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Comment by el_cujo | Hacker News Reader

This, it feels very weird to me seeing people advocate for basically only allowing the super rich to travel. To a lot of people, travelling abroad isn't just about getting drunk at foreign clubs and leaving trash everywhere, but about experiencing other cultures and having your world-view widened beyond what you see every day. I think most people would argue these things are good, not just for the individual but for society?

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Solving the problem of over-tourism is different than raising the price of travel overall. When talking about over-tourism, we're only really talking about a few thousand places which attract so many tourists that they cannot function in a healthy place. If you increased the price of tourism in those select places, then yes, you might have the unfortunate outcome that only upper-middle-class people could visit Paris in May, but all those other people could go to smaller cities in central France which are still full of culture to experience, and might stand to benefit a lot from increased tourist revenue.

But maybe I am a bit biased because I like to visit obscure places anyway.

That's true, I guess I'm conflating "overtourism" specifically with a wider push discouraging people from travel to decrease carbon emissions. You make a fair point, there is plenty of the world left to experience beyond the big hubs like Paris and Rome.

Look at it this way: why is the desire of today's middle class to travel by air more important than the survival of civilization tomorrow?

Travel imposes heavy costs on the world, in its current carbon based form. It's only affordable because we pass these costs on to the future.

It's not just the desire to travel by air, it's the economics. When I first moved to Germany I looked into doing a few trips by train, but the flights were much cheaper.

That definitely sounds like a failure of regulation. Taxes should be levied, and probably also subsidies put in place (from those taxes), so that train travel is cheaper than air travel. Train travel doesn't require nearly as much energy as air travel, per passenger.

Right. OP was arguing we shouldn't price in externalities because it would conflict with the desire to travel by air.

There are different degrees of overtourism. I'm from a very touristy city, Rio de Janeiro, but when I went to Barcelona, it was really in another league. Almost everybody at the subway were foreigner, as almost everybody in the restaurants.

So be it. Traveling everywhere every time you want isn't a human right. It's a luxury.

Wow I can't believe you mean this. This isn't even a slippery slope. This is a sheer precipice, with Trump and his racist pals grinning sardonically at the bottom. Humans who can't travel are not free.

> but about experiencing other cultures and having your world-view widened beyond what you see every day.

I think if you want to experience what a country is really like you need to learn the local language, or find a guide who understands that you want a "real" experience and that you are OK with going out of your comfort zone. Otherwise you are going to end up in one of the tourist containment zones around the world where every local speaks sales-oriented English, is hawking some trinket with the country's name on it, and the available food is pizza, fries, McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks and if you're lucky, an inoffensive variation of a local dish.

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