I found this column on Vox (which I typically hate), and read it with interest because of my experience in Italy last week. I think the piece is spot on.

I went to Rome and Florence with my wife in mid-October. There were simply too many people there to reasonably enjoy it. Mostly Americans, but also lots of Germans and French, and I think half the nation of Japan was in Rome. Our 3-hour “skip the line” tour of the Vatican was not fun. There were tens of thousands of people skipping the line. They herded us through the museums so fast that we had no time to enjoy anything. Standing in the Sistine Chapel, a lifelong dream of mine, was a huge disappointment as we were crammed in there with so many people and then hustled out. So yeah, I think much of Europe is overtraveled and I’m gonna think hard about my next trip.

quote:
Many Americans, in much the same way we’ve grown accustomed to cheap products that arrive within 24 hours or less, have an unsavory tendency to feel as though we are owed a fabulous, friction-free time simply because we’ve spent enough money and energy planning to have a fabulous, friction-free time. Cottage industries and corners of the internet have sprung up to reinforce this illusion: No matter where in the world you go, especially as an American leisure tourist, absolutely every choice can be made for you. On TikTok, you can copy painfully intricate spreadsheets and decks promising you the “BEST SUMMER EUROPE TRIP EVER.” Startup apps like Postcard and Camber allow you to copy other people’s saved location pins and follow their itineraries like treasure maps. Publications and influencers compete to offer you the dreamiest-sounding getaways, guiding you to each trendy restaurant and café and what to order there. Some people are even letting ChatGPT plan their vacations. It’s an almost sports-like pastime to reference every possible available recommendation and “best of” list and cobble together a bulletproof itinerary, an activity I’ve engaged in many times, sometimes with great pleasure. But it all ends the same: with thousands of people doing the same things, in the same places, at the same times.

quote:
More people are traveling because they can, a direct result of policy changes on a governmental and corporate level: the rise of online travel agencies like Expedia and Viator that make vacation planning as easy as online shopping, the slackening of visa requirements for foreigners and “digital nomads” who buy local real estate (many of whom promptly renovate them into cookie-cutter Airbnbs), deregulation of the airline industry, the popularity of user-generated, algorithmically ranked “best of” travel recommendations, a capitalist global economy that keeps developing countries’ currencies low and therefore favorable to people from richer nations, and the widespread adoption of remote work, to name a few. That there is not enough space at the restaurants we want to eat at, that the must-see museums sell out weeks in advance, these are not the fault of the individual travelers clamoring to go there, they’re the result of explicit decisions made by governments and corporations.

https://www.vox.com/culture/23798890/american-tourists-travel-trends-vacation-optimization

This post was edited on 10/28/23 at 2:40 pm