Over the summer, my wife and I traveled with our two young kids on a two-week vacation through Europe.
It wasn’t as highfalutin as it sounds. In London, our Airbnb had ample skylights — which rendered the place all but uninhabitable during Europe’s heat wave. In Paris, our charming home-share had a cavernous hole in the ceiling of the entryway, revealing load-bearing beams that appeared to have been rotting since Napoleon’s reign. And in Amsterdam, our Airbnb advertised a kids’ bedroom stocked with toys — but failed to mention the mosquitoes and mice.
I’m not complaining. If travel mishaps are the stuff of memory, my vacation was unforgettable. And without home-sharing services like Airbnb, review sites like TripAdvisor and conveniences like Uber, OpenTable and Expedia, the trip would have been far more expensive, less accessible and, in a strange way, less authentic.
But my tech-abetted trip was illuminating, too, because it provided a firsthand look into a vexing problem that has gripped much of Europe lately — the worry of “overtourism,” and the rising chorus that blames technologies like Airbnb, Uber and other internet-enabled travel conveniences for the menace.
Every summer, the most popular European destinations get stuffed to the gills with tourists, who outnumber locals by many multiples, turning hot spots into sweaty, selfie-stick-clogged, “Disneyfied” towns. They offer a taste of a growing global threat: Across the world, thanks in part to rising affluence, travel is becoming a more widely shared pastime. International trips were up 6 percent in the first half of the year, surpassing experts’ forecasts, according to the United Nations’ World Tourism Organization.
This growth might once have been considered unambiguously good news. But the world’s most popular destinations cannot expand to accommodate an infinite flood of visitors. Advocates of curbing tourism say too many visitors are altering the character of historic cities, and making travel terrible, too.
“It’s a level of tourism which is degrading the enjoyment that residents have, but it’s also degrading the tourist experience, because the tourist who is endlessly queuing behind backpacks of hundreds of other tourists is not discovering the real or the authentic place,” said Justin Francis, the chief executive of Responsible Travel, a company that arranges “sustainable” travel for customers.
What’s to blame? In addition to broad prosperity, there’s technology, defined very broadly.
For more read the full of article at The Nytimes
