<story><title>Norway&apos;s Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism</title><url>https://www.outsideonline.com/2401446/norway-adventure-travel-overtourism</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>Welcome to the world of, by some measures, &amp;quot;too many&amp;quot; people having too much disposable wealth. There are obviously worse problems to have. But overtourism is a problem that&amp;#x27;s only going to get worse.&lt;p&gt;This even affects Mount Everest where people are literally dying just to say they stood at the top of the world. And Everest simply can&amp;#x27;t support the number of climbers now.&lt;p&gt;You see this in US national parks where the obvious ones (eg Yosemite) are arguably oversubscribed while others you could probably go days without seeing anyone.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a certain lack of imagination here. Some of it is convenience. Take Everest. People climb it because it&amp;#x27;s the tallest and people know what it is. There are ~14 other peaks over 8000 meters. Are any of these qualitatively worse experiences? Probably not. But... bragging rights.&lt;p&gt;Solutions to this fall into a number of buckets:&lt;p&gt;1. Making it more expensive: some will complain only the rich can go and this is unfair.&lt;p&gt;2. Quotas: you have to book far, far in advance and no doubt this is unfair to some people.&lt;p&gt;3. Lottery system: this is really a variation of quotas but probably fairer.&lt;p&gt;So I&amp;#x27;ve been to Paris like 4 times. I like it but my God the touristy places are a nightmare such that I basically never went to any. Honestly the best part for me was the bread. The sandwiches you&amp;#x27;d buy on the street were unbelievably good.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I honestly don&amp;#x27;t understand this need people have to jam in with 100,000 other people just to see some famous building. Maybe that&amp;#x27;s just me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>munificent</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;too many&amp;quot; people having too much disposable wealth. &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them.&lt;p&gt;The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;shirky.com&amp;#x2F;writings&amp;#x2F;powerlaw_weblog.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;shirky.com&amp;#x2F;writings&amp;#x2F;powerlaw_weblog.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Instagram has caused these power law distributions to escape media onto the real world. While there are millions of delightful vacation destinations, most people never hear about most of them. Instead, a tiny minority of the most photogenic one (like Trolltunga, mentioned in the article), consume almost all of the attention and then net a huge, unmanageable number of visitors. For every Everest, there are a hundred mountains that are 90% as beautiful but only get 10% of the visitors.&lt;p&gt;I believe this is one of the fundamental, structural problems of the modern age. Most of the information we consume — literally the knowledge we base our worldview on — is now brought to our attention based on social media sharing and aggregation. The nature of those systems takes a linear range of &amp;quot;relevance&amp;quot; and distorts it into power law that no longer matches reality. But because this &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; our window into reality, we then take the result of that distortion at face value.&lt;p&gt;I would love to see more systems engineered to try to balance that. Perhaps a Twitter-like system that capped the number of followers you had. A recommendation engine that subtracted out the effect of popularity when ranking. But so far I don&amp;#x27;t see many. I&amp;#x27;m not sure if it&amp;#x27;s because it&amp;#x27;s not what people want, not what advertisers want, or what.&lt;p&gt;(The great thing about &lt;i&gt;knowing&lt;/i&gt; that this effect happens is that you can often easily acquire a better-than-average experience by deliberately stepping a little farther towards the long tail. The third best restaurant in a city is usually almost as good as #1 but noticeably cheaper. The second-most popular hike will give you 80% of the view with 20% of the crowds.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Norway&apos;s Bold Plan to Tackle Overtourism</title><url>https://www.outsideonline.com/2401446/norway-adventure-travel-overtourism</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>Welcome to the world of, by some measures, &amp;quot;too many&amp;quot; people having too much disposable wealth. There are obviously worse problems to have. But overtourism is a problem that&amp;#x27;s only going to get worse.&lt;p&gt;This even affects Mount Everest where people are literally dying just to say they stood at the top of the world. And Everest simply can&amp;#x27;t support the number of climbers now.&lt;p&gt;You see this in US national parks where the obvious ones (eg Yosemite) are arguably oversubscribed while others you could probably go days without seeing anyone.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a certain lack of imagination here. Some of it is convenience. Take Everest. People climb it because it&amp;#x27;s the tallest and people know what it is. There are ~14 other peaks over 8000 meters. Are any of these qualitatively worse experiences? Probably not. But... bragging rights.&lt;p&gt;Solutions to this fall into a number of buckets:&lt;p&gt;1. Making it more expensive: some will complain only the rich can go and this is unfair.&lt;p&gt;2. Quotas: you have to book far, far in advance and no doubt this is unfair to some people.&lt;p&gt;3. Lottery system: this is really a variation of quotas but probably fairer.&lt;p&gt;So I&amp;#x27;ve been to Paris like 4 times. I like it but my God the touristy places are a nightmare such that I basically never went to any. Honestly the best part for me was the bread. The sandwiches you&amp;#x27;d buy on the street were unbelievably good.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, I honestly don&amp;#x27;t understand this need people have to jam in with 100,000 other people just to see some famous building. Maybe that&amp;#x27;s just me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>skohan</author><text>&amp;gt; this need people have to jam in with 100,000 other people just to see some famous building. Maybe that&amp;#x27;s just me.&lt;p&gt;I was fortunate enough to spend a gap year traveling around the world, and one of the lessons I learned quickly was that I have little interest in &amp;quot;iconic&amp;quot; destinations.  I can distinctly remember when I made this realization: I was in Oia Santorini at sunset, which I had decided to go to because I had seen amazing photos of this secluded town on a cliffside overlooking the sun go down over the Aegean.  But while the view was beautiful, the reality of that moment was a thousand other tourists elbowing their way to a good vantage point to take the same picture which had been taken a million times before.  There was even a newly married couple who was standing there dejected: they had apparently gone to that point to take wedding photos, but discovered it would obviously be impossible.&lt;p&gt;I still like to travel, but please keep me miles away from anything famous.</text></comment>