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If your meeting requires you to go to the Bahamas, so be it. But there are doctors and nurses that have been travelling around the world, educators that travel, carers, archeologists. Yes, some will attempt to game the system, but there's a lot of good people doing vital work that need to travel.
Man, this is one I've tried to wrestle with multiple times. I feel like there are monumental benefits to trans-Atlantic/trans-Pacific recreational flights (really just most long international flights). Banning those would almost certainly increase feelings of isolation, and probably make the already-rampant xenophobia plaguing the world even worse. There really aren't viable alternatives to flying for getting across a multi-thousand-mile-wide ocean - boats are too slow for the average person, and building trains over the ocean is impractical. Maybe the focus should be on making planes more environmentally friendly, instead of outright banning them?
The thing is tourism does more damage than good, hence saying frig recreational flights. If people are determined to travel, make them sign up to educational holidays.
Do you think "having tourism" would do more damage than "not having tourism"? Because that's what we're really comparing here. Tourism may be a net negative, but if the absence of tourism is a bigger net negative, well, I'd argue that "having tourism" is the better option.
Obviously making tourism into a net positive should be the goal, but that's a whole different discussion (which your idea of "educational holidays" probably fits into). But I don't think we get there with a blanket ban on most forms of air travel. Not to mention, making air travel more efficient/greener would have huge ripple effects across multiple industries. That seems like a no-brainer approach to me, at least in the long term.
First off let me say, thanks for having this conversation, I'm enjoying it.
Educational holidays are a concession and would have to be tested. So holiday goers would have to show they're attending lectures and visiting sites for the bulk of their visit. I honestly haven't fleshed out the idea as I just came up with it.
But to talk about tourism, I think it was Prague that was able to showcase just how damaging tourism truly is. The city centre has miniscule local residency due to properties being brought up to lease as Airbnbs. With businesses attempting to target tourists, prices of food and travel increased and you know what didn't go up wages. So people were forced to move out of the city and commute in just to serve tourists things they can't afford. During tourist season, it's vibrant and busy, off-season it's a ghost town. The citizens aren't benefiting, it's exactly the opposite. Tourism is just imperialism flexing its muscles.
Absolutely! Like I said, this is a topic I've always struggled with, and I've leaned both ways. I just so happen to be leaning on the side of recreational air travel this week lol.
The example with Prague strikes me as rooted in capitalism, not so much tourism. Like, ideally governments (local or otherwise) in tourist-heavy areas step in and implement things that address those capitalistic problems you describe - penalize rental property conglomerates, enforce a liveable minimum wage, build affordable permanent housing and mixed-use spaces, etc. I hear your comparison between tourism and imperialism, and I get that some tourist areas are pretty awful where the local residents are treated as subhuman and that definitely sucks, but idk, it feels more like a capitalist/classist issue to me.