Tourists: Love or Hate Them, We Need Them

Tourists. We've all said it as a derogatory term, as we see a sea of visitors taking pictures and hogging the pavement so much so that locals need to walk on the road.

As Jarvis Cocker of Pulp sang in Common People: "everyone hates a tourist, especially one who thinks it's all such a laugh."

In the current extraction model, tourists are others who come, see, eat & drink then leave again. It's a passive, one-way relationship with the community there to serve and entertain.

With peak season upon us, overtourism is rearing its ugly head again — eliciting protests in the most extreme cases. And the bitter irony is that these are often the same destinations most exposed to climate risk: coastal erosion, wildfires, droughts. Facing pressure from every direction at once.

So how do we build resilience? Is changing the nomenclature going to change anything? As a guest you're not going to trash your host's place — so there is something in a name change and a reframe. Like DMOs becoming management- not marketing-focused, what matters is changing the model.

From extraction to inclusion, mass market to community-led, closed to planetary — the shift needs to happen at every level at the same time: mindset, language, model.

With that, we can all love tourism again and embrace its promise of broadening the mind, creating peace and prosperity.

I'm sure Jarvis would approve. 'Got to have love', after all.