The idea is not to say that tourism in typical European cities or in the US and Canada is decreasing, because of course, it isn’t really. But if we take a comparative study of the evolution of tourism during the recent years we may see that the touristic growth of these typical places compared to the one related with more exotic ones is pretty low. Everything indicates that the best travel destinations are about to change soon.
If we take a broader look at the world, we can discover that a recent trend for countries that are on the way to develop have found that tourism is a great way to create some income to finance their projects. Sure, the strategy is not wrong in the first approach. If we don’t have the money, we bring it from the outside. This should work and in fact, it does work, but not everything is written in pink. There’s also black there, and very black. They’ve become the best travel destinations but they’ll have a high price to pay because of that.
What is happening is that in the hurry to develop great touristic attractive locations and funding publicity campaigns the money is not going where it should be. In the end, and going a bit to the extreme situation, the result is that conditions on the living standards of people in the country keep being the same while tourists are enjoying an amazing lifestyle, even with low prices compared to their home countries. And this is what is happening with some of the best touristic destinations such as Brazil, Bangladesh, India, China, Turkey, Venezuela or Thailand, together with an increase in tourism in countries in Eastern Europe.
And from my point of view what is happening is simply because governments are failing in the approach they give to tourism. In my opinion, tourism does not need to mean luxury hotels and big resorts with expensive personnel or great museums and exhibitions. Many of these countries have the beauty in the sights, in history, you can feel in the streets of their towns and cities, in nature. Taking the example of some African countries, I consider absolutely wrong to build up 5-star hotels in the middle of the jungle. They simply don’t fit. Instead, they should try to take a more cultural approach and build buildings that do fit with the local style, that have some meaning related to the region, taking advantage of the exotic taste tourists could get.
Tourism should be cultural immersion and in the way it is being done nowadays, it fails completely with its original purpose. In other words, if you want a luxury hotel, keep visiting Paris, but please don’t go down to Kenya. Unfortunately, if you go down to Kenya you will find the same luxury hotel. Furthermore, it seems that nowadays in order to be one of the best travel destinations you need to have a 5-star hotel standing there. Which is the idea of great vacations that people have?
On the other hand, I don’t want to seem a person who is against high-quality hotels. Don’t take me wrong. I simply think that everything should be in place and respecting the area and culture where it is placed.
