Tourism Again

Over the holiday season, I had the opportunity to take a holiday (from what?) and be much to my own distaste, a tourist.

Thus I have a few more reflections about tourism. 

Tourism is difficult for me to conceive. I'm leaning on my economics training here, which has a gross tendency to overestimate human rationality. 

First Reflection: Icecream.

As a kid, I lived in regional center Ballarat. Population 80,000. Ballarat has ice cream. A popular tourism destination in Victoria, where Ballarat is, is The Great Ocean Road. The road is pretty great, but it isn't like the main attraction. It's mainly surf beaches, attached to surf towns along that ocean road - Torquay, Lorne, Angle Sea etc.

Lorne has a population of just over 1,000 and also has ice cream. 3 stores in fact according to google. 

So as an economist, this is what confuses me about tourism. Let's make economist-style assumptions. Say I have a Sunday off. I'm choosing between travelling to Lorne for the day, or staying in "The Rat". Staying means I'll still do leisure activities, it doesn't mean I'll reheat leftovers. 

The trip to Lorne means I'd go to the beach and have a swim, then buy some fish & chips and ice cream.

I'd do the exact same thing with my day off in Ballarat, except maybe go for a ride, walk the lake etc.

What I'm trying to establish here, is where "tourist dollars" come from. If I spend $50 on lunch in Lorne, it is $50 I don't spend in Ballarat. Of course, I know better. I got the Economics bachelors degree. Just because Australia has a sales tax (GST) doesn't mean local councils in my state aren't locked in a vicious taxation battle effected by land prices, effected in turn by local business revenue. 

But setting that aside, the bones of my reflection are that I go to Lorne to enjoy the beach, which in Australia is a public good. The commons. There's no rent an umbrella or beach blanket business like Italy, Mexico etc. So too is Ballarat's Lake Wendouree. Which is to say, the attractions are largely free. 

So the first obvious tourist $$$ are transport costs, buses or petrol, maybe car hire, insurance so fourth. Now before jumping to the scale of tourism most middle-class Australians think of when thinking tourism. What if Fish and Chips and Ice Cream in The Rat does not = F&C&I in Lorne. This I suspect is the real key to tourism's contribution to an economy - importing price insensitive individuals.

I can't actually get the real numbers, but let's say in Ballarat fish and chips costs $20 and in Lorne $35, and again economics is well, not a science because if Lorne being a seaside town gets fresher produce maybe the $35 fish and chips is twice as good as fish and chips in the rat, in which case it's somehow cheaper per util in Lorne, even though I have to fork over $35 not $20 to solve the problem of lunch.

So let me blow out the scale, Wuhan is a city in China famous for Hot Dry Noodles. Just while you are reading this, maybe pour yourself a glass of water, don't drink it, and just hold it above your desk so your arm is supporting it, and nothing is supporting your arm. Just holding about 350-600 grams aloft.

Transport yourself across the world = $$$, check into a hotel, airbnb, hostel or whatever = $$$ and bingo bango Wuhan has a new consumer to boot, whereas wherever you are from has lost one. 

Now, we have a word and that word is 'touristy' denoting basically an economy that has given over entirely to a short term transitional consumer market, or people on tour, tourists. Wuhan, in the international sense I am guessing is not touristy. Covid tours are probably not a thing yet. Hence after spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars, you can probably get the hot dry noodles the locals eat at the same price as the locals.

From the perspective of the federal treasurer, it's a disaster that you are probably spending $5 a day feeding yourself in a foreign economy rather than $20 or $50 a day in theirs. Granted the taxes levied on travelling out of the country no doubt more than ofset your lost domestic consumption. Furthermore, there's an exchange of tourism, bring in wealthy Wuhanians, sell them opals, stuffed marsupial plushies manufactured in provinces near their home, have them spend $120 per person taking a bus ride to Lorne, sell them $50 fish and chips, $15 icecreams.

Okay, so I doubt anyone is actually holding up a glass of water, but if you had you probably would have noticed your arm is getting tired. The reason I built in this thought experiment is to try and impress upon you the energy that needs must be consumed to lift you over an ocean and deposit you on the other side. I'm sure with aerodynamic lift and economies of scale it's much more efficient than literally dragging you, but it's not like it's free and it's not like planes run on renewables yet. Anyway...

Because, I preppy private school boy from Ballarat have limits to my price insensitivity. I'll go hungry if I have to if it means me saving $30 on lunch, worst comes to worst I'll start bringing lunch to avoid being ripped off. 

I recall hearing David Beckham once got scammed into paying for an Evian bath, it does seem to exist. This is the extreme of price insensitivity. Now it could be just an honest, if stupid, indulgence but consider being scammed into such a bath by having fears played upon. Price insensitivity driven by a fear of the unknown. There is a much more middle-class version of this, which is travel advice like only using official taxis, only prepaying for official taxis, sticking to the tourist area on the map (in the case of literal tourist ghettos, where one is told the police don't have control of the streets beyond the tourist district). 

Where basically, you eat in the hotel restaurant rather than venturing out and buying off a street vendor.

All of which is to say, tourism economics appears to be predicated on exploiting waste. You aren't Serena Williams, or David Beckham. But poor countries with natural goods like white sand and torquise water can ship you in, where your disposable income makes you a relative David Beckham or Serena Williams, and you will do ridiculously indulgent things, like lounge by a pool drinking cocktails all day instead of going through garbage bags looking for scrap metal or whatever.

Second Reflection: The Lowered Bar from De Tocqueville 

I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo — that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture — great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast — for luncheon — for dinner — for tea — for supper — for between meals. I like a change, occasionally. ~ Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad 1869.

Useful undertakings which require sustained attention and vigorous precision in order to succeed often end up by being abandoned, for, in America, as elsewhere, the people move forward by sudden impulses and short-lived efforts. ~ De Tocqueville 

Once upon a time, it was a big deal to cross an ocean. Very, very few got to do so. 

They say "travel broadens people" (actually Twain's conclusion of Innocents Abroad is much to this effect) a claim of which, I'm sceptical. For example, my family and I took a tour, with a group and a tour guide. My father had some fear that a woman asking frequent questions was going to be a repeat of another tour experience I had not been present for, where a woman on that tour had stress tested the patience and professionalism of their tour guide by asking questions the answer to which had just been given. By my dad's characterisation she was so inattentive as to be just a hair's width away from asking "where am I?"

They also say "a picture is worth a thousand words." another claim I'm sceptical of, and being a tourist in the 20s allows one to peak behind the curtain of images such as this:

taken from pinterest, pinned from tumblr. Example only, my reflections made in total ignorance of the subject of this picture.

If you go to a tourist hotspot, you will be in the presence of influencers, and worse, aspiring influencers. I am an artist, Pinterest is an incredibly useful tool, I'm interested in fashion and so I come across "pins" of influencers in their hats on their beaches and cobbled medieval streets and standing beside or in front of art all the time. What the pictures never describe is how vacuous the work of an influencer and those who aspire to be influencers are. Going to a tourist-and subsequent influencer-hotspot, peels back that curtain to reveal in my experience that there isn't more to influencer social media posts, but rather much less.

Like in the above picture our brain might leap to the conclusion that there is some relevance to the artwork the woman is posing in front of. We create a narrative that this picture means something to the model, if she was a classmate in highschool we crushed on, we'd probably be using google lens to figure out the painting and then read up everything we can so that tomorrow at school we might strike up a conversation with her and demonstrate how interesting we are to them. But in my experience the significance of that art piece is a prop, following a trend. It turns out that influencers influence eachother, at some point an influencer went to an art gallery and got photos of themselves posing in front of or besides artworks and it got a response and subsequently became a meme to duplicate. Exactly the same as fashion trends like the cut of jeans, the length of skirts, the ubiquitous influencer hat, the law of attraction etc. Much of influencer content doesn't even require a comment as vacuous as "so humbled to be among the ruins of this ancient civilization" to gain traction. 

The previous trip I went on was to CDMX, CDMX is not a tourist ghetto. It is not touristy. We went to a big art gallery though, and while I didn't see any influencers doing their thing, there were definitely people who dressed up to go to an art gallery, seemingly eager to impart that they indeed were the kind of people who go to art galleries, even though people who go to art galleries go to look at art, not people, basically decrying their imposterhood in high-brow society. No art was for sale, there's no dress code in the gift shop...

And I really mean it, like exceptionally vacuous. A void. An abyss. Like the vocabulary is sucked out of a room. There is just the image, and perhaps, profoundly necessary to be an influencer - the complete mediocrity (aside from appearance, which is probably the number one success determining factor among influencers).

Now I imagine a future dystopian state where one has to justify leaving ones home to visit an exotic location. One where it is no longer a free-for-all for anyone with disposable income and/or annual leave, and software engineers facilitating airlines racing each other to the bottom of price wars.

Something somewhat resembling the past, but distinctly not as sexist as the past, one that allows women to travel too.

In our hotel, we had a bunch of cable channels, and the foodnetwork was one of the few that was in English rather than dubbed. I saw a Guy Fieri program, a reality contest to get your own food network show. Specifically looking for someone that could do what Guy does in Drivers, Dine-ins and Dives. Which is bite into food on camera and then describe the experience. Seems simple right? Well much as I love the show SBS's Food Safari host Maeve O'Meara couldn't do it, basically saying 'mmmm I like it' with every dish she eats in every episode.

So imagine a world where before you got granted permission to holiday in Thailand, or even get a passport, they made you take a bite of a meat pie and tell them about it.

Those who Meaved it with a 'mmmmm it's good' had their passport denied. Those who could articulate something, convey some intelligible information like 'woah, firstly, the temp's correct, the roof of my mouth is intact. Super savory, nothing chewy in the filling no gristle, the meat's not tough, falls apart nicely. Gravy not too salty, not too gelatenous, the crust is good quality, slightly sweet, crumbly but not to the point that the bottom falls out...' and they interrupt you and say 'thankyou miss. Passport granted.'

Call it, if you will, a three-way test. 1. Can you observe? 2. Can you reflect? 3. Can you articulate?

At some point, thanks to economies of scale and technological breakthroughs, travelling went from a privilege to an entitlement. 

It used to be, it seems a thing where communities or societies, perhaps snooty, misogynist societies got together and debated how to allocate the scarce resource of travel. It was almost a duty to go, come back and tell us about it because not all of us can go. I wonder if history has any forgotten individuals of spies and diplomats that failed in this duty. "How was Prussia?" "Oh great, I had a great time." "Are you fucking kidding us?"

De Tocqueville, Twain, Marco Polo, Ibn Jabuyar, Nasir Khusraw, Fan Chengda, Xu Xiake, Xenophon. This is not what tourism is today. Particularly if a tourist is observant enough to observe other tourists. 

Observant person Fran Lebowitz I once saw live, and she said two things are bad for a city: tourists and billionaires. Here's an excerpt from an article that expands on this:

Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here. As it became more and more intense, it became more and more a place where the actual citizens are pushed out to the edges. A friend of mine always says this: "I don't care what kind of aesthetic people have; the second they have a kid, their house becomes horrible." The second you have a kid, whether you think it's going to or not, your house becomes full of plastic junk. So this is the same with tourists. The city will sink to that level of having a house of three-year-old children, so they like certain things, they don't like certain things. And they like things that you don't like, or that I don't like. I do object to it. And I would like to see fewer and fewer tourists and I'm tired of hearing about how much money they bring to the city because the kind of jobs the tourists bring to the city are the worst jobs. They're hotel maid jobs, they're jobs that have no future to them.

There's a lot there, but once articulated it's easy to see, you just need to go to a "tourist destination". While I was in tourist ghetto's that well worn argument of "it brings in tourist dollars" echoed through my mind. Economics isn't that simple. Like, where I lived in Melbourne, every year the Australian Grand Prix was questioned. I ask myself? How much money did the Melbourne Grand Prix (or Australian Open etc.) make me? The money these events inject into the economy, such that it exists take a very long and complicated route to get to my pocket. For one thing, I used to work for a private company conducting surveys about travel and tourism for which I'm sure the investment in my wages was partially contingent on all the tourism expenditure in Australia, from the Tamworth music festival to the Neighbours Tour to the Creswick Dinosaur Park and Land of Miniature. 

What I suspect is more true about tourism dollars is not just Fran's point about hotel maid jobs, but that by and large it gives money to people who already have a lot of money. The jury is out on whether the Melbourne Grand Prix - a love-or-hate event in and of itself, is a more obtuse form of corporate welfare. 

I guess all I'm saying is, nobody has yet gone to Mars. I bet, they don't just let anybody go to Mars. The first people they send to Mars, will probably be influential. They likely will not be influencers though. The distinction being influencers primarily elevate mediocrity - almost by definition everything they do has to be something anyone could do. The economics are again, obviously more complicated, in so far as not everyone can be an influencer - influencers require pyramid or perhaps spiderweb style financing. The first manned mission to Mars will probably consist of people with skills. Useful skills. Furthermore they will probably be people who are exceptionally self reliant. 

And I hope I don't come across as too harsh on influencers. I recognize they are people too. I merely assume that people on some level must know that when they watch someone who is paid to basically eat 3,000 calories in one sitting they know they are tuning in to a cultural nadir.

Third Reflection: Jack Whitehall's Father

There is a breed of English man that still wears a suit and tie to the beach, because they wear a suit and tie everywhere. I've met one. Anyone probably anywhere can tune into somewhat contrived Netflix travel program "Travels With My Father" and see one. They might be a dying breed but...

I saw this guy, white guy wearing a singlet, some kind of sarong like wrap (we weren't in Thailand) and leather sandals. He was too comfortable.

I want to draw a distinction between this feeling, and say body shaming. It's a whole other post, but the short of body shaming is - I'm against it. People should not be forbidden from participating by ridicule or harassment. I don't want to live in a world where thin people go to the beach and fat people have to stay home.

My thoughts attached themselves once again to this heuristic I'd heard on manager-tools' podcast:

It is the duty of the host to make the guest feel at home. It is the duty of the guest to assure the host, they are not.

Tourists get way too comfortable. They are guests that do not see through the façade and take the invitation to 'feel at home' literally.

The most egregious examples being carving your initials into a UNESCO world heritage archeological site. But you know it also puts me in mind of images like this:

from https://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/19/us/race-photo-series-o-magazine-trnd/index.html

Which in turn puts me in mind of something one of UK's harsher feminists once said, a simplified kind of truism [paraphrasing]: "We know these women don't want to have sex, because they need you to pay them to do it."

It kind of circles back around to Fran's point about tourism creating the kind of jobs nobody actually wants, and that pretty much anyone is allowed to be an ambassador these days, to the extent that they forget they are ambassadors and let slip all the state secrets like that we are disgusting, entitled, vacuous people. 

I'm not saying Michael Whitehall is a great ambassador, his attire probably reflects his own overriding desire for comfort. Tourist economies seem to have been optimised for narcissism, tourists actively encouraged to forget that the locals are people too. 

Fourth Reflection: Tourist Ghettos

It is weird to live in a country, and then travel to one of that countries tourist ghettos. Before going to one destination, I was told by a national "X is how Mexico should be in my mind." and going to X I could see their point. It was kind of hyperreal. Things looked how Mexico might look everywhere if it's economy and government were high-functioning. Craftsmanship was excellent, no cutting corners or decrepitude. Cards accepted everywhere, all of that.

But I also couldn't see their point. How could any Mexican "should" contain so few Mexicans?

I've invoked in the past the concept of "tourist ghettos" and I still believe good tourists should stick to the ghettos so as to minimize their expansion. They shouldn't insist on striking out for the "real" Italy, the "real" Japan, the "real" Thailand or "real" Mexico, lest they tempt some previously honest merchant to start catering exclusively to the price insensitive tourist. 

My recent travels allowed me sufficient experience to define a tourist ghetto - where the locals aren't consumers, solely vendors. 

My families mysterious destination X was on the recommendation of a travel agent in Australia. I actually have little interest in seeing more of Mexico, not no interest, moreso a passive approach. I would see Mexico of Mexico's own volition. I don't have a checklist of shit to see and do, and I won't lose sleep having not done it. The agent said 5 days in X would not be enough. I guess no member of my family pointed out we aren't generally thrilled by the prospect of cheap mojitos and sunbathing and given that would they reconsider their estimate...

I share this by way of apology. Because X was a destination with two things to do, by way of day trips out of X. X could be seen in a day. A half day at that. It's tiny, and so I apologise, we left the tourist ghetto and saw where the locals shop, buy and eat. It was a great relief for me. I struggle in tourist ghettos. There's a lot of politeness and no respect in the ghetto.