Is this the summer of bad tourists? – By Larry Bleiberg (BBC) / Aug 21, 2023
From vandalising ancient sites to disrespecting local culture, we’re increasingly aware of travellers misbehaving – and this could ultimately be a good thing.
This summer, every day seems to bring another headline of tourists around the world behaving badly.
Last week, it was two drunk Americans sneaking into a closed section of the Eiffel Tower and sleeping off their bender high above Paris. The previous week, a French woman was arrested for carving a heart and her initials into Italy’s iconic Leaning Tower of Pisa. A Canadian teen defaced a 1,200-year-old Japanese temple last month, just after a Bristol-based man etched two names into Rome’s Colosseum and told authorities he was unaware of the arena’s age. And who could forget the German tourist who crashed a performance inside a sacred Bali temple and stripped naked – after having previously run out on the bill at several local hotels?
It feels like the whole world has forgotten how to act in other people’s homes. But while this may seem like the summer of bad tourists, it could just represent a rather uncomfortable truth: as long as people have travelled, we’ve misbehaved.
CONTINUE > https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230821-is-this-the-summer-of-bad-tourists
