THIS NEW BOOK IS REFRAMING HOW WE THINK ABOUT TOURISM

The sun was finally peaking through the storm clouds when I cracked open The New Tourist on a train headed out of Amsterdam. I’d absolutely loved the city, even in pouring rain—canals around every corner, beautiful public parks, some of the most charming architecture I’d ever encountered. But I’d also spent the vast majority of my time outside the inner ring, venturing into the historic, heavily touristed city center just once, to hop on a boat tour. I’d wanted to avoid being part of the overcrowding that much of Amsterdam has experienced due to a surge in tourism in recent years. (In 2010, there were 5.3 million overnight hotel stays in the city. Last year, there were 9.4 million. Complaining about tourism is now a frequent refrain among locals and visitors alike.) Put less charitably, I wanted to avoid any possibility of being mistaken for a “tourist” in the most pejorative sense.

Right away in the introduction to The New Tourist, Paige McClanahan gently told me off. “A lot of people are uncomfortable with the word ‘tourist,’ at least when it’s aimed in their direction,” she writes. “It irks me that some people insist on a distinction between ‘travelers’ and ‘tourists,’ where the former are explorer types […] while the latter are philistines who are content with cliched, mass-market experiences.”

This nuanced approach to tourism is baked into the premise of The New Tourist, a new book perfectly summarized by its subtitle: “waking up to the power and perils of travel.” A “new tourist,” argues McClanahan, engages with the people who live in the place they’re visiting, and ideally does activities on locals’ terms, not those of corporate chains or extractive behemoths. A “new tourist” is also aware of the tourism industry’s impact on climate change (historically, at least 8% of greenhouse gas emissions come from tourism, a percentage that’s likely increased significantly in recent years), and how certain activities impact local ecosystems in places like Hawaii, Iceland, and the Alps.

McClanahan also considers the forces that drive us and our fellow tourists to head to a certain location (a government’s effective tourism campaign, for example, or our colleagues’ Instagram posts), in one chapter describing the policy choices that led Amsterdam to becoming the heavily-touristed, famed party city it is today—and recent attempts to reverse that reputation, including a campaign to tell bachelor parties to stay away.

Yet McClanahan remains unwavering in her belief that tourism can be a net good—for individual travelers, for destinations, and for the world. In her last chapter, she cites the British writer G. K. Chesterton, who wrote of the joy of “friendship between nations that is actually founded on differences,” in his 1922 book, What I Saw in America. Though it was published over 100 years ago, McClanahan says this idea perfectly illustrates her conception of a “new tourist.”

I sat down with the author to talk about the motivations behind this concept, her own traveling experiences, reporting visits to Hawaii, the Alps, Kerala, and Disneyland Paris, and how our attitudes towards tourism are slowly shifting.

There’s so much interesting reporting in The New Tourist, but I’m always very curious about what authors couldn’t fit in the book. What darlings did you have to kill?

I wrote two whole chapters that are nowhere in the book. The very first trip I took for the book was to Israel and Palestine. I had heard about a tour company that really tries to use tourism as a force for peace, and I wanted to go see this in action. I spent eight or nine days in Israel and Palestine; I joined a group trip that was really transformational, and I watched the people in this group—mostly American Jews visiting Palestine for the first time—have these really eye opening moments and it was super powerful. Then of course, the war broke out.

I also wrote a whole chapter on Pompeii, focusing on UNESCO heritage sites, and the political power of UNESCO—and also the kind of complex effects of UNESCO listing, because it's not always necessarily a good thing for a place. I ended up weaving a bit about UNESCO into the Liverpool chapter, and how [that city] walked away from the UNESCO listing. But I wanted to keep the book pretty tight and readable, and really whet people's appetites for these topics, so Pompeii also ended up on the cutting room floor.

You make the point that travel and tourism, which are so baked into the global economy, and obviously various global forces—whether economic or political or what have you—are changing on a regular basis. How did you approach these live issues?

I was really nervous going to Saudi Arabia first of all—and then to write about Saudi Arabia. I included in the book an example of a reader that was pushing back on [my article about tourism in Saudi Arabia for the New York Times]. I was nervous to write about it in what's objectively a pretty positive light for all the reasons that you can imagine. I was kind of torn, thinking like, “Okay, this is a country that's known for its horrific human rights record, and I'm gonna go and write something positive.” But my guiding light in all of my writing and all my journalism is to give an accurate portrayal of what I experienced, or if I'm interviewing someone, give an accurate portrayal of that person's voice. And so the resulting chapter is what happened to me; this is the truth of my experience.

Over the course of the week I was in Saudi Arabia, I had five or six really powerful interactions with women, very unexpectedly: one woman I was sitting next to train; another sort of like, a colleague of the guy who was sitting next to me on the flight as I was coming in to Jeddah. The story with Fatima [a female tour guide who showed me around Riyadh and told me, among other things, about her intent to divorce her husband, which a recent rule changed allowed her to do] wasn't that unique, really. So I thought, okay, this felt representative of other things I had experienced too. But I was nervous to put that in there. We'll see what the broader reactions are.

You share similar behind-the-scenes anecdotes throughout the book, and I really appreciate these peeks into your thought process and how editors and readers respond. It gives a very clear picture of what actually went on in the making of this book, and there's no omniscient “great white man” voice, which has often plagued travel writing.

That’s kind of what I wanted to say right out front in the introduction: Hey, I don't have the answers here. This is something that I really discussed with my agent and my book editor; should we have some prescriptive stuff at the end, a list of do's and don'ts? But like, who am I to tell people what to do? I really don't have the answers, but what I can do is encourage people to explore with a certain mindset and with a certain level of humility.

I make bad decisions just like everybody else, but let's all try, right? Why don't you come along with me while I try? And let's see where that leads us together. I really want to invite the reader to come with me, and that's kind of why I wanted to show some of the behind the scenes stuff.

Your source in Barcelona used the word “gentrification” to describe how the city has become more and more unlivable for local residents. But then in Riyadh, you describe scenes very similar to what you experienced in Barcelona—“We're eating eggs Benedict, and I can get all the toiletries I want”—yet the locals you met there don’t take issue with these changes brought on by Westernization or gentrification. As a visitor, how did you experience this difference, or was there much difference at all?

Riyadh is at the earliest stages [of its tourism industry] and Barcelona’s at the overdone kind of stage [according to Butler's Tourism Area Life Cycle]. So how do we know that Riyadh isn't going to turn into Barcelona in 20, 30 years from now? Or that we’re not going to be writing about the problem of over-tourism, or gentrification, or that locals can no longer live the way they want to live?

I wanted to show places at different points on that tourism spectrum [and treat them] as a sort of a cautionary tale. It’s the “yes, and…” Yes, there's huge opportunity: It can give a place an enormous amount of income, which can translate into reputation and power and control over the vision of a city and how it's going to develop. At the same time there are all these pitfalls, you know, and Amsterdam and Barcelona both went hard on tourism and then oversold and ended up with the consequences. As [worldwide] tourism is expected to just grow and grow faster than the global economy over the next several years, more places need to be paying very close attention to what's happening or what has happened in Amsterdam and Barcelona and Venice, places like that, so they can ride the high of that early promise of tourism without overdoing it.

A point I wanted to make in the book is that these are really policy challenges in the end. Something that bothers me is when I see media that seems to be blaming travelers for tourism challenges. Of course we're all implicated, and we all have agency, we all need to make informed decisions—but every single tourist who visited Barcelona and Amsterdam at the height of their popularity was doing exactly what the local government had paid an enormous amount of money to have them do. It’s that “yes, and” again: Yes, we should be careful and, governments, really, the buck stops with you.

Yes! We’re not pawns, but we exist within a system that points us within certain directions. That argument was one of the many sections in this book that spoke to things I’ve thought about a lot but never really looked into.

I can't tell you how many times in the last five, six years where I meet somebody at a party, or a parent at my kids’ school, and they ask what I do. And when I say, “I’m a journalist, I write about tourism,” people are automatically like, “Oh my god, I try to take the train whenever.” Or when I say I’m writing a book about tourism, they're like, “I always look for little boutique hotels.”

People are really thinking critically about their own travels in a way that I don't think many of us were five or 10 years ago. I think the pandemic—that pause and then restart—and [the increasing number of] headlines about the problems of tourism means a lot of us feel kind of implicated and maybe have a sense of shame or confusion about it. We're looking for guidance. I feel like my reader for this book is somebody who wants to travel, who loves to explore, and who has a little nagging voice in their head, like, “Oh god, did I make a bad decision that one time, or am I going about it the right way?” That's my reader. I feel like there are so many of us now who are in that position.

On that note, are there any other books you’d recommend for people who finish yours and want to read more about thoughtful tourism?

The Last Resort, by Sarah Stodola, about the history and the evolution of the beach resort. That’s one of the only other books I’ve seen that takes a sort of journalistic lens [on the travel industry], but she really focuses on beaches.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.