Travel In The Age Of Entitlement

It’s become all about me

Tourists have often been maligned for their bad behaviour but these days, it’s getting worse, and I don’t need to see the names carved into The Colosseum to know it. I’ve seen it firsthand, unfolding right in front of my eyes over the past two years of near-constant travel. It’s been a slow-motion descent into a great abyss from which I’m not sure if we’ll ever return.

This got me wondering why.

Why now, more than ever, do I see tourists swarm over sacred sites, duck beneath bollards, and trample over the fact that locals might want to preserve these places for future generations? Why is it that people ignore the local customs and don’t bother to learn the local language and treat travel like a commodity as opposed to the experiential thing that it supposedly is?

Travel has become all about me.

Not me, Paul, but the metaphorical me. The person, the individual, and not the place that was kind enough to host them as a guest. The camera has shifted, the lens turned, and we’ve put ourselves into the spotlight. The destination is no longer a destination but a well-constructed set for our photoshoots, the locals are little more than background actors, and we’re the stars, broadcasting an alternative reality to all our fans back home.

It’s this self-focus that has slowly made us all that little bit more entitled in our attitudes towards travel. It’s become something that we do as opposed to an experience that we share. It has made us ignore the social, environmental, and economic impact that our holidays have on local communities because we paid good money for those tickets and we’ll be damned if we let anything get between us and our good time.

It would be a little too easy to point the finger at the narcissism of the smartphone generation, using social media to scapegoat why people have become so much more entitled when they travel. This, I think, is an oversimplification of it, as the phone is a symptom [or perhaps a catalyst] of the cause, which I believe is a growing sense of entitlement.

But entitlement doesn’t belong to one generation. It belongs to all of us, young, old, and in between. Some of the most entitled travellers I’ve ever met have been the older ones who lament what social media has done to the youth despite wasting hours being spoon-fed propaganda on Facebook. They’re the kind of people who will happily fly down to Mexico, spend a week in an all-inclusive resort in Cabo, and then complain about Mexicans coming to America.

How dare they bring their delicious food into my country!

To them, travel is a one-way street that only works when they’re the ones behind the wheel, and you’ll find examples of this all across the developed world. It’s like people are either blissfully ignorant or have willfully forgotten that travel is a privilege, not a right, one that has been afforded to us thanks to something I like to call the ‘roulette wheel’ of geography. Where you are born in the world more often than not determines how much of the rest of it you’ll get to see.

Born in Australia?

Congratulations, you lucky bastard! You play your cards right, you’ll go backpacking through Europe and ride motorbikes in Vietnam and spend your honeymoon in Bali.

Born in Nigeria?

Mate, you might want to sit down, because I’ve got some bad news…

The purchasing power of geography has tipped the travel scales heavily in our favour, giving us the opportunity to visit countries where people will never get the opportunity to do the same. This, I think, should be treated with a certain level of grace, as there isn’t anything that we’ve done to earn this privilege, it has simply been given to us thanks to where we were born.

And yet, despite this dumb luck, I still see tourists barge into restaurants, sit down, and then complain about them not having English menus. Use Google Translate, you heathens, or at least appreciate that the world wasn’t made to be catered to you. There are billions of us here and the vast majority of them will never have the opportunity to get on a plane, let alone visit another country, so try to remember that next time you’re in Thailand and can’t find hot chips on the menu.

The cost of travel is too high to be this cheap.

What I mean by this is that between budget airlines, resort deals, and package tours, travel has never been easier and more affordable than it is right now. This, in theory, is a good thing. The more people who travel, the more people who learn. The more people who learn, the more people who understand we’re all connected in this big, messy, shambolic thing we call life.

But…

[why is there always a but?]

But the people on these tours aren’t engaging with the local culture, they’re viewing it through a constructed window, one built for profit and that profit rarely goes into the pockets of the country that they’re visiting. These budget airlines are delivering more people than ever to places that can’t reasonably hope to accommodate them. So, to meet demand, they supply an endless construction of resorts and hotels that consume the landscape and dominate the horizon.

Someone has to lose, and let me tell you, it won’t be the tourists. They expect to be accommodated, without considering the impact that those accommodations might have on the local population. There are whole countries [hello, Jamaica] that have become little more than tourist economies, with entire industries wiped to build hotels and resorts just so people can leave home at an affordable price without leaving the comforts of it behind.

Affordable, for who?

Certainly not the people who built that paradise, being paid pennies just so we can shave a few dollars off our all-inclusive experience.

Look, I’m not saying don’t travel. That would be hypocritical given that I’m currently a tourist right now, travelling around Japan. I think what I’m trying to say is that travel shouldn’t be all about you. It’s about the place, about the people, and how our stories are intertwined.

The more we start viewing travel as an experience to be shared, not serviced, the less entitled we’ll be and the more we’ll treat it with the respect and veneration that it deserves. You wouldn’t trash your own backyard so don’t go trashing someone else’s just because you’re not the one who is going to have to clean up the mess.