The sun was finally peaking through the storm clouds when I cracked open The New Tourist on a train headed out of Amsterdam. I’d absolutely loved the city, even in pouring rain—canals around every corner, beautiful public parks, some of the most charming architecture I’d ever encountered. But I’d also spent the vast majority of my time outside the inner ring, venturing into the historic, heavily touristed city center just once, to hop on a boat tour. I’d wanted to avoid being part of the overcrowding that much of Amsterdam has experienced due to a surge in tourism in recent years. (In 2010, there were 5.3 million overnight hotel stays in the city. Last year, there were 9.4 million. Complaining about tourism is now a frequent refrain among locals and visitors alike.) Put less charitably, I wanted to avoid any possibility of being mistaken for a “tourist” in the most pejorative sense.
Right away in the introduction to The New Tourist, Paige McClanahan gently told me off. “A lot of people are uncomfortable with the word ‘tourist,’ at least when it’s aimed in their direction,” she writes. “It irks me that some people insist on a distinction between ‘travelers’ and ‘tourists,’ where the former are explorer types […] while the latter are philistines who are content with cliched, mass-market experiences.”
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This nuanced approach to tourism is baked into the premise of The New Tourist, a new book perfectly summarized by its subtitle: “waking up to the power and perils of travel.” A “new tourist,” argues McClanahan, engages with the people who live in the place they’re visiting, and ideally does activities on locals’ terms, not those of corporate chains or extractive behemoths. A “new tourist” is also aware of the tourism industry’s impact on climate change (historically, at least 8% of greenhouse gas emissions come from tourism, a percentage that’s likely increased significantly in recent years), and how certain activities impact local ecosystems in places like Hawaii, Iceland, and the Alps.
McClanahan also considers the forces that drive us and our fellow tourists to head to a certain location (a government’s effective tourism campaign, for example, or our colleagues’ Instagram posts), in one chapter describing the policy choices that led Amsterdam to becoming the heavily-touristed, famed party city it is today—and recent attempts to reverse that reputation, including a campaign to tell bachelor parties to stay away.
Yet McClanahan remains unwavering in her belief that tourism can be a net good—for individual travelers, for destinations, and for the world. In her last chapter, she cites the British writer G. K. Chesterton, who wrote of the joy of “friendship between nations that is actually founded on differences,” in his 1922 book, What I Saw in America. Though it was published over 100 years ago, McClanahan says this idea perfectly illustrates her conception of a “new tourist.”
I sat down with the author to talk about the motivations behind this concept, her own traveling experiences, reporting visits to Kerala, Liverpool, Saudi Arabia, and Disneyland Paris, and how our attitudes towards tourism are slowly shifting.
