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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

This probably has direct implications for Mediterranean countries as well. UK tourists are a significant money source.

otoh it's probably great for internal tourism. We get to keep more money in the country.

Who do you think spends more? Your neighbor vacationing a few hours away from home? Or that international visitor who wants to see everything they can in their one week in the country?

Depends. If they arrive in an RV and just do one grocery run in a German chain during the their entire month of vacay, we could skip them.

I'd like to know more about this RV that can store an entire month of food. Sounds pretty fancy.

You can’t find a spot for a 50 pound sack of rice or two?

So let me get this straight. Foreign tourist spend less money in your country than domestic tourists because the foreign tourist are driving in with an RV and living off of a fifty pound bag of rice during their vacation?

Fwiw, there are a lot of highly frugal people in eg the surfer/kiting community (example!) which do indeed spend pretty much nothing where they're visiting for their hobby.

And they do often smell and leave trash behind.

So I can imagine that being true if you're living in one of those hotspots... It's a hard topic though

Let me set this straight: My point is you have an incorrect idea of how much space a month of food (and it needn't all be rice; that just illustrates the point) takes up. You can readily fit it in an RV, especially a big one.

Right, however over-tourism is a real problem.

Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators. It distorts property markets and sucks the oxygen out of other kinds of business. About time the Med weaned itself off of it.

The obvious question is, what jobs will replace them?

This doesn’t sound like they’ll be weaning off it, though: it’ll be cold turkey. That’s going to let wealth holders pick up more property at depressed prices and drive down wages.

Relative to what? Its certainly better than resource extraction (oil).

>Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators

No. It's worse than that. The transient customer base rewards the worst people. The people who make the most money and have the most influence are basically scammers who manage to stay one season ahead of the bad reviews. They're screwing customers, shafting suppliers, employees, business partners, etc, everybody. By the time the 1-star reviews are pouring in they've pivoted, sold the businesses, under new management, etc, etc, and are on to the next venture.

So over time these people get rich you basically wind up with these sorts of people running everything including the government and it's all just shit.

And it permeates everything. Everyone starts screwing everyone and being scummy by default. And the time and money and effort of having to hedge against in literally everything makes everyone all substantially poorer

Source: Grew up in it. First world white people too, so spare me some patronizing BS about low trust societies or whatever

Right! I am currently living in a (relatively poor) Western European country that has recently experienced a tourism boom, and although the money pouring in has been nice for at least some, it has wrecked the existing social fabric in many ways - starting with housing.

On the flip side, at least the beaches are kept clean. In the UK (where I'm from) there is a big problem with sewage outflows. Meanwhile here an entire beach got washed away by the winter storms - so they are putting it all back! Maybe 100 000 m3 of sand!

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