UGLY (Fill in Your Country of Choice) TOURISTS.
When it Comes to Traveling Abroad, No Culture has a Lock on "Ugly".
For as long as people have traveled as tourists, their behavior has always been, at best, tolerated by the locals, and at worst, a source of outright hostility. Tony Perrottet, in his New York Times Sunday Review article, “Tourists Gone Wild,” describes badly-behaving Chinese tourists as merely the latest version of “the tourist problem,” a phenomenon going back to ancient Greece. Taking us on a tour of touring itself, he provides historical examples of badly behaved tourists, from the centuries-old graffiti scrawled on the walls of the Great Pyramids in Egypt, the slopes of Mount Sinai, and the columns of medieval cathedrals, to the complaints lobbed against the dismissive members of the British Grand Tour parties of the 18th century, the madras shorts-wearing “Ugly Americans” of the 1960s, the camera-clicking Japanese of the 1980s, right up to the selfie-stick wielding, collective mobs of Chinese tourists today.
Travel books tell you where to go and what to see: we need a guide to how to behave.
In all cases, the behaviors of the visitor always irritated and frustrated their hosts. It was the unfortunate result of tourists lacking information on how best to behave in a foreign culture, and of the host lacking information on how best to accommodate the behaviors of the guest. Given that travel and tourism is the world’s largest industry, and that cultural hostility and misunderstanding does not contribute to peace, brotherhood and general kumbaya, it’s time to go further than to just recognize the problem, and do something about it.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dean Foster Global Cultures to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.