What do you think about when you travel? If you’re like me, you’re probably just thinking about how to optimise your trip (for me, it’s finding a bookshop and a teashop no matter where so I can get a book and try some tea). But whenever I see articles about the problem of over-tourism or about unruly tourists, I do wonder if the articles are asking the right questions.

The New Tourist tries to ask different questions about tourism. Subtitled “Waking Up to the Powers and Perils of Travel,” McClanahan takes the reader through various aspects of tourism, from the power of guidebooks and Instagram, to who gets a seat at the table when planning tourism development, to tourism and the environment.

From the introduction, McClanahan pulls no punches. She writes that

“It irks me that some people insist on a distinction between ‘travelers’ and ‘tourists,’ where the former are explorer types who are unsatisfied with anything short of an “authentic” experience, while the latter are philistines who are content with cliched, mass-market experiences. In practice, I find that the biggest difference between the terms is that we use “traveler” when referring to ourselves and people close to us, while “tourist” is reserved for everyone else.”

Ouch. But on reflection, it’s true. We (or at least I and the people I follow on social media) like to think of ourselves as afflicted with “wanderlust”, as people who travel to fill a deeper longing within us. Whereas all those awful tourists who are littering and speaking too loudly in our country are labelled as “tourist” and the problems are due to “over-tourism”.

But instead, McClanahan suggests dividing people into two different types of groups, the “old tourist” and the “new tourist.” The old tourist is “a pure consumer who sees the people and places he encounters when he travels as nothing more than a means to some self-serving end: an item crossed off a bucket list, a fun shot for his Instagram grid, one more thing to brag about to his peers.” On the other hand, the “new tourist” is someone who “is humbled by her travels, which open her eyes to her smallness in the great stretch of history and the vast sea of humanity. The new tourist embraces the chance to encounter people whose backgrounds are very different from her own, and to learn from cultures or religions that she might otherwise fear or regard with contempt.”

With this in mind, McClanahan sets off through her tour of the travel industry, covering:

• The history and impact of guidebooks
• The impact of Instagram and travel influencers
• How tourism started making an impact globally
• When tourists become unwanted
• Travel and seeing natural wonders before climate change destroys them forever (and also, travel’s impact on the environment)
• Tourist traps

All this culminating with a chapter on The New Tourist.

There is plenty discussed in this book and I highlighted a lot of passages that gave me food for thought. For example, I thought that the discussion on who gets a seat to the table, using Hawaii as an example, was one that we don’t consider often enough. When deciding on the tourism strategy, how often is it a top-down by governments who may not be in touch with the sentiments of the people (especially the indigenous people) and how often is it a grounds-up approach to crafting their tourism strategy?

I also appreciated the discussion on the tourist trap, that one reason these places still exist is because we enjoy the comfort and ease of the familiar that it brings. If you’re travelling to a culture very different from yours, you may feel overwhelmed trying to get things right and a “tourist trap” is an easy solution that promises some measure of cultural exchange without much effort on your part. That chapter reminded me of my recent trip to India, where I went for a friend’s wedding. Before the trip, I felt slightly guilty that I wasn’t going to be travelling and wouldn’t have an “authentic” experience. But during the trip, I had a thought: isn’t this, too, an authentic experience? I may not have travelled much in India but going to my friend’s wedding let me experience something very different from all my past experiences going to weddings in Singapore. Perhaps one day, I’ll go back to India and also see the sights, but with the amount of time and money I have available now, it might just be enough that I went to celebrate with my friend, without feeling the compulsion to check things off a sightseeing list.

One thing that McClanahan didn’t mention, and that I wanted to touch upon so that I remember to continue thinking about it, was an undertone of elitism in some writing about over-tourism and tourists behaving badly. The problem, we are told, is that there are too many people travelling badly and too many badly behaved travellers. Depending on where you are from, these badly behaved travellers will tend to be from certain countries (but probably not yours). Unsaid, but to me implied, is the idea that travelling would be much better if travelling was restricted. But who should get the right to travel? The reason we have a lot of problems about over-tourism is because travel has become democratised; flight tickets becoming cheaper and technology overcoming language barriers are two big factors that I think might have led to this boom in travel. Do we really want to go back to a time when only the rich and privileged could travel?

Perhaps one chapter McClanahan could have added, which might point to a direction on the problem above (at least for badly behaving tourists), was one comparing domestic tourism to overseas tourism. Are all badly behaving tourists from overseas? Are there any places where domestic tourism is an issue or conversely, a lifeline? What do we look for when we travel within our country compared to when we travel overseas? I think these questions might be interesting to explore and might help us approach the problems arising from travel from a new angle.

In the end, I think many of us travel to experience something new and to be surprised by that experience. If you’ve never really thought about travel in a broader sense, The New Tourist could be a book that starts you thinking about this matter and perhaps even affects the way you choose to plan your next trip.

P.s. For the next few posts, we will be doing a bit of bookish travel to two countries that I visited this year – India and Japan. I hope you’ll enjoy the reviews and non-review posts!