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Comment by dieselgate | Hacker News Reader

This isn’t meant to be a personal jab but in my opinion tourists, by definition, are “consuming” the region they are touring. Consumption is not always over-consumption.

Tough luck for us all, especially when there are so many downsides of cruises or flying. But not all tourism is “bad” and of course many economies depend on it - it’s a tricky balance.

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Precisely. Tourists are like locusts. They congregate on that cute little place that suddenly then isn't cute anymore, turn every other store into a souvenir store and the rest into hotels and restaurants to feed the hordes. It drives up the rents and consequently the property prices until the people that used to live there no longer can afford to.

And that's before you get into drug tourism, which Amsterdam has a lot of as well.

I was born there and lived there for 28 years, I'll still visit occasionally because I still have some friends there but on the whole the city has lost its charm for me.

>Precisely. Tourists are like locusts.

Ok - so how to I go on holiday and not be a locust ? What is the solution no holidays, no travel ?

I live in London and its can be fun trying to get a real work meeting near Houses of Parliament as 'locusts' are all around. However - quid pro quo

>And that's before you get into drug tourism, which Amsterdam has a lot of as well. Not sure the tourism came before the changes to local drug enforcement.

A cruise ship is just the mirror to remind us, we are all locusts.

I guess it is possible that in the future there will be generally few people who go on holidays to distant places or travel very far. It is a relatively recent phenomenon for anyone except the wealthy, as in the past, what, 100 years or so? Maybe someday a hundred years from now people will study "The Golden Age of Travel and Vacation".

I’m used to working around tourists, including Westminster. One office is just south of Parliament, I also have sites on the river at horse guards, at Trafalgar Square, near Westminster abbey, and in Downing Street, as well as other tourist locations like Buckingham place, the strand

Working on a few days surrounding the queens funeral was a pain - got stuck near Westminster tube for half an hour, got stuck the wrong side of the mall for a while, but on the whole I find very little impact.

The tourist amenities are on the whole scaled appropriately.

The problem with cruise ships is they dump a thousand people into a small town, they spend very little, use all the space, clog the main instagram landmark, then leave.

A normal tourist visiting the city would have several nights in a hotel, be eating lunch and dinner out, be visiting multiple attractions. This brings more money into the city, spreads them out across different sites, and is naturally limited by the availability of hotels.

Bring your own hotel breaks this model.

Amsterdam cultivated a reputation for its drug tourism. Why was that ever allowed to happen? It seems like you're angry about all the tourism - a problem a lot of other cities would love to have.

The sad answer is that everyone _left_ Amsterdam by choice - and allowed these tourism centric industries to grow. The money that it brought in was too good and eventually lead to the so called decline you seem to be complaining about.

As for property price rise - people have the same complaint against tech workers. So I guess I can no longer be a tourist and I can't work in tech because someone somewhere is definitely going to be angry that I make more money and the world isn't fair.

The reason why it was allowed to happen was because it is very hard to differentiate between those that have a problem and those that arrived without a problem but developed on while there.

Amsterdam's strategy would have worked very well indeed if it had been adopted all over Europe. But to be 'first mover' really hurt.

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