and logistics facilitators but also burdens companies reliant on these maritime avenues with escalated inventory and transport costs. Such developments harbour the potential to instigate a fresh cycle of global inflation, impacting consumer prices and economic stability worldwide.

This recalibration of shipping routes exacerbates the issue of capacity within the ocean freight sector, as vessels now require extended durations to complete round trips and prepare for subsequent cargo loads. There has been a contraction in available market capacity, a phenomenon not isolated to the Red Sea but also influenced by the drought situation in the Panama Canal and the cyclical effect of the Chinese New Year. These dynamics have precipitated noticeable capacity reductions across pivotal trade corridors: Transpacific routes to North America's East and West Coasts have registered decreases of 7.5% and 6.9%, respectively, while the Asia-North Europe trade lane has encountered a contraction of 4.9%.

The necessity to divert, coupled with the overarching crisis, has exerted upward pressure on ocean freight rates, primarily due to escalating operational costs. Xeneta's analysis underscores a significant surge in shipping rates, particularly affecting routes from the Far East to the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. These routes have witnessed a near-tripling in costs since 1 December 2023. This steep ascent in freight rates illustrates the direct consequences of geopolitical tensions on the logistics sector, hinting at broader implications for global trade networks and economic resilience.

These developments accentuate the intricate dependencies within global supply chains and the pivotal role of strategic maritime corridors in maintaining economic equilibrium.

As the situation unfolds, the agility and adaptability of the shipping industry, coupled with coherent international cooperation, will be paramount in navigating the complexities of this crisis and mitigating its impact on the global economic fabric.

Preparing for prolonged impact

The repercussions for businesses amid this crisis will be determined by the intricacies of their supply chain strategies, including the selection of shipping routes, choice of carriers and the flexibility to adapt operational frameworks.

A notable example is the detour around the Cape of Good Hope, which increases the distance from Shanghai to Rotterdam by 3,500 nautical miles, and from Jebel Ali to Port Said by 8,500 nautical miles. When vessels operate at a speed of 13 knots per hour, the Shanghai to Rotterdam journey, inclusive of the 3,500 nautical mile detour, will prolong the transit time to over 44 days, whereas maintaining a speed of 17 knots per hour could keep the duration to 33 days, aligning more closely with the original transit time without the detour. However, higher speeds result in increased fuel consumption and subsequent higher emissions charges, highlighting a complex trade-off between speed, cost and environmental impact.

A nuanced understanding of the specific implications for each business is essential, particularly in terms of transit time and cost, which are vital components of inventory management and overall supply chain expenditures. Identifying which shipments or goods are most susceptible to delays or additional costs due to the detour is crucial for formulating effective mitigation strategies.

Shipping lines have embraced a diverse range of priorities, strategies and solutions to soften the Red Sea crisis's impact on global supply chains. Maersk has adjusted the speeds of its Asia-Europe vessels and fine-tuned port call schedules, a move aimed at alleviating capacity concerns while ensuring the integrity of their service network remains intact. Moreover, in response to the growing demand for alternative logistical options from the business community, Maersk has introduced innovative solutions such as truck bridge services and sea-air transport options. These initiatives are designed to assist customers in navigating the challenges of extended transit times, showcasing Maersk's commitment to providing flexible and efficient solutions amid ongoing maritime disruptions.

Maersk's sea-air and truck bridge solutions. Image: Maersk

The imperative of resilience

The Red Sea crisis has highlighted the critical need for resilience within global supply chains. To navigate this turbulent landscape, companies must excel in real-time monitoring of global events, grasp the implications of these developments and rapidly deploy alternative operational strategies. Cultivating such resilience serves as a bulwark against imminent disruptions and fortifies long-term business sustainability in a global marketplace characterized by its increasing unpredictability.

The acceleration of trade digitalization and supply chain data visibility makes integrated end-to-end solutions with predictive and proactive management possible. It is time to plan for the unplannable - and to do it well.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Charting the course: How the shipping industry is adapting to tensions in the Red Sea

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the Red Sea, Houthi hijackings and attacks on shipping are putting pressure on global #trade. Here's how major shipping firms are adapting to the crisis.

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, looking at a hyperloop test track being built in the Netherlands, and what it might mean for the future of travel. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, looking at a hyperloop test track being built in the Netherlands, and what it might mean for the future of travel. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The longest hyperloop test track in Europe has opened, raising faint hopes once more that the maglev meets vacuum tube transport technology could be the future.

Operators said the facility would help prove the hyperloop's feasibility, saying it could allow a 6,200-mile (10,000km) network of high-speed tubes to be in place around the continent by 2050.

As it stands, the European Hyperloop Center test bed in Veendam is not so much a loop as a 420-metre-long forked white pipe running alongside the railway and road that must still be used, for now, to transport people around this corner of the Netherlands.

Made of 34 interconnected prefabricated 2.5-metre-wide steel cylinders, the partly EU-funded test pipe is somewhat shorter than the 2-mile track envisaged in 2020, and allows speeds of only a fraction of the 620mph (1000km/h) that proponents believe the technology can achieve.

The test track at the European Hyperloop Center in Veendam. Photograph: Hollandse Hoogte/Rex/Shutterstock

The fork in the Vandeem pipe will allow engineers to test what happens at a "lane switch" when a high-speed vehicle changes course. First tests will be carried out by the Dutch company Hardt Hyperloop in the coming weeks.

The centre's director, Sascha Lamme, said it was a "pivotal moment", telling Agence France-Presse: "You need this to create a network. The lane switch is a diverging part of the infrastructure, so one part goes for example to Paris, the other one heads off to Berlin."

skip past newsletter promotion
Alex Hern's weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion

The idea of the hyperloop was floated by Elon Musk in 2013, who proposed a line linking San Francisco and Los Angeles, using magnets to propel shuttles along pipes in near-vacuum conditions, with the lack of friction and air resistance potentially allowing the vehicles to rival the speed of aeroplanes.

His fellow tycoon Richard Branson continued to put the hype in hyperloop with a Virgin-branded company testing a passenger capsule in the Nevada desert in 2020. He sold up and the renamed Hyperloop One collapsed last year.

While past predictions for the hyperloop have appeared unduly bold, Lamme maintained a pan-European network could appear in a few decades. "If you look at how highways were developed over time, it goes exponentially when the technology is ready. It should really be possible to get into a station in Amsterdam and travel to a city like Barcelona in two hours."

Supporters say the hyperloop offers potentially cleaner and quieter as well as quicker transport, although passengers may balk at the idea of travelling in a windowless pod hurtling through an airless tube. Lamme suggested reluctance could be overcome with "a capsule with a nice ceiling which might display stars or a nice sunny day".

Europe's innovation may yet allow it to keep up with developments in China, which opened a one-mile test track for "low-vacuum pipeline magnetic levitation technology" in Shanxi province in 2022, according to state media.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Europe's longest hyperloop test track revives futuristic tube transport hype

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Operators hope newly opened Dutch track will help prove feasibility of high-speed shuttle system

# data[].attributes.headline
A Guardian article, looking at the 'golden age' of British package holidays, and indicating how much holidays have changed. 

# data[].attributes.subject
A Guardian article, looking at the 'golden age' of British package holidays, and indicating how much holidays have changed. 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Una cerveza, por favor! The golden age of the British package holiday - in pictures

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When British tourists ditched the UK seaside to travel overseas, Trevor Clark captured their glamorous new vacations - although he did bring his own palm tree