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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

The problem with most tourist destinations is the same as the tragedy of the commons: there's a bunch of tour guides, restaurants, airlines, hotels, etc that can sell a piece of the common heritage, and there's no overall coordination of the total amount served.

I went to Galapagos, and they were thinking of limiting the total number of visitors. To me this make a lot of sense. You can't have hordes of people showing up, it'll wreck the place. I would do an auction, 10k or whatever highest bidders get to enter. A tourist attraction could then act like a monopoly and extract the maximum out of it, without straining themselves serving those customers (yeah I've got BT internet).

Granted, there will be a lot of politics about the distribution of that pie, but at least you can say you are getting the most out of the situation.

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so only the richest should be able to visit such places? Probably from far away countries, whilst people from neighbouring countries are not able to see?

Yep. They also live in the nicest homes, live longer, have nicer cars, and so forth.

Not saying it's fantastic, but if you have to ration a resource willingness to pay is a place to start.

I don't feel the same way about every resource (eg health and education) but whether you can visit some old town somewhere doesn't seem essential.

And then you've changed the meaning of these pieces of cultural heritage to mean they are some kind of exclusive culture that can only be accessed by the wealthy bourgeois of the world. There would be no limit to this, they can artificially make the price as high as they want. It should be on a ticketing basis that is limited daily, not by pricing out wealth brackets in the world. You can only imagine that of the hundreds of thousands to millions that visit these places every year, there are millions more people that may never visit.

Those nice homes and cars have materials and resources invested into making them. The resources around tourist attractions are limited.

Well there's paintings that are part of our cultural heritage that most of us will never see, other than in reproductions. Doesn't mean you can't appreciate it. I don't really mind if the original is owned by some billionaire. The cultural significance is still something that's open to everyone to appreciate. But we get to do that knowing some guy who really cares about it is spending crazy money on maintaining it.

You could instead have a lottery like for Olympic Games tickets, so that only the luckiest are able to visit such places.

But I don't see why the locals living there would want to. They get to set the rules, and for them the money from rich tourists is certainly more attractive than being able to "show their culture" to a balanced sample of the world population.

Peru does this on the Inca Trail trips. There is a daily cap on the number of people allowed on trail (tourist + guides + porters/cooks), plus guides are required. While it certainly isn't cheap, it wasn't prohibitively expensive (i.e., if you can afford the airfare and hotels in a city, you can likely afford to hike the Inca Trail).

Having recently visited Iceland, I could see that the Reykjavik-area was near its limits. As was the airport (gate areas were overcrowded throughout the terminal). There's plenty of space elsewhere on the island, but the government and Iceland Air have done a really good job convincing tourists to do a quick stopover en route from the Americans to Europe.

And being a regular visitor to Scotland (Scottish by birth, though raised in the US), there are more and more tourists every time I go back. Skye is running into problems supporting the number of visitors at peak season - many showing up without planned accommodation, camping on roadside, etc. The NC500 route is similar - the area is desolate and lightly populated, but it's been pitched as a tourist destination - great to get people out of Edinburg, but facilities are barely adequate, at least at peak season.

> As was the airport (gate areas were overcrowded throughout the terminal)

It's also a popular layover destination, right?

Yes, it's the hub for WOW and IcelandAir, so a lot of people passing through on trans-Atlantic trips.

IcelandAir also allows travelers to split their itinerary for no extra fee, so a few days in Reykjavik isn't too costly (just room/board). I assume WOW does the same.

I was there in mid-January and was amazed how busy both KEF and Reykjavik were for the "offseason." A few locals said there wasn't really an offseason any more.

There's no "auction" , it's called competition. All the government has to do is increase tax in tourist services.

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