Don’t be a colonial tourist, or why we should review our travel expectations

Have you noticed the heavy advertising for travel and tourism?  It seems to be in every medium. just as lockdown is easing.  Have you ever thought: Why do we expect to travel the globe and be tourists everywhere?  What is this sense of entitlement?  What does travel do to climate, to local communities, wildlife etc.?  What should we be doing?

Fairly recently, I heard the following: “Everybody has the right to travel to wherever they wish”.  Pre-coronavirus, that was probably a very widely held opinion.  However, at the very simplest level, this is patently now not the case.  I am not able to visit my grandchildren in Scotland.  If we were to follow our inclination to go where we like, when we like, in fairly short order we would likely be subject to state intervention and sanctions – and in my opinion, under current coronavirus conditions, rightly too, including Mr Cummings.  So, how does this sit with our apparently insatiable desire to travel all over the globe.  Nowadays, there are even maps of the world you can buy, on which you can colour in or scratch off all the countries you have visited.  Many people travel abroad more than once a year, weddings are now hosted in all manner of locations, stag and hen parties often are held overseas.  What is this drive and what is it doing to the visited local communities and the globe? 

At the heart of our craze for travel, there seems to be an incredible sense of entitlement to go wherever you please, do whatever you please.  Some time ago, one might have believed that this was a kick back against the landed gentry preventing people from accessing the countryside.  That just doesn’t wash today.  Back in the last century,  rather than holiday at the coast in the UK, a flight or a coach to France, Spain or Portugal was affordable.  Now, it has become expected.  With that expectation and ordinariness, the search for the exotic has become a national pastime.  We’ve just got back from – fill in the blank – Cancun, Peru, Antarctica, Kazakhstan.  What country, experience, photograph have you just bagged?  What concerns me is that this seems to come with a total lack of respect of the traditions, cultures and languages of the places visited.  The British are particularly poor at languages and expect to have English spoken everywhere they go.

Consider the giant cruise ships that rock up at tiny ports round the globe, or Venice for that matter.  Consider the city breaks, the tours, the golf tours, the game lodges.  The punters are all tourists.  They flock to the sights and spend their money at cafes and craft shops.  Staying in hotels or lodges, who does the waiting, who does the cleaning and cooking?  Who are these people?  What do they do at night?  The problem is that the majority are not interested, don’t wish to know, but expect to have the best of everything provided by gracious, willing slaves that speak impeccable English.  Consider: in the future, we may be expected to speak impeccable Chinese, just so tourists are comfortable and will spend their money here.  Why is it that so many places come to rely on tourism?  What does it do to locations, cultures, development and the environment? 

I suspect there is a rather similar progression at every “discovered” destination.  When people start visiting, I suspect that the local community is initially flattered.  The provision of what visitors like – to see, eat, stay in and buy - then becomes a driving force.  Over time, such destinations become dependent on tourists and tourism.  With the coronavirus shutdown, many businesses are now under threat.  Tourist destinations abroad are now under threat, with no travel and therefore no income.  Pragmatically, tourism is economically important.

But let us take a step back in time to the discovery of destinations.  Following discovery, who has the wherewithal to provide the hotels, cafes, restaurants and shops that tourists require?  Inevitably, it is the few with the financial clout and ambition to exploit the opportunities.  It is not the original community, with its traditional culture and social structures.  So, changes follow to that culture, reflecting not the traditions, language or mores of the original, but actually the likes of the visitors.  Thus, tourism is basically a corrupting influence, a subtle colonial influence.    

In an age of accelerating climate change, do we really consider the impact our travel has on air quality, increasing carbon in the atmosphere, or noise in our oceans?  The impacts of Covid-19 on improving air quality have been wonderful.  We shouldn’t slip back to our dirty ways.  As for impacts on wildlife, exploitation and habitat destruction are obvious.  Perhaps we should also be questioning the basis of much of eco-tourism.  Much of it seems to be colonialism by another name.  Read “The Big Conservation Lie” by John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada (2016).

Essentially, I am just arguing that we take more time to consider how we behave.  We have that time, so let’s use it.  Question the need to travel, question that sense of entitlement, question what are the cultural, economic and environmental impacts of our actions.  Arguing that we can do what we like, simply because we can, misses so many points and surely is no longer acceptable.