‘Overtourism’ Worries Europe. How Much Did Technology Help Get Us There?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The article falls directly into the "good old days" fallacy. No, people in the past were not looking for "more authentic experiences".
I bought in a flea market a photo album of a trip of some Swedish couple in the 60s. It is awesome. It could be posted picture by picture on Facebook and nobody will notice. Except by details like that the plane tickets, included in the album, were printed by a mechanical typewriter. Also includes tourism flyers, tickets for the theatre, and a menu from a restaurant. Sounds familiar? Because people are people in all places at all times.
I also fail to see what this article is stating. That people are travelling to build a personal brand. Maybe some people but nobody in my circle. Everyone I know travel because they want new experiences. They save little items and trinkets from those experiences to remember them. Not to post them on social media.
* Assuming by offline you mean not-shared, rather than literally offline. Anyone with a smart phone is most likely backing up their photos to iCloud/Google photos.
That is my point. In the past, people did the same things, if that does not make them superficial we are neither. We should not judge our contemporaneous travellers so lightly.
Most people are fully aware that what happened there is a tragedy. Most people also have an instant-no-thought habit to smile when having a picture taken. Is it really any better for them to take a picture and be solemn? Is that enough or do they need to express deep sadness for these pictures? Would others claim these sad emotions are just for show anyway? And if so, should we expect people to just not take pictures at all at the WTC memorial? And if so, at what point in time can we start taking pictures at a place with our normal happy faces?
People are there. They are happy they are there, even though 'there' (where ever 'there' is) may be a place that causes them to have emotions on the sad part of the emotional spectrum.
Think of funerals. It's a sad place to be (perhaps sadder since the person who died is someone well known as opposed to a lot of unknown people, but I won't judge either way). Family and friends are together, which usually makes people happy. It's a mixed bag of emotions. If someone happens to smile in a picture there it's probably more to do with habit of smiling for pictures or happiness to be with family and friends (perhaps first time in a while) than it is for being happy the deceased is deceased or for social status boosts.
Hilter invaded Poland in Sept 1939 and VE-Day was May 8, 1945; so the war in Europe lasted 68 months. 75 years ago the war was 47 months old, or 69% complete. I consider the final 30% of something the "tail end." It's weirdly pedantic and downright antisocial to go around arguing "tail end" means something else, especially when its entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
Since the internet is for cats I did some quick Googling and looks like, on average, a cats tail is around 34% of their total length (body plus tail) so saying the final 30% of something is the tail end is objectively accurate. Unless you want to go around arguing that some cats don't have tails.
1943 was the year when German advance was halted and they began to be pushed back by Soviet army. It's right in the middle of the war if you look at the map instead of calendar.
https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/learn-about-art...
It's not like you can spin up 20 more instances of the historic city center when you get 20x the usual traffic. Result: cities literally divided against themselves, transformed into a tourist-factory-slash-amusement-park that nobody lives in, segregated from the actual living city.
What, me bitter about my hometown being disneyfied? Nooooosir...
There's something to be said for trying to preserve local flavor while accommodating tourists though, and that's a line each tourist spot will have to find for themselves. Some will probably inevitably become expat party towns, while others will probably strike the right balance.
You are technically correct.
This comment falls directly into the "things never change" fallacy.
This fallacy can be applied whenever anyone complains about any change anywhere. Picking one sample piece of anecdotal data from another period that can roughly be lined up with some other vague impressions of today does not refute the claim.
I have no strong opinion on overtourism or the effects on it by social media, but I'm willing to listen to people who discuss it without dismissing them.
That sounds interesting. I looked for it, and I just found references to the "tradition fallacy" that only deals with resistance to change.
Can you provide a link?
> Picking one sample piece of anecdotal data from another period that can roughly be lined up with some other vague impressions of today does not refute the claim.
I provided an anecdote example as a means to be more pedagogic. It is easier to understand concepts from the concrete to the abstract. So you are completely right, my anecdote does not refute the claim.
You can probably cover every habit of thought and discourse under a banner of fallacy, if you pick out the ways in which they are used badly - since people tend to think badly due to misapplied habits.
The reason I'd agree with your timeline is one thing you did not mention -- wealth explosion. Purely recreational international travel is and always has been relatively expensive.
Also XIX c. passports were without biometry (ie without photography of the holder).
1. No more staring at signs and menus in confusion. Snap a picture with Google translate and viola.
2. Related to #1, no more getting lost using public transit or walking because you can't read street signs. Google Maps with walking directions, transit directions was a LIFE-CHANGER.
3. No more being LIMITED to phrases in your phrasebook. Again, Google translate.
4. No more worries about being taken advantage of by local taxis or figuring out local taxi customs. Uber and Uber clones.
5. No more getting trapped at tourist trap restaurants or overpriced "officially" reviewed restaurants. Google search again.
6. Waze can help you navigate to the most secluded spots, even when the local signs become sparse.
I could keep going...
Actually, it's amazing how much it was Google and local clones of Uber. Yelp and Uber aren't as popular in the countries we visited as I expected.
Honestly it was almost a little too easy, in some ways I didn't feel like I was in a foreign land... I felt at total ease in any neighborhood, because even if no taxis were around, just hail a ride.
Rented a car multiple times and drove around because Waze was great everywhere if Google Maps broke down.
Overall I LOVED that technology has made experiencing a foreign country almost trivially easy.
Technology absolutely lowers many barriers to travel.
The difference between this trip and my last trip was unbelievable.
...and then you can complain on FB how many people are on that supposedly "secluded" spot. Surprise: technological innovation applies to them as well.
Indeed, technology removes many bottlenecks...but as we should know here on HN, all that ever did was expose other bottlenecks elsewhere in the pipeline - and physical scarcity is a far harder bottleneck than knowledge imbalance.
Likewise for planning each and every meal via reviews.
Google translate might mean that you don't even try to learn the basics of a local language.
Each of us seeks different things in their free time. I for example usually don't turn on phone for days during travelling.
This exaggeration of this behavior has increased contrast. It is both easier to identify and self-identity people who aren't victim to this pattern. There were never the good old days, speaking in a formal logical manner. However, in the good new days it is easier to identify this bullshit and pry oneself away from it.
Guess with howany people the photo albumhas been shared compared to the social media post?
This type of dismissal - that people discussing change are nothing more than baseless nostalgics, is really becoming it's own tired trope.
The article gives quite concrete examples of recent-ish developments that are an annoyance to both other residents and other travelers. Large groups of selfie sticks, outsized queues, neighborhoods bereft of actual locals, etc.
The article also discusses sustainability which is a pretty important topic on a planet with 7.6 billion people. How is that a fallacy exactly? An increasing population and a global expansion of middle class people, two elements that factor a booming tourism industry are very rooted in fact.[1]
>"No, people in the past were not looking for "more authentic experiences"."
Nowhere in this article is that claim even staked. It's also very odd that you then go on to mention a couple who brought back some small keepsakes and mementos from a trip as evidence of this. People keep reminders from local events in their life as well and it has nothing to do with "authenticity."
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_...
Once my wife asked her father how people chose what restaurant to eat at when all you had was a phone book, and his answer was telling: "There just used to be fewer places to go."
I mean, I've traveled to four different continents as a student on minimum wage jobs. A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back. And especially if you're from a rich country, traveling means the odds are in your favour of actually spending less on things like food or local transportation than if you'd just stayed at home for the week.
How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me. Owning a home with a toilet, access to a self-driving shared vehicle and a computer is an actual possibility for the hypothetical 3 billion middle-class people of the future who could afford it. But having an access ticket to Paris, despite 3 billion people being able to afford it, is not going to be feasible, ever. In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.
I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.
> How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me.
It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE, Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company.
> In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.
The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete with locals.
Inequality is another issue, but this "overtourism" is because of the massive growth in the global middle class. It used to be only a tiny fraction of Chinese citizens could afford to go overseas. Now hundreds of millions of them can. And Europeans are also able to get around very cheaply now within Europe.
People travel more. I think that's fine, sorry if you lived in a picturesque town, but I think it's fair to share it with the world if you live in a nice place.
The average tourist stays about a week. That means you've got about 1.4m tourists in the city on average, on a population of 2.2m. In other words, tourists as a group are about 60% the size of the local population.
Then consider that tourism follows a sort of bell curve with months along the x axis. A month in July has about 2x the monthly average, so at peak holiday season you're looking at there being more tourists than locals in the city. That's an insane proposition. Similarly, tourism isn't spread out, but rather concentrated, the city centres become uninhabitable.
Then consider the dynamics on the local economy. If you've got 3 billion (or 75 million) people's worldwide income bidding for some real estate, some food etc, against 2 million locals, prices will go through the roof. Local population will atrophy and the city turns into an open-air theme park.
And that's assuming a single visit. I've been to Paris half a dozen times and it's not even a place I ever deliberately thought about wanting or needing to visit. And I'm sure I'll be there another 10 times in my lifetime.
None of this is feasible if you ask me, outside of the extremely limited scope of stating it's strictly logistically not impossible to accommodate these numbers. The sociopolitical and cultural dynamics will break.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it's a net good that so many more people can afford to go the Paris, own an internet-capable device, read about happenings on the other side of the world.
Having so much data changed the game, and we're struggling to catch back up.
Optimistically, I do believe it is self-correcting, as more and more people learn that the crowds are too big, and the prices have gone up too much.
Yes, and in the good old days, that niceness was a local property: The rich got the nicest places in the area and the poor got the shittiest places in the area.
I guess when globalisation is fully realized, according to this, the rich will get the nicest places globally and the poor will get the shittiest places globally.
Why do we want that future again?
Almost all the examples of “nice places” I’ve seen on this post have been artificial.
1. It takes time.
2. The places need to be intrinsically nice, not "generically pleasing to tourists at this moment" - those wear out quickly.
3. Popularity breeds popularity, so the tried-and-true sites stay popular.
A few years ago, she sold it for €12 million.
Globalization or overpopulation.
So not overpopulation as much as everyone wanting to live in/go to the same handful of places. And now they are all mostly making choices based on the same sets of data (Yelp reviews, AirBnb etc etc).
That only works until someone with a sufficiently large follower base promotes it on instagram. Instant tourist influx. Many of the tourist traps started out as hidden treasures.
Sure, someone might promote precisely the completely ordinary place you have selected and cause it to be overrun, but given the number of places you can choose from, that's not very likely.
Of course that only works if you don't travel to see unique and famous sights, but in that case you can never avoid other tourists anyway. If you just want some new experiences, the selection is effectively unlimited.
btw, the Taj Mahal is indeed beautiful, but it's a very small oasis in the literally the most vile city(Agra) I've been to in all my travels. Absolute filth. The best thing to do is drive there, see it for an hour, and then drive back to the place you came from.
Or go really off the beaten & easy path.
I just spent a year traveling North to South in West Africa, I can count the number of tourists I saw on two hands. It is breathtaking and well worth the visit, but it's also very difficult and demanding.
I love travel, but no, "tourism" isn't automatically the same thing.
Modern "mass tourism", in particular, consists of taking a big boat or a big bus with a bunch of people who are just like you, to places that local people never go. Then you take a picture, post it somewhere to show off to your friends, then you buy some trinkets and go to the next place.
Setting aside the question of whether or not international travel is sustainable for (say) all of China, this form of travel is ludicrous. You might as well stay home, look at pictures on Instagram, go to a buffet and and visit the mall.
75 years ago was 1943, there was no tourism in Europe unless you were flying a bomber or driving a tank.
The first jet airliner didn't fly until 1949 which enabled tourism for the common person.
I'm sure tourism was "better" in the old days when only the wealthy could afford to travel.
And one of my recent trips was to walk a bit of the Camino de Santiago which has the oldest known tour guide book published around 1140. Though people have been walking it before Jesus was around.
After Amalfi, we went to a small fishing village nearby and had an experience that was so, so much better. I even got to speak some Italian and buy some homemade grappa from the local shop, which would be difficult in a more 'disneyfied' place.
It would be nice if TripAdvisor or Google had some sort of 'tourist jam' avoidance algorithm, letting you pick places like or near the place you want to go, but slightly off the beaten path.
Or some kind of warning if you're planning to go somewhere during the peak season.
In other words, that's already happening, and it does help, but doesn't scale quite with the demand. There's always diversification ("go see that niche thing if you're into it - old mine, train museum, festival of this and that, power plant, take a bike tour instead"), but the attraction of extremely-popular spots is self-reinforcing.
You do realise that you are part of the problem you are complaining about? Why are you entitled to visit there and nobody else? Regarding the tour buses, as someone who lives in a popular tourist city (Edinburgh) given the choice of a bus full of tourists rocking up every day, or the same number of tourists rocking up in rental cars, I'll take the bus any day. There's nothing worse than navigating narrow streets surrounded by people who can barely drive not knowing where they're going.
The quick jaunt through Rome and Florence I tacked onto the end of the trip was very loathsome in many aspects. I'd bet you have to go at least 3 miles away from the colosseum in any direction to find food of a higher quality than Olive Garden.
Honest question, what do you believe the point of being there is for them? Do you think other people might have different reasons for being there than you?
If the path less travelled becomes more accessible, then it stops being the path less travelled.
Sounds like the experiences I had... in 1999 and again in 2009. The Amalfi Coast has been, is and will continue to be popular with tourists for a reason. It's beautiful and it's a ferry ride away from Capri & the Blue Grotto. Good luck finding something similar to the Blue Grotto.
I visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna some time ago during a weekday in late January, which meant that I got to see some of Velasquez's works (including the exceptional "Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanta_Margarita_Teresa_in_a_...) in a room all by myself. I felt "royal-ish" for those few minutes, as if those famous paintings had been painted by Velasquez especially for me and me only. And then just a couple of rooms away there were a couple of paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, which I also got to see alone, by myself.
But why, it sounds like it is working perfectly. You would prefer it if a large percent of those people were send to your small town? You are a tourist, you are part of the problem.
They do the same inconsiderate shit as Times Square tourists: block the sidewalk, walk 5 abreast really fucking slowly, stand in the subway doors, leave their huge suitcases in high traffic areas, etc. But the fact that they're not all clustered together like in midtown reduces the frustration factor immensely. I actually don't mind them when they're spread out like this.
edit: Why not comment before you censor with your downvote?
Also I think there is a very periodic jump in tourism during specific European holiday periods which are best avoided (Especially for americans the idea that whole countries all have multiple weeks of holiday effectively at the same time is probably easy to forget)
I honestly did not expect the number to be that high.
So a double digit percentage of all humanity travels internationally, every year.
But there's probably huge swaths of the population who have never traveled internationally for economic reasons, or because they live in a large country (like China, the US, India or Russia) which makes that less necessary.
Travel now is part of conspicuous consumption as much as a flashy purse is. Displaying that you went to some small French village on your Instagram can generate a fair amount of prestige and envy. Also, unlike purses though, there is a permanent record of your purchase for all to see.
It doesn't take much to get away from the crowds. It also doesn't take much to have unique, different, more satisfying experiences. Walk more, explore more, don't be so concerned with ticking off the classic "must do" checkmarks, take the time for your vacation to be for you.
But once the class below catches up, the class above will change what it is that separates them (by definition since humans are inherently wanting to outdo each other). Once material goods become cheap, the thing that separates people with status from people without is time. Upper class people have time to go on lengthy international vacation, something lower class people can't do even with money.
In my circles, it's not cool to just go to the big sights that mass Chinese and Indian tourists go to. So now a riskier trip with more expenses and planning is required to show status, such as going out on your own backpacking in South America or Safari in Africa or hopping around some islands no one's heard of for scuba diving or hiking in Nepal. The older people opt for luxury in their vacations, showing that not only can they afford to go traveling, but they can go with their whole extended family and rent huge houses in national parks.
But it doesn't have to be explicit thinking of "I'm going to show this other person up", it's just the way humanity works in my opinion. You have a certain network, and you either maintain yourself in it or you fall out of it if you don't continue to do the things that network is doing.
But many locals say that they don't feel like being in the city during summer due to overcrowdedness and they feel like they can't get the day-to-day errands done in the city without going through a sea of people.
Here I just bicycle the complete opposite direction from the center to go to "known quiet spots" where we can get errands done. And pleasantly enough, the city has also recently implemented a plan to expand the "no cars" zone in the city, thus it has become even more safer for bikers and pedestrians.
I know that this article is mostly about those who live in the host city, but it does also mention the experience of the traveler. For any travelers looking to avoid these situations, there are plenty of wonderful places to go where there's not disneyfication. I almost just began to list countries out but really: It's almost everywhere other than a few major cities in Europe!
Cheap photography is to blame for this more than anything else. I was transiting through Dubai a few years back and spent a bit of time at the Burj Khalifa. There is a fountain at the base that does a performance every so often. The majority of people were not seeing the fountain directly at all, they were watching it through their mobile phones. It was a weird sight. I personally didn't take a video since you can see much better ones on Youtube than the one I'd have been able to take with trying to keep other people's phones out of it.
As for overtourism - it's a nice problem to have.
whereas if an american says it, it gets explained way as: 'they are a racist protectionist bigot'.
These are superficial examples but you catch my drift.
In any case, both migration and temporary visitors (tourists) only works in balance. I think virtually everyone recognises that basic truth. But what constitutes balance is a matter of opinion, and some of these opinions are definitely driven by racism.
I agree that the people complaining the loudest often employ ugly arguments, but the crux of both the anti tourism and anti immigration arguments seem to be "There are lots of people in my city who don't look or speak like me and I don't like the way they act." As you said, it's a matter of balance, but I think most of the anti immigration people are closer in opinion to the anti tourism people than the anti tourism people would care to admit. We don't really get to choose how tourists or immigrants behave, they get the same freedoms as locals, and that includes the freedom to be rude with suitcases and speak Chinese unapologetically. Basically everyone is ok with immigrants provided they meet a bunch of qualifications that make them much less foreign, that's not exactly extreme open mindedness. In the US, it's often the people accused of being racist who say they don't mind immigration at all if the immigrants adopt American customs and learn English.
I also don't really see a difference between complaining about a street full of gift shops or complaining about a street full of llanteras.
These are complex issues, and I don't pretend to know the answer, but I don't know if it's fair to generalize the professed desire to preserve one's community into the category of xenophobia and racism.
And I completely agree that it's not fair to categorize it completely as xenophobia and racism. I was just agreeing with the guy above that I don't think it's fair that the anti immigrant stance gets categorized that way and the anti tourism stance gets lauded as a sort of preservation.
And while I don't fault the people who want to preserve their communities, once new people start showing up, your options are
1) to require that they adopt your culture and language, which strikes a lot of people as not really ok, especially if you are of the persuasion that cultures are something to be preserved. I feel like the counter to this is that local communities have a culture that should be preserved too, but I think we all subconsciously rank cultures. Tourists lose to everyone, tech employees lose to almost everyone (but they have enough money that they still move in), and I personally think that there are parts of American culture that maybe Baby Boomers consider intrinsic but a lot of younger people consider "not culture" (like... I don't know... Certain hamburger restaurants, I apologize for the dumb example) and that's where culture rankings get confused and people start getting called racist. There are little towns in the Midwest with cultures that are pretty marginalized (like the whole region being called flyover country) and when these people want to preserve their culture against anyone else's, they are often called racist, mostly independent of their sincerity in wanting to protect their culture. Like Googlers, their culture is less.
2) Or you can just not let in people who have different cultures, which will very often end up being explicitly racist in areas where the population is homogenous.
3) Or you can let in so very few immigrants that they don't change the character of a place, but over a country the size of the US, there's still more than enough immigrants that if they decide they want to live near people with similar cultures they can displace the locals in fairly large towns (note: these are not wealthy people).
4) or you can let in most everyone amd let them act how they want, within some broad bounds, and you get wholesale change in a lot of communities.
As someone from the Seattle area, I've seen parts of Seattle get gentrified, some parts that I knew before, and while I can commiserate with the locals that the rising rent sucks and the character of the places have changed, I also feel like the people moving in are just trying to live their lives. In order to feel the anger that the locals feel, I have to convince myself that the tech employees are somehow worse than me, but I can't. They're just people trying to live someplace cool.
The same thing is happening in Portland, and there are some signs around Portland that are really mean, directed at people moving up from California, and if they were directed at immigrants they would most definitely be xenophobic and racist. Once again, I totally understand the sentiment, the place they grew up is changing dramatically and losing a lot of the character that they loved. But at the end of the day, you can either go with it or you can tell the people moving in that their culture is less than yours so they need to either change or stop coming.
The article I linked above seems like it could be the best suggestion for dealing with this. It seems like we need to do our best to make room for everyone, while also finding a way to preserve local culture without having to make value judgements about whose culture is worth preserving.
Edit: redreading my comment I know that I'm really mixing together gentrification and immigration, but I guess I just don't really see a giant distinction. It's easier to take sides in gentrification and tourism because the newcomers are richer and less sympathetic, but they're still just people who are different. Now, economic inequality is a different issue that's connected to both, but in my mind a discussion about immigration and gentrification is more about the free movement of people.
At the same time, I'm not sure that truly unfettered freedom of movement would create a world which we actually want. For instance, if all border enforcement disappeared tomorrow, I don't see how there wouldn't be a mass immigration from regions at the bottom of the development index toward those at the top. And I would imagine the result of that would be to torpedo the cost of labour, and put stress on the social systems in those developed countries. I would imagine the wealthy would be just fine, but the middle class would be all but erased globally. So while I don't necessarily like the idea of boarders and exclusion, at some level I don't see how healthy and prosperous communities/cultures/societies can preserve their health and prosperity without having some filtering mechanism.
And as far as the options you give, I would agree with you in broad terms that we should strive to allow people to preserve what's unique and interesting about their cultures when they move into our communities (option 4), but the truth is there are a lot of gray areas and there will probably always have to be some of #1 as well.
For example, lets say that there is a population which moves into your neighborhood in Seattle which doesn't believe in vaccinating their kids, and now your kids who go to the same school are at risk of getting the measles. Is that enforcing your cultural superiority to insist that they get vaccinations against their belief system?
Or say there are people moving into your neighborhood who strongly reject homosexuality in their culture, and now your gay friends have to deal with dirty looks when they walk down the street holding hands in their own neighborhood. Should you just accept this as a form of cultural diversity?
So I think what I'm trying to say is that it's a nice idea to say we should open the borders and live and let live, but it's not as simple as that. A lot of us would probably agree that we're happy if people who share mostly the same values as us, and are of a similar socioeconomic strata come and bring their food, music, maybe even their language. But when it comes to real-world migrations I think there are a lot of grey areas, and we all have to draw the line somewhere as far as what should be accept as far as changes in our communities, but there's a lot of disagreement and negotiation involved in exactly where that line should be.
Anyway, like I say I don't know the answers, and it's a topic I struggle with philosophically.
What OP did say was, if they don't want you visiting, they certainly don't want you saying. And that may be true for some, sure, but I've said it certainly isn't necessarily true. And it's precisely because for very few people in the anti-tourism movement it's driven by being anti-foreign, it's a question of balance.
That may well be true for anti-immigrant movement, as well. But there's no denying that part of this movement wouldn't accept, view or treat any degree of foreigners as welcome and equal. The same can't be said for people who are frustrated by mass tourism.
There's a great deal of difference, and it hinges on time.
If your plan for visiting is "get the cheapest one-day return flight from Wherever, binge drink all night with your buddies, retch it up en route to airport and sleep on the return flight," all you care about is the cheap booze - literally nothing else matters (yes, this is a significant set of tourists around here).
Then you get the other tourists who actually come for something else spend money in addition to using the infrastructure. That is normal, albeit with major scaling problems (there's the issue - "don't have enough space to put all the tourists coming to see the Major Must-See Sights, as those aren't inflatable"). Those care about the appearance NOW ("people retching on public transport? How revolting!").
And then you get the normal city traffic - with locals, expats, and whoever else actually lives here. And those care about quality of life in long term ("what good is public transport, if it efficiently gets you into a city center that's devoid of actual life, only with a disneylandesque imitation? Will I want to live in such city in 5 years? What do I want to change?").
In other words, the longer you're planning to visit, the more probable it is that you'll be nicer about it, because you'll be expecting similar behavior in return. If you just pass through: eh well, break that window, piss in the street, kick that dog - not likely anyone will catch you within the remaining four hours. Note that this doesn't have any relation to whence the tourists are coming - the behavior correlates very closely with the length of the stay, be it an just-out-of-town sports team (common) or a stag party from the UK (also common).
In Europe by contrast most nations are defined by their history. There is a certain nativism in European thought that can't really exist in the same way in the US since a vast majority of the population emigrated within the last few centuries, and in many cases much more recently.