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Greece has many beautiful places, and though I’m Greek and I spent the first 20 or so years of my life there, I of course haven’t visited its every corner. I recently spent a few days on Crete, and let me tell you, it was an eye-opening experience. Mass tourism needs to die, yesterday!

You might have recently seen how Spanish citizens in Malaga and other places have protested mass tourism. If you live in any remotely touristy location – let alone a place like Rome, Paris, or Venice – you surely know first-hand how damaging mass tourism can be.

I was so affected by my own experiences – which I’ll talk about more in a while – that I decided to write this post. I was always against mass tourism, but now I am absolutely adamant: Mass tourism must die!

What Is Mass Tourism?

There are many ways to define mass tourism, but here’s the thing: They are all facets of the same reality, and they’re interconnected.

• Mass tourism, as the name implies, is about quantity. Among other places on Crete (which were as bad in terms of tourism), I visited Chania. It’s a city with a population of a little over 50,000. The base of Suda is nearby, so on any given day you can expect the city to be swamped with US Navy personnel on shore leave, passengers from a couple of cruise ships, on top of the “regular” tourists. Do the math – or imagine, say, New York, suddenly receiving a few million tourists.
• On top of that, an important element of mass tourism is also the organizational dynamics. In simpler terms, mass tourism is characterized by large corporations packing (indeed often literally) plenty of people together, squeezing them in airplanes continually taking them to specific locations, often to specific hotels.
• Mass tourism is also about attitude. It’s all about consuming, being a product, buying experiences, and all other prefabricated concepts that have an enormous impact on the environment as well as local culture.

There are many manifestations of mass tourism, but one of them is the perfect example.

Cruise Ships and Other Hells

My central thesis in this post is that mass tourism must die. And if you’ve ever been stuck in a gargantuan cruise ship for a week (bonus: with a stomach virus going around and no functioning toilets) you might readily agree with me!

The behemoths floating around (that only nominally should be called “ships”) carrying thousands of mindless zombies from one place to the next, so that they can buy and consume as much as possible – and oh, fuck the locals and the environment! – are the very embodiment, the most apt symbol of mass tourism.

Of course, the central question is, who benefits from mass tourism?

Who Benefits from Mass Tourism?

Think of the industrialization of art for a moment: It’s not the artist, the audience, or even the retail sellers (e.g. independent galleries or record stores) that benefit from it. It’s the corporate behemoths. By favoring production-like “art”, prostituting it and rendering it mediocre by definition, capitalism-on-steroids maximizes profits while minimizing value

It’s precisely the same with mass tourism.

The more cattle tourists are packed together in a single “package” (be it a cruise ship or a specific flight leading to a specific place and a specific hotel with specific all-inclusive restaurants), the more the profit.

The locals certainly don’t benefit from mass tourism, even in market terms. That is to say, not only do locals see the destruction of their local environment and the bastardization of their local culture, but they don’t even improve their situation financially. If you’re a tourist flown to an all-inclusive hotel, the only money you leave to the local economy are for some ridiculous seashells and bracelets sold to tourists for $5, colonialism-style.

But there is more.

Favela Stores and the Dystopia of Capitalism

In my time in Chania, I discovered the process can even acquire dystopian dimensions. I saw a high-end jewelry store called “Favela”.

Let that sink in for a moment.

You have a place selling items at very high prices (items that, when you think about it, serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever), items that are very likely made using human exploitation or even slavery, and you call that bloody (literally) store by a name associated with deep, unfathomable misery, poverty, and degradation.

Truly, things like this give us a hint how the last days of the Roman Empire must have been like.

A Tourist or a Traveler?

This distinction – “are you a tourist or a traveler?” – is a bit of a cliché. But, as often is the case, the reason is that it’s on to something.

To some extent, being a tourist vs being a traveler isn’t a binary dilemma – it doesn’t mean you’re either one or the other. Rather, a bit like in the writer-or-artist quandary, realistically speaking it’s a continuum. The ideal state would be for a person traveling away from home for leisure to be fully a traveler and not at all a tourist. Pragmatically, that’s not quite possible.

But how can we be “more” travelers? What does it even mean?

After my quasi-traumatic traveling experience, I define “tourist” as a “mass tourist”; someone who supports this canned way of traveling, being flown to popular destinations on specific itineraries, staying at specific all-inclusive hotels, doing touristy shit, buying garbage, polluting the local culture.

A traveler, on the other hand, isn’t looking for a canned experience. Travelers don’t want to go to a stupid hotel that looks the same in Chania, Acapulco, or Las Palmas. A traveler doesn’t buy trash and tries to experience without modifying what is being experienced (we could have a philosophical discussion about the feasibility of this, via the observer problem). A traveler, above all, is someone who is aware of what’s involved and shows respect.

And just maybe, that’s where the problem lies.

The Insta-asshole Generation: Glorified Disrespect

Most tourist hells in Greece (think Santorini or Mykonos) are extremely “Instagrammable”. Especially the former can be seen on all sorts of things, from puzzles and fashion magazines to food product photos.

And on Instagram… 🤮

Chances are, even if you have absolutely zero knowledge of where (or even what) Santorini is, you’ve seen some variation of this photo:

What is not very easy to discern in this photo, is that these narrow alleys that are full of luxurious villas and high-end rentals are full of tourists wanting to take precisely such photos. Often they want to also include themselves in the photo, making duck faces, to post on Instagram and show all their friends how important they are. Me me me, gimme gimme gimme.

These alleys were never meant for any of this, not even remotely. Locals (who, as a group, are not absolved by blame for this state) have been displaced by this hell. Their island’s culture has been destroyed.

How to get it back?

Maybe – if mass tourism needs to die – we need to wait for mother nature to intervene! 😛