> TL;DR: a few days/weeks of lightweight entertainment for you does real damage to the places you visit.

That's a bizarre take. Beyond bad, just plain weird.

> It's not a high bar. Visiting friends or doing a specific activity (rock climbing! diving! fishing! sports! cooking! meditation retreat! make art! take a class! gain a skill!) would be a perfectly ethical reason to travel somewhere, in my humble opinion

That's an extremely high bar for most of us, and that you don't see it is hilarious.

Nothing is more artificial and touristy than a "retreat" or going someplace to scuba dive, but somehow you're placing these arbitrary definitions on what is more or less ethical.

All of those "ethical" activities are extremely artificial and damaging, it's absurd thinking going abroad to do "art" or "rock climbing" is more authentic and not artificial and damaging. Unless you know someone local who can take you somewhere non commercial (which is an extremely high bar, unless you have friends all over the world) all those activities are as much Disneyland as taking photos of the Eiffel tower, I'm sorry to tell you.

Visiting friends doesn't mean you won't go sightseeing, what does one thing have to do with the other? And what if you don't have friends all over the world?

> Having the luxury to travel is a "first-world entitlement." It isn't entitlement to say that you should strive to be more thoughtful about the costs.

What you're saying amounts to gatekeeping, which is even more entitled. "If you cannot travel like the entitled few can, in the extremely narrow way I deem ethical, then don't travel at all."

Also, I don't know if you understand everything you say applies to doing tourism within your own country as well. So your advice effectively becomes "do rock climbing (and hope your children and spouse want to do that) or stay at home". Your world shrinks because you cannot do "ethical tourism" according to some absurd definition.

Yuck.

You balked at the idea of volunteerism, but then I gave you less...demanding...versions, and you criticize them as being imperfect. It's clear that I'm not going to convince you, and you keep cherry-picking the most expensive / burdensome examples I provide, so I'm done replying after this.

But since I didn't explain it explicitly, the principle is that while all travel is damaging, you can thoughtfully pick activities which:

1) Will help offset that damage (e.g. volunteering)

2) Require that you be in a place (e.g. seeing family / friends), or

3) Otherwise spread out your impact and/or engage with locals on a more authentic level -- even the horrible, very bad, "extremely artificial and damaging" yoga retreat (lol, come on) will put you in a small minority of travelers, many of whom will be locals themselves.

Despite your repeated mischaracterizations of my argument, it doesn't have to be expensive, and perfect is not the enemy of the good. It doesn't take much more than creativity and effort to do better with your travel.

That's rich. You haven't proven any of your alternatives is any better. Like, none of them. They are all as artificial as sightseeing, but if it makes you sleep better at night...

Your "yoga retreat" is the worst of the Eat Pray Love kind of tourism, I cannot believe what I'm reading. It's artificial as fuck, please don't suggest it ever again.

I also do not want to visit friends and family, that's a different activity entirely!

You mischaracterize all sightseeing tourism as "damaging" and the equivalent of TikTok and Mario Kart tours, yet complain that I am mischaracterizing you.

Wow. The sense of entitled gatekeeping I'm getting from you is off the charts.

I have to follow your very strict and arbitrary standards -- you, who by your own admission have lived in "several tourist hotspots" (making you a bigger part of the problem than me) -- because... somehow my visiting several interesting parts of the world where I know nobody is "damaging"?

Wow. That's rich.

I think you kind of missed his point. The current era of tourism does to foreign cities what gentrification did to working class neighborhoods.

At first, people want a taste of something different and authentic. But eventually the place sells out and stops being a real place and starts catering to the new entrants, pushing out the natives in the process.

Florence is a good example of this. Not long ago it was a real place where real people lived. Nowadays everyone there is a foreigner, including the workers and the people who own the businesses and Airbnbs. A tourist goes there and feels like they've gotten to know Italy, but really all they experienced was a theme park designed to take their money by catering to their expectations of what Italy is supposed to be like.

Ok, I can get that. I've been to Florence and it does feel artificial to me. And it's indeed overcrowded with peddlers selling crap. But it's not the only city in Italy, and I don't particularly like it. Italy as a whole is an amazing country and a wonderful place to do tourism and sightseeing.

What I could do without is the sanctimonious attitude of "tourism is bad unless you do it exactly like I tell you to, which also happens to be a way that 90% of the middle class that can afford traveling cannot do, but hey, I can, and I've lived near many tourist hotspots anyway [sic], so I guess it sucks to be you!".

The backpacker that can go do volunteer work or rock climbing or living among the locals for 6 months is a tiny minority of those that can travel; saying it's the only valid way of traveling abroad is gatekeeping, plain and simple.

You can be a tourist and simply not be obnoxious, but apparently that's not enough for some people.

The moralizing aspect comes in when we admit that we all made Florence (and Rome and Venice) the way they are, and that this is the inevitable end of any tourist destination.

Therefore an alternative is needed, that lets us visit a place without destroying it and stealing it from the locals. I think that's what was being proposed.