Probably Not the Last on Tourism

I live in a tourist county – we've got the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the whole James Fenimore Cooper legacy – his father founded the eponymous county seat where all this takes place – and Abbey and I, in our idyllic retirement, participate in theater that works only because of the high level of tourist activity. As I think I mentioned, our county is unique in our region for seeing twice as much revenue from sales tax as from property tax. So the collapse of the tourist industry has been devastating – and will become more so as the summer progresses.*

Naturally, this is happening all over the world. One in ten jobs worldwide depend on tourism. Revenues from tourism have fallen, on average, 80%. No industry can survive that. How will it look on the other side?

Short answer: no one knows. I've read a lot about this, because the lives of so many of the people around me depend on the answer, but as yet, there is no clear path to the future. Most speculation involves folks who have had some good ideas about improving tourism and creating more sustainable ways for the tourist industry to protect and enhance natural environments and indigenous people. They project these ideas into the future, in a wish-fulfilling fantasy.

Tourism is a realm of human activity which has essentially disappeared, and as such might be put back together, in the new world, any way we want to. Will we base its reconstruction on long-term, agree-upon, sustainable goals, or on the quickest buck?

There is a kind of tension between two possible outcomes. One is return to status quo ante, and quickly. This approach takes into account the millions of workers who have suddenly lost their ability to buy food and shelter, and the massive pressure on governments all over the world to get them back to work. Endangered animals in Africa are suddenly threatened like they haven't been in decades – they are huge sources of readily available protein. People have to eat. The story is the same, with variations, all over the world.

The other approach suggests that the answer for the future is to make tourism really expensive. Christopher deBellaigue, writing in the Guardian, suggests that:

Tourism isn’t the right that many holidaymakers, whatever their budgets, seem to think it is. It’s a luxury that needs to pay its way.

He suggests that the greater cost would be structured so that the tourist sites themselves retain most of it, for maintenance of the site itself (natural or man-made) and development of more robust indigenous industry, craft and art. Day-trippers on tours or cruise ships generally buy very little at a tourist site, and much of that is manufactured far away. Venice loses money on tourism, deBellaigue asserts, and so Venice sinks into the lagoon.

So will the new world include a tourist industry that, like yacht racing and skiing at San Moritz, is the realm of the wealthy? Or will we return to economy-of-scale tourism that values cheap, and damaging, travel, overwhelming sites and leaving them without the means to maintain and repair, not to mention improve?

Isn't there a Plan C?

* - Our little baseballville destination is far enough away from highways and airports that visitors usually need to stay over and eat in our restaurants. So we get few day-trippers and our problems – and solutions – are not on a scale of those discussed in this post.