#even European history which a lot of EN stuff is based on had these kinds of kinship structures or other close relations not based solely

[tonyglowheart]

same anon about the chinese terms; i keep thinking clan = extended family. wwx is adopted right? cause i keep thinking that by how fandom does it and the clan term says that's right to my brain

Nooooo think of this more like a feudal system (I don't know historical fuedal systems well enough dont quote me) or like... idk, Game of Thrones, everyone knows game of thrones now right? I don’t know Game of Thrones either, just imagine a... game of thrones-esque setting

So you have the Clan, right, and the main family of the clan? the uhh what are they, the starks, the lannisters, the whoever else. You have the main family at the center of that. But then you also have all sorts of servants and soldiers and retainers and whatever. In a feudal system you have knights and stuff. They all technically “belong with” the clan/are under the banner of the main family, but are not literally members of the family, are not adopted into the main family tree, etc. A royal companion of a royal heir in real life history, for example, could even be raised alongside the heir, attend the same classes, participate in the same activities, and they could be close as brothers. But the royal companion does not become the literal adopted sibling of the royal heir. It’s like how you might be friends with your boss, and they might consider you like family, but while the boss-employee relationship exists they’re still your boss, and there’s still that power dynamic & positional difference there.

“Traditionally,” or like, in what can be considered established xianxia/wuxia canon, you have cultivation sects that are more like apprenticeship or... guilds I guess? I only know vaguely about historical guilds, so I’m more borrowing their idea than quoting them exactly. You have masters and you have apprentices, and journeymen, etc, and apprentices can hone their still and “go up in rank” so to speak, work their way up to being a full master in the guild. It’s an organizational grouping that creates close bonds but is not necessarily a family in the nuclear family sense or like the family tree or clan sense. But MDZS cultivation families are structured much more like nobility/gentry, even if they came from humble origins, where you have the whole... core family + also the accompanying people who are under the family’s banner and thus “part of the Clan” as far as considering the clan as like, a political organization also goes. But not literal adoption into the family. 

Within wuxia/xianxia, sect-mates are actually considered more marriagable prospects than outsiders, and a lot of the romances in the dramas might be about a shixiong and a shimei or whatever. (If you think about them as a professional collective that does have close personal bonds, like a guild might, then it makes sense; you spend a lot of time around these people so you know them well already, plus if your sect has proprietary techniques you would keep that inside the sect. it’d be like if you had a childhood sweetheart, like in PotC with Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan). 

“Wei Wuxian is adopted” is the absolute Anglophone myth of the century and the bane of my existence lmao, because he’s NOT. People use it to discourse about all sorts of things and justify all sort of other things, but his standing in relation to the Jiang family is much more nuanced and complicated than “he’s adopted.” He’s a cultivator, so he’s not just a normal servant, and he’s also the head disciple, plus he can be considered, at the very least, a sort of “royal companion” to Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli even, so he does have an advanced place compared to your average Yunmeng Jiang disciple. But, like how in PotC Will was raised alongside Elizabeth, that doesn’t make them automatically adopted. Even Jiang Yanli declaring Wei Wuxian her did doesn’t mean that he is, or that he is to her, per se. Before anyone throws rocks at me - I’m not saying she doesn’t consider him like a brother, or that they’re not close. But that assertion had a very specific purpose. As mentioned, your sect-mates are actually considered to be very marriagable prospects, and Madam Jin was suggesting it would be improper for Jiang Yanli to be alone with Wei Wuxian, who is considered a potential prospect for her. Jiang Yanli’s assertion that Wei Wuxian is her didi stops the reasoning behind the suggestions of impropriety in its tracks. But that doesn’t mean she considers him literally adopted into her whole family tree, it’s not getting into that territory, it’s an interpersonal declaration between her and WWX. It also doesn’t then automatically mean that JC should see WWX as a brother in a literal adopted sense either, which I’ve seen some people argue lmao.

Plus, if Wei Wuxian were adopted, his name most likely should have changed and he should have the Jiang name; if MXTX had decided that WWX were actually adopted but kept his own name, then MXTX should have made a note about it, like she did with Madam Yu. It’s the kind of thing that’s like, you would expect it to be remarked on at least, like it should be lampshaded if nothing else.

So, yes a clan kind of would be an extended family usually, but I thiiink even in historical terms, the like retainers or generational servants would be considered as “belonging to” the Clan, since a Clan is also kind of a political organization as well socially speaking, especially if we’re talking about nobility or landed gentry, but not literally part of the family tree - main or otherwise.

Add to that, that in MDZS, MXTX plays around with clan & the idea of a cultivation collective/organization, so a clan functions both as a clan (family), clan (political), and clan (cultivation organization organized around the schools of cultivation established the founding families).

Maybe a good example? Think of Gusu Lan. They make very clear the distinction of “inner disciple” and “outer disciple.” They all belong to Gusu Lan, but “inner disciples” - i.e. members of the family tree who can trace their ancestry to Lan An, are differentiated from outer disciples, who are part of the clan, but that doesn’t make them adopted into the family tree. Lan Sizhui, who IS adopted into the family line/tree/lineage, has both the Lan name and the cloud-scroll forehead ribbon.

Wei Wuxian being adopted actually would have made things even more complicated for YMJ imo lmao, and I think YMJ/JC would have had to do more extreme stuff to buy back into being deemed “proper” or pious by society or by like, Confucian(?) standards after WWX went rogue, and also he’d have more social obligation to eradicate WWX and his work in order to like regain honor for the family & sect. If he’d been adopted, then YMJ would have been much more closely tied to WWX, and like WWX “defecting” already is still seen as partly YMJ’s responsibility/fault, either for like... idk not bringing him up right, or for cultivating a snake in their midst, and so it’d be their responsibility to “clean up their mess” so to speak. If WWX had been adopted, he might well have carried YMJ down with him too when he chose to defect, much like how the main branch of Qishan Wen carried the whole extended clan down with them. 

[daggerzine]

R.E. Seraphin molds tiny shapes into big songs.

Though he’s been on the scene for a while now (with different bands) I hadn’t heard the music of Bay Area musician R.E. “Ray” Seraphin until this year via a cassette called Tiny Shapes via Paisley Shirt Records (more on the label below). His first real band was Talkies, which he discusses below (and I have enjoyed), but he seems to have really come into his own this year with that cassette and a new EP, A Room Forever, which came out just a month or so ago. In his music you’ll hear influences of 80’s jangle pop as well as some deeper post-punk stuff (and for more current stuff I hear whispers of Dean Wareham and his bands and Wild Nothing). Reading below he seems very well grounded and seems to have a great attitude about everything (even not being able to play shows during a pandemic or being in a writing slump). I think once this is all over this guy will go on 5-year tour and gain lots and lots of new fans. In the meantime do check out his stuff, you won’t be disappointed.

   Where did you grow up?

Berkeley, CA. The area I grew up in was filled with Victorian homes and dilapidated industrial warehouses. My family home was walking distance from a lagoon and an old, rusty set of train tracks. I felt I lived in an unremarkable college town. There wasn't much activity outside of the school. I discovered Berkeley’s storied political and musical history much later in life. Now, of course, there are many books written about Berkeley, but I thought it was a kinda nondescript city as a kid.

 Do you remember what band made you fall in love with music?

Dating myself hard here, but I remember being floored by The White Stripes’ “Fell in Love With a Girl” video when I was 11. The Top 40 music making the rounds on VH1 and MTV at the time was beyond dreck — a lot of Train, Staind, Matchbox 20. The White Stripes were the first band I was exposed to that made succinct, catchy, no-frills music. I was genuinely enthralled. Plus, the Lego animation in that video still holds up.

 Was guitar your first instrument?

I started on bass. My first instrument was an extremely cheap, pointy BC Rich knockoff monstrosity. I believe I was 13. I had no idea how to play and little interest in learning. For the first year, I putzed around with a Pro Co RAT, a wah pedal, and a tinny-sounding Crate practice amp. I just tried (and succeeded in) being as obnoxious as possible. When I started writing songs, I eventually graduated from playing bass poorly to playing guitar poorly.

 Tell us about your first band.

My first band that played shows was called The Phil Spector Shotgun Experience. That was primarily a cover band I put together with my high school buddies and my mom. We covered Radio Birdman, the Pink Fairies, and the MC5; we also had an unwittingly hilarious original called “Nitroglycerin Man” — the first song I ever wrote (maybe I was subconsciously inspired by Wages of Fear). At some point, we kicked my mom out of the band and started playing as the Impediments. That band kicked ass — we made pridefully dumb American punk music. That was also my only band to sign a record contract, so it’s quite possibly been downhill from there!

 Tell us about The Talkies (unless that was your first band mentioned above).

Talkies (no article!) was a group I started in 2014 as a vehicle for my songs. My previous bands had been more of a shared vision, so Talkies was my first foray into being the lone genius of a group. The sound was mostly drawn from what is disparagingly known as power pop. Basically, I was heavily into the band Shoes for a few years.

We released a few albums and EPs. Did a couple short tours. During that time, the project was dragged from the Bay Area to Austin and back before I finally, mercifully pulled the plug last year. It was time.

 When did you transition from Talkies to the solo stuff you’re doing now? Did it feel comfortable?

Talkies had run its course, but I had a smattering of songs leftover from that project that I wanted to record. Around that time, I learned my good friend Jasper Leach (Burner Herzog) was getting ready to skip town. I had always wanted to work with him and, seizing my final opportunity to do so, we banged out my début, Tiny Shapes, last summer. The whole experience was fairly serendipitous. The stars aligned for that one.

I wouldn't say the process was comfortable. Recording the album felt necessary, urgent — almost compulsory at times. My heart was ready for a new project and I truly wanted to center myself for the first time. I’m glad I did. This is the happiest I’ve been musically in some time.

 “I think therefore I am”

I love the songs on A Room Forever. How did they come together?

So glad to hear that! I got asked to contribute to a compilation back in April. With the deadline approaching and inspiration still eluding me, I took a glance at my bookshelf, noticed a particular Carson McCullers title, and whipped up “Clock Without Hands.” After my trusty collaborator Owen Adair Kelley added his parts, I felt we had stumbled upon a great sound. I tried to harness the creative spirit and pushed myself to finish a few ideas buried deep in the recesses of my Voice Memo app. I got friends Matt Bullimore (The Mantles) and Yea-Ming Chen (Yea-Ming & The Rumors) involved, and that was that. No great origin story — just pure American ingenuity and elbow grease.

 Tell us about Paisley Shirt Records. Who runs it and how did you hook up with them?

Paisley Shirt Records is simply the man, the myth, the legend — Kevin Linn. He is a San Francisco-based musician and artist who records as Sad-Eyed Beatniks.

I met him when I was looking for someone to release my album, Tiny Shapes. He had just put out a tape by Hits — a great local band featuring some friends of mine — and I felt a kinship with his roster. So, I reached out to him. Foolishly, he agreed to put out my album and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Solid dude. High marks.

 Have you done any solo tours? If so where and how did they go?

Ha! No. I had only notched two shows as R.E. Seraphin before the pandemic hit. Likely not doing anything beyond the odd live-stream show for a while. That said, if any tastemaking European touring agencies are reading this — give me a ring!

The latest EP

 What are your top 10 desert island discs?

Ah, jeez. This question. I’ll just say these are 10 (plus one) that I come back to quite often. In no order:

 Marquee Moon by Television

The Everly Brothers’ Best

Forever Changes by Love

Let it Be by The Replacements

Third/Sister Lovers by Big Star

The First Songs by Laura Nyro

16 Lovers Lane by The Go-Betweens

In a Silent Way by Miles Davis

A Different Kind of Tension by Buzzcocks

Something Else by The Kinks

Old No. 1 by Guy Clark

 What are a few Bay Area bands that we should know about.

This is a golden-era for weirdo pop music in the Bay. To name just a few: Galore, Cindy, The Umbrellas, Tony Jay, Flowertown, Healing Potpourri, Latitude, Cocktails, The Reds, Pinks, & Purples, Yea-Ming & The Rumors, Anna Hillburg, the 1981, Toner, Frank Ene, Neutrals, Owen Adair Kelley, April Magazine, Telephone Numbers, Hits, Sad-Eyed Beatniks. Essentially every act associated with Paisley Shirt Records and/or Mt.St.Mtn. My bias is strong.

 Do you feel that the pandemic has helped your songwriting or hindered it (if either)?

A li’l column A, a li’l column B. I’m a natural procrastinator, so I’ve definitely savored the lack of band practice and shows (things that often necessitate new material). That said, I doubt I would have finished A Room Forever had I not been quarantined at home. Without having many obligations and without being able to leave my house, music definitely became my raison d’être for the first time as an adult. I was fortunate to not be deemed an “essential” worker and to be able to focus energy on my passion momentarily. Silver lining.

 What’s next ? A new record by the end of the year possibly?

Hopefully continuing to promote my music and play shows on the ol’ webiverse. A Room Forever will be receiving a small vinyl and tape pressing at the end of September via Mt.St.Mtn. and Paisley Shirt Records. So, looking forward to that.

I was creatively tapped for a few months after A Room Forever. While a new album is possible, it’s not probable. I am plugging away at a few tunes, but I tend to conceptualize albums as a thematic whole and not as a collection of songs. Haven't stumbled onto my next Big Idea yet. Don't count me out, though. I could see myself dashing off a covers album for sure.

 What is one song you wish you’d written?

Too many to name! I’ll reframe that question to mean a great song I could see myself capable of writing in an alternate time, place, or dimension. Maybe one of Peter Holsapple’s songs from The dB’s — “Black & White” or “Neverland.” Also: anything by Wreckless Eric or Martin Newell.

 Final thoughts? Closing comments?

Just finished reading an interview with the great James Purdy, and thought this quote summed up iur current political climate well:

“You go out into the world and no one knows you, you can be ruled because you’re programmed. Everything is stamped, put on the shelf, described, thrown out into the garbage. It’s a political process, and behind that an economic process. But to be nothing, that is the worst of all possible things.”

   www.reseraphin.com

www.paisleyshirtrecords.bandcamp.com

[operawindow9-blog]

Interviews: Montreal's Lost Love stay positive on 'Good Luck Rassco'

It's been a few years between records for you guys. Comfortable Scars was recorded in early 2016, and you're back now with your new record Good Luck Rassco, what was your experience in the studio like this time out?

Guilhem: Way more fun. Comfortable Scars had the same sound from the first to the last song, and we recorded it on the weekends. With Good Luck Rassco, we worked differently. We tried to get different sounds on different songs. We didn’t want to just sound “punk/rock.” Also, we spent a whole week in the studio to record GLR. It was definitely a blast. Props to Hugo Mudie, Adrian Popovic, and Alex Ortiz for being a cool crew to work with.

Olivier: And even though the studio, Mountain City Recording, was in Montreal, it would have taken us over an hour each morning to get to it, and another hour after to go back to our respective apartments, so we rented an Airbnb near it. That way, we spent the day recording in the studio, and then we would go back to our Airbnb to spend the evening together watching shitty movies on Netflix. It kinda felt like we were on tour.

Vinny: It was really cool! Cannolis, Makers Mark, Palm Bay and I got to hang out with my boys for a week… what else can I ask for?

Lost Love has captured a certain joyous, upbeat levity in your sound that feels rare these days. We're living in such a fucked up world, what keeps you in that headspace? Are there songs that you look at and say "this doesn't fit" or "it's too dark" for Lost Love.

Vinny: To be honest Guilhem writes most of our stuff, so he's probably the best one to answer that question. But if you ask me, I remember when we were in the process of writing Comfortable scars we came up with a song that was named "Forever Jaded." That song's purpose was to criticize people with tendencies to be hateful and pessimistic. Even though it never saw the light of the day, I feel that moment has been important. As individuals, we understood that being kind and optimistic ourselves was the best way to impact others. I'm not sure that answered the question, but this is surely a great piece of band history.

Guilhem: Actually, the first songs we wrote and recorded when we started the band were darker. With a name like “Lost Love,” it’s clear we were not in a nice place when we started this project. After playing a lot of shows with those darker songs, I figured it’d be better to sing about positive things. Like burritos and sandwiches.

Olivier: And bees! Also, when you take a look at our song titles, I think it’s obvious that we have a good sense of humour even if the world is kinda fucked right now. Like Guilhem said, we’re all trying to stay positive and to have a good time.

Guilhem you released a solo acoustic record back in May under your own name. Is there a different mindset you had to undertake when writing for that project versus the band?

Guilhem: Not really. Most of those songs could’ve been Lost Love’s songs, but they ended up being on that solo record because I needed one for when I’m playing solo shows, which happens more and more often. But I have tons of new songs written at the moment, and I’m starting to feel like some of them are definitely more Lost Love songs than solo songs.

I'm always struck by how deep Montreal's independent music scene runs. Countless cool bands are playing locally that never get mentioned, even in English Canada, let alone down in the States. Which bands from the Montreal scene should people check out today?

Guilhem: Bucky Harris, Barrasso, Ariane Zita. They all released an EP or an album this year. Check it out.

Olivier: Mundy’s Bay, Solids, Mudie, Noé Talbot, Brutal Chérie, Oktoplut, and a lot more!

[Both Barrasso and Brutal Chérie will be joining Lost Love on the Black Forest stage at Beau's Oktoberfest - ed]

So Good Luck Rassco was released in Europe on the French label Guerilla Asso, and there's quite a bit of footage online of you guys performing in Paris. What's your relationship with the European market? Are there inroads to the European punk scene that Quebecois bands can make based on language?

Vinny: To make a long story short, bands from France have been touring Quebec massively since Guerilla Poubelle stepped foot on the continent back in 2005. So it's been a little over a decade that we've been building that relationship. Does speaking French help? Yes.

Olivier: Ça aide beaucoup en effet!

Guilhem: We’ve always been told that Europe is a paradise for underground touring bands. We first went there in 2016, and now we just came back from our 3rd tour over there (and I did 2 solo tours as well). I think they have a totally different culture on how to book a show, host a band, attend a show, etc. People are more respectful, even to smaller bands. It feels like they care. Also, I feel like wherever we go (outside of Quebec) we get that “exotic” factor from being French Canadians. I think that we play around with that factor a lot and we’re pretty good at making fun of ourselves and not taking ourselves seriously.

Lost Love, of course, has a close association with Pouzza Fest, and you've been announced as one of the Canadian performers playing Fest this year (and we're of course in the leadup to Oktoberfest later this month). Do you approach these big festival shows differently from club gigs? Are there songs that work better in one environment or the other?

Guilhem: Nah. We’re the same band whether we play in front of 5 people in Ottawa or 100 people in Munich. We’re about to play a show in Quebec City on a line-up with a lot of skate-punk bands, and we thought about changing our setlist to fit the mould. But we won’t, because it’s going to be way funnier to see how a skate-punk crowd reacts to our poppy/Weezerish songs than to try to fit their taste.

Olivier: I totally agree. If we play songs that we love and it looks like we’re having fun on stage, I feel that the people watching us will be more inclined to have a good time and appreciate our music, whether they’re into metal, punk, rap, indie rock, pop or whatever. If they like us, that’s cool. If they hate us, that’s cool too.

Vinny: Y’a rien de mieux que s’en calicer ! Which translates to: the best approach is to not give a fuck. Our preparations are no different, but the stress level definitely is!

Good Luck Rassco is now available from Stomp Records in North America, and Guerilla Asso in Europe.

This story is part of a reporting partnership between Punknews.org and Some Party, a weekly newsletter covering independent Canadian rock music. Subscribe at someparty.ca.

Source: https://www.punknews.org/article/67942/interviews-montreals-lost-love-stay-positive-on-good-luck-rassco

[footballghana]

I want to do things my way - Nigeria forward Victor Osimhen

Following his reported African record transfer deal from OSC Lille to SC Napoli, Nigeria forward Victor Osimhen would be one of the stars to watch as the 2020/21 Serie A kicks off this weekend in Italy.

In July, the 21-year-old and 2015 CAF Youth Player of the Year, made the headlines far and near when The Partenopei (as Napoli are nicknamed in Italy) announced his arrival from the French Ligue 1 side in a mega move; the biggest involving an African footballer.

Incidentally, Osimhen made his international breakthrough in 2015 at the U-17 African Cup of Nations (AFCON) held in Niger, where he emerged as top scorer with four goals en route to the FIFA U-17 World Cup, Chile 2015.

In Chile, Osimhen set a new scoring record at the global cadet championship, as his 10 goals in seven matches broke the long-standing record of nine goals in a single tournament previously held jointly by Frenchman Florent Sinama Pongolle and Ivorian Souleymane Coulibaly.

In addition to guiding Nigeria to the title, he was deservedly rewarded with the Golden Boot and the Silver Ball as the second-Best Player of the tournament behind compatriot Kelechi Nwakali. He was later in the same year crowned as CAF Youth Player of the Year 2015.

The youngster from Lagos-based Ultimate Strikers Academy was immediately snapped up by German Bundesliga side Wolfsburg, where he had difficult start of his European career before being sent on loan in 2018 to Charleroi in the Belgian Jupiler Pro League.

Osimhen blossomed in Belgium, scoring a remarkable 20 goals in all competitions, including the record-breaking quickest goal in the history of the Belgian First Division A with an 8.15second opening goal against Antwerp on 26 May 2019. He was also declared the club’s player of the season.

Osimhen who earned his first international cap on 1st June 2017 in Nigeria’s friendly 3-0 win over Togo in Paris, was on Nigeria’s 23-man list to the 2019 Total AFCON in Egypt, where he featured only in the Bronze medal winning match against Tunisia.

With the 2019/2020 French Ligue 1 season being called off due to COVID-19 pandemic, Osimhen had scored an impressive 18 goals in 38 matches, and was picked as the winner of the Marc Vivien Foe award presented by Radio France International (RFI) for Africa’s Best Player in the French football championship for the 2019 /2020 season.

As he begins a new phase of his career with Napoli, Osimhen explained his expectations in an interview with CAFOnline.com,

CAFOnline.com: There were so many speculations about offers from clubs in the English Premier League (EPL). Why did you eventually sign for Napoli?

Osimhen: Many predicted I will move to the EPL, and I had a lot of interesting offers from some clubs. But Napoli was the best choice for me. It was so because of the kind of player I want to be in the future, and the kind of great career I want to have. I have no doubt that Napoli is the club I need to achieve that greater height. The relationship between me and Coach (Gennaro Gattuso) and President (Aurelio De Laurentiis) is a very interesting one, because even before I came to Napoli, I spoke with both. They convinced me even more to sign for Napoli. The relationship is going very well, and I just want to repay them on the pitch for the trust they have in me.

How ready are for the challenges of playing against the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo in Serie A?

I’m really looking forward to a new career here in Serie A. Playing against the likes of Christian Ronaldo is something one can eagerly wait. While at Lille, I had the opportunity of playing against some of the best players in the world like Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and it would definitely be a whole great experience to play against Ronaldo, who is one of the greatest players on earth. So, I’m looking forward to facing him soon.

Are you under pressure to perform at Napoli being the Africa’s record signing?

There is no pressure on me since I came here rather, I just need to work and do what I loved doing. I just need to do my work on the pitch and give my all like I have always been doing and getting the goals for both my club and country. This is the most important thing for me and there is no pressure at all. I just want to do my thing in my own way.

You had an excellent pre-season scoring form. What is your goals’ target in your first Serie A season with Napoli?

I am happy for the goals I scored pre-season. I’m not the kind of players that set a number of goals I’m going to score for my team because I’m a team player; I don’t set personal target before that of the team. I just want to score as much as I can for my team, help them doing well and winning trophies. So, there is no personal targets for me; I just want to do well and get the goals for my team.

You have always said that former African Footballer of the Year Didier Drogba is your idol. How do you feel playing for a club where Argentine legend Diego Maradona is usually the reference point?

Drogba would forever be my idol and I’m so grateful to him. Choosing him as a role model has really been helpful since my growing up years. I have not met him yet and I’m really looking forward to seeing him and getting one of his signed jerseys; that would really be a dream come true for me.

Now, playing in a club that used to have Diego Maradona, who is undoubtedly one of the greatest players ever, is inspiring. Maradona is an idol here in Napoli and I have seen his pictures everywhere. He is truly the best. To be here and to play on the same pitch of Maradona is another dream came true.

How are you adjusting to the new lifestyle as well as communicating with other players in the team?

When I moved to Wolfsburg, I had to learn the German language. Since then, dealing with language stuff has been easier, either when I moved to Belgium, France or now Italy. Of course, I’m going to get an Italian language teacher soon.

Napoli is a great team with many international players like Kalidou Koulibaly, Dries Mertens and some other players who speak English. The coach (Gattuso) also speaks English which makes it easier for me. But learning Italian will be very important and I’m really looking forward to it.

Source: cafonline.com

source: https://footballghana.com/

[rollinbrigittenv8]

Proposing Solutions to Overtourism in Popular Destinations: A Skift Framework

A cruise ship in Venice. Cities across Europe are struggling to cope with increased tourism. bass_nroll / Flickr

Skift Take: As destinations scramble to reduce the impact of tourism on their citizens, foundational work must still be done to create a repeatable framework and process for preventing overtourism.

— Andrew Sheivachman

The world is in an unprecedented period of tourism growth, and not everyone is happy about it. Arrivals by international tourists have nearly doubled since 2000, with 674 million crossing borders for leisure back then and 1.2 billion doing the same in 2016.

As the travel industry has ramped up its operations around the world, destinations have not been well-equipped to deal with the economic, social, and cultural ramifications. Cities have often made economic growth spurred by traveler spending a priority at the expense of quality of life for locals.

Europe has been perhaps hardest hit by the stress of increased travel and tourism. Barcelona, Venice, and Reykjavik are just some of the cities that have recently been transformed by visitors.

For the last few months, news reports have reflected the truth about the global travel industry: Not enough has been done to limit the negative impact of tourism as it has reached record levels in destinations around the world. Anti-traveler sentiment is seemingly on the rise.

“I would consider [these cities] to be canaries in the coal mine,” said Megan Epler Wood, director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The folks that have been protesting are from highly visited destinations and they don’t feel their lives should be interrupted by tourism.”

She continued: “They’re in a position of making a statement… something I’ve been discouraged about is the idea that people who are protesting are making a mistake. It’s important they make a statement because we need to hear from them and come to a new level of understanding of what this means. We need to very seriously find what their concerns are and figure out how to plan with those destinations and think about acting proactively.”

Why have some destinations thrown up their hands in helplessness in dealing with the deluge of tourists? And what have other destinations done to successfully limit the effects of increased visitation?

Skift has identified five solutions to overtourism, drawing from what destinations have done successfully to limit the influx of tourists, and we spoke to global tourism experts about their perspectives. We also looked at the ways in which travel companies themselves have been complicit and what more they can do to grow global tourism in a more sustainable way. We don’t argue that these are one-size-fits-all solutions for every trampled-upon destination, but they may serve as a solid foundation for beginning to tackle the problem.

Furthermore, we look to the future for ways in which the travel industry, in conjunction with local stakeholders, can better measure and limit the adverse effects of tourism.

If the travel industry can help connect the world and build bridges between cultures, why has it struggled to find a sustainable path forward?

1. Limiting Transportation Options

Travel has become more affordable over the last decade, particularly in Europe and developing economies in Asia with the rise of the middle class. Low-cost carriers have proliferated, while megaships from cruise giants have extended their reach around the world.

Various indicators show that more flights are taking place across Europe than ever before, particularly during the busy summer vacation season.

“[Increased travel has] been controversial in a way that is directly due to the fact that businesses arrive in a city and disrupt normal life and commercial activity,” said Tom Jenkins, CEO of the European Tour Operators Association. “In fact, cities are designed for tourism to disrupt normal activity, because tourists are not normal by definition in how they behave. They’re always disruptive and it’s always been controversial. Even if your city becomes rejuvenated, when you get foreigners arriving somewhere exerting financial influence over supply, you get a phobia.”

Why have some cities with pervasive tourism, like Paris, not had the same recent backlash as Barcelona or Berlin?

Jenkins notes that backlash against tourism is a consistent theme throughout European history; people said the same thing about the advent of railways and steamships warping the character of their cities that they do today about cruises and cheap flights.

Let’s take a look at Barcelona’s struggles with increased visitation in recent years. Data from IATA, MedCruise, and Visit Barcelona expose the massive influx of visitors to the city.

The increase in cruisers is particularly striking. Since Barcelona really hit the world stage thanks to the 1992 Summer Olympics, its cruise traffic has gone from about 100,000 cruisers in port to about 2.7 million in 2016. In the greater Mediterranean, the average number of passengers per call has increased from 848 in 2000 to 2,038 in 2016.

Top European Cruise Ports (in passengers) 2000 Passengers 2016 Passengers 1 Cyprus Ports .08 million Barcelona 2.7 million 2 Balearic Islands 0.6 million Civitavecchia 2.3 million 3 Barcelona 0.6 million Balearic Islands 2 million 4 Piraeus 0.5 million Venice 1.6 million 5 Istanbul 0.4 million Marseille 1.6 million 6 Genoa 0.4 million Naples 1.3 million 7 Naples 0.4 million Piraeus 1.1 million 8 Civitavecchia 0.4 million Genoa 1 million 9 Venice 0.33 million Savona 0.9 million 10 French Riviera 0.3 million Tenerife Ports 0.9 million Source: MedCruise

The impact of low-cost carriers, along with the relative strength of the euro in recent years, has also played an important role. While there has been a major focus on the influx of U.S. and Chinese tourists to Europe, evidence suggests that the most frequent visitors are actually from European countries. Indeed, according to surveys from Visit Barcelona, European tourists comprise around two-thirds of those visiting the city.

It follows that if cities and tourism boards would work to make it more difficult to access their destinations, by limiting cruise ship tenders or the access of low-cost carriers to airport terminals, that fewer visitors would be able to come.

There’s also a bit of a contradiction here: Often residents of areas that have been built up and developed by tourism blame the travel industry, and not their politicians and city planners, for the changes.

Boorish tourists become a target for protests and outcries, instead of the local and regional forces that have more or less enabled their ability to visit a destination en masse.

“The moment you start meddling with things, you affect the economic pattern of the town, and all kinds of problems arise,” said Jenkins. “There is a quite startling depiction of giant cruise ships in Venice, but someone gave permission for that at some point. Someone is taking their money. Someone with power and discretion said, ‘You come and park here.’ Similarly in Amsterdam, the inhabitants are very resentful, but the visitors didn’t organize their red light district and permit cannabis shops to open. The residents did. It’s just bonkers and it’s a planning problem, not a tourism problem. It has a planning solution.”

Amsterdam has recently restricted new tourist shops in its city center, a solid first step. The city is still struggling to cope with the effect of rampant homesharing.

Urban dwellers across Europe have announced their anti-tourism sentiment in various ways. Stakeholders should be looking forward and planning to craft a more equitable environment for both tourists and locals, even if it means reducing tourism and those who have built successful businesses serving them.

An easy way to do that — well, nothing seems especially easy when it comes to this issue — is to simply make it harder to visit instead of creating restrictions when travelers are already in destination.

2. Make It More Expensive

Travel has become more of a commodity purchase for consumers than an occasional luxury in recent years, spurred by low-cost carriers and affordable homesharing services.

“[Managing tourism] is a good thing to be talking about because our industry is good at selling the virtues of tourism, but we’re not very good at being honest with ourselves about what we do well and what we don’t,” said Darrell Wade, co-founder of Australia-based Intrepid Travel. “In some ways, the industry hasn’t progressed at all. There are nice towns [all over the world to visit], and you look at places like Croatia where there are several hundred islands, towns, and villages. There’s lots of great stuff to do, so let’s get out of the tourist area in Dubrovnik.”

Countries that suffer currency devaluation are also extremely susceptible to a tourism rush, as in the case of Iceland. We’re seeing this now in London following the Brexit vote, as well.

In recent years, Iceland has moved to offer more luxury accommodations and experiences in a bid to attract higher-yielding travelers as the country’s currency has rebounded from a crash in 2008.

Even if mass market tourism slows down due to increased costs, dropping Iceland’s annual tourism growth rate from around 30 percent to 10 percent, the cool-down would be beneficial for locals struggling to deal with rising cost of goods and a hot property market in Reykjavik.

When Skift went to Iceland last year, the country’s top travel and tourism executives told us the most attractive way to slow down growth is to create more luxury offerings for higher-spending travelers. As gentrification hits major cities worldwide, this can sometimes happen as a result of investment and real estate speculation.

Adventure and luxury tour operators and cruise lines are better positioned to provide experiences outside of the traditional tourist areas in a destination.

“Most of our departures are to the remote destinations, but we have quite a bit of presence in some of that heavily trafficked area [in Europe],” said Trey Byus, chief expedition officer at Lindblad Expeditions. “We take a different approach to that. The east end of the Greek islands is one of the most overrun places in terms of tourism, so we don’t go there during the busiest of seasons, we’ll go on the shoulder seasons. You take a look at the islands and there’s the obvious places where the mass tourists go where we avoid, places where the Greeks would go to holiday….We’ve been in the Adriatic for many years and at one point many years ago we considered a turnaround in Venice, but even then we said we’re not going to go there. That’s going to provide an awful first and last experience for us, so we took that off the map.”

There’s also the question of demand management, which few destinations have embraced in a significant way. Similar to the way attractions like Walt Disney World charge more for tickets during peak periods, destinations can increase the ticket price to access areas when demand is the highest.

Barcelona is considering a tax on tour operators to make it more expensive for tourists to visit, for instance, and the city already taxes hotels, apartment shares, and cruise ships. Perhaps a more concerted legislative effort to make visiting more expensive can replace mass tourism with higher-spending and more respectful visitation.

This would, in theory, at least, not only generate more revenue for cities to deal with the myriad complications of overtourism, but condition tourists to visit during periods of decreased demand when their impact on locals would be more limited. Over time, perhaps, tourists can be trained to be more thoughtful about their travel decisions. At the very least, life for locals would improve.

“What you see looking forward is obviously demand seems to be growing exponentially and you see more and more pressure,” said Jenkins. “Can they tweak capacity in a way that things can be spread out, and that the demand can be managed and controlled through price? I’m absolutely convinced. We’re seeing a huge increase in capacity in some places, can they carry on doing so? They probably can, given there is demand for them and money to facilitate that demand.

“There’s also the scope for demand management. People think if the price goes through the roof, they won’t have to manage the attraction. People will have to get used to paying more to visit peak attractions at peak times. The way we price things [in the travel industry], there’s no incentive to alter your arrival at all. It’s all the same price.”

Many remote destinations do a form of this with permits, only allowing groups of visitors in a few times a day. The Galapagos Islands, Machu Picchu, and others have embraced this form of demand management for decades. Urban destinations could take a page out of their playbooks by limiting access to high-demand areas and increasing the price of access at the same time.

3. Better Marketing and Education

There seems to be one issue that few destinations have figured out: How do you keep tourists from wrecking the environment or crowding cities?

Better education, and more realistic marketing, can help. Gone are the days where famous historic monuments like the Spanish Steps or Kensington Gardens will be accessible without a horde of tourists, and travel companies selling affordable tours need to do a better job of letting tourists know what they’re really buying.

London, for instance, has laid out a plan into the next decade to manage tourism growth, and it includes marketing its outer areas to tourists instead of downtown or Westminster. New York City unveiled a similar plan last year, looking to capitalize on increased tourist interest in Brooklyn.

If tourism companies sell travelers vacations based on certain promises, like deserted beaches and town squares, it can be a problem if their experiences don’t match expectations.

“I see it as everyone’s problem; some organizations are the source, like national tourist authorities, airlines, and cruise lines,” said Intrepid Travel’s Wade. “Part two is the traveler, because they’re a little on the lazy side and they don’t realize the image they saw online of a destination has 100,000 people in it in real life. This isn’t great for our industry either, because it’s a terrible product. I walked around Dubrovnik [recently], and I’m not enjoying it. We want to empower people and change how they think about the world. We don’t want to be sending them to hellholes, it’s not in our long-term interest.”

From an education standpoint, travel stakeholders have to present their products more realistically. They also have to educate their customers on what they’re really getting into on a trip, and the acceptable ways to behave while in-destination.

If travel is really about experiencing a distinct culture, then travelers should be prepared to respect localities and traditions; travel can’t just be a commodity. Some travelers, though, just want to relax on a beach somewhere with a beer in hand for a few days, without having to deal with the complexity of another culture.

“One thing tour operators can do to help destinations is to help educate them about planning or being prepared and thinking through how they’re promoting themselves and who they’re promoting themselves to,” said Yves Marceau, vice president of buying and contracting for tour operator G Adventures. “It used to take years for a destination to become super popular. Now, with China on the move and with social media, a destination can go from unknown to top 10 list within two years. The reality is if the destination has limited capacity, it can be overrun very quickly. You look at place like Iceland and there’s more tourists than Icelanders. That happened very fast, and you see places where it is happening even faster.”

By limiting the numbers of licenses available to tour operators, or the the time of day they can operate in the most popular areas, destinations can limit the impact of overcrowding while providing a suitable experience for visitors. While tour operators often decide to stagger tour timings, regulations can help bring along those that don’t.

Expectations for access can also be set for tourists before they arrive, so they aren’t disappointed or disruptive upon arriving. Exclusivity, as we’ve seen time and again, is actually a major selling point for consumers.

Fueled by compelling global marketing campaigns and the frantic pace of social media, travelers now expect to tick a certain set of boxes while traveling. Destinations need to be aware that the image they present to travelers, and the demand created for access to certain experiences, simply can’t be provided sustainably.

4. Better Collaboration AMONG stakeholders

A rarely discussed problem is that local, state, and national tourism boards are generally tasked with promoting tourism and business travel instead of planning and managing it.

“The large majority of funds that go to any discussion of how to manage tourism go to marketing tourism,” said Wood. “The rough estimate is maybe 80 percent of tax money that goes towards tourism in a destination generally goes to tourism marketing organizations, but they’re not management organizations, they’re marketing organizations. These people are starting to realize they could have a new role for what they do. What if you gave 80 percent of all the money to manage the destination? This was never a problem because we had a big globe and not many people traveling.”

Many destination marketing organizations have begun to reconsider how they can best serve the interests of locals instead of promoting rampant visitation growth. Executives on stage at the Skift Global Forum this year weighed in on their newfound approach to the problem, and this represents a good first step towards some sort of transition.

There is a deeper problem affecting destinations worldwide: There is no codified way to conclusively measure and quantify the impact that tourism has. While not impossible, it could be more fruitful for destinations to develop and test methods for solving overtourism by collaborating and trying to agree on a framework for finding solutions.

Several groups are working on this now, including Wood’s colleagues, but cities and travel companies need to come to the table as well. In the long term, it’s not enough for destinations to just manage demand; they need to measure and manipulate the specific effects of overcrowding.

“We need to come to an understanding of how to measure those impacts and it’s not as simple as demand [alone]… people are trying to speak too generally about the problems and there’s a tendency to vilify certain parts of the industry,” said Wood. “What I don’t think we can do is stop them from doing what they do. We need to do a good job measuring [the effects of tourism]. It’s well-known tourists want to go to specific places at certain times, so we have to think of other ways of managing their use [of destinations].”

Part of the problem, it seems, is having concrete details on where travelers go and how they affect the environment they are in, whether urban or remote. An international group of academics and tourism experts are working on a solution to this involving standardized monitoring methods in multiple cities worldwide.

Some places, like the Australian state of Tasmania, have experimented with offering travelers free smartphones that track their movements to provide more visibility to industry stakeholders on traveler behavior.

The more data and information cities have about the phenomenon and resulting disruption of overtourism, the better equipped they would be to act to prevent it by coming up with solutions based on evidence instead of conjecture or blacklash.

5. Protect Overcrowded Areas

It’s clear destinations haven’t done enough to prevent excessive..

[touristguidebuzz]

5 Overtourism Solutions for Popular Destinations

A cruise ship in Venice. Cities across Europe are struggling to cope with increased tourism. bass_nroll / Flickr

Skift Take: As destinations scramble to reduce the impact of tourism on their citizens, foundational work must still be done to create a repeatable framework and process for preventing overtourism.

— Andrew Sheivachman

The world is in an unprecedented period of tourism growth, and not everyone is happy about it. Arrivals by international tourists have nearly doubled since 2000, with 674 million crossing borders for leisure back then and 1.2 billion doing the same in 2016.

As the travel industry has ramped up its operations around the world, destinations have not been well-equipped to deal with the economic, social, and cultural ramifications. Cities have often made economic growth spurred by traveler spending a priority at the expense of quality of life for locals.

Europe has been perhaps hardest hit by the stress of increased travel and tourism. Barcelona, Venice, and Reykjavik are just some of the cities that have recently been transformed by visitors.

For the last few months, news reports have reflected the truth about the global travel industry: Not enough has been done to limit the negative impact of tourism as it has reached record levels in destinations around the world. Anti-traveler sentiment is seemingly on the rise.

“I would consider [these cities] to be canaries in the coal mine,” said Megan Epler Wood, director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The folks that have been protesting are from highly visited destinations and they don’t feel their lives should be interrupted by tourism.”

She continued: “They’re in a position of making a statement… something I’ve been discouraged about is the idea that people who are protesting are making a mistake. It’s important they make a statement because we need to hear from them and come to a new level of understanding of what this means. We need to very seriously find what their concerns are and figure out how to plan with those destinations and think about acting proactively.”

Why have some destinations thrown up their hands in helplessness in dealing with the deluge of tourists? And what have other destinations done to successfully limit the effects of increased visitation?

Skift has identified five solutions to overtourism, drawing from what destinations have done successfully to limit the influx of tourists, and we spoke to global tourism experts about their perspectives. We also looked at the ways in which travel companies themselves have been complicit and what more they can do to grow global tourism in a more sustainable way. We don’t argue that these are one-size-fits-all solutions for every trampled-upon destination, but they may serve as a solid foundation for beginning to tackle the problem.

Furthermore, we look to the future for ways in which the travel industry, in conjunction with local stakeholders, can better measure and limit the adverse effects of tourism.

If the travel industry can help connect the world and build bridges between cultures, why has it struggled to find a sustainable path forward?

1. Limiting Transportation Options

Travel has become more affordable over the last decade, particularly in Europe and developing economies in Asia with the rise of the middle class. Low-cost carriers have proliferated, while megaships from cruise giants have extended their reach around the world.

Various indicators show that more flights are taking place across Europe than ever before, particularly during the busy summer vacation season.

“[Increased travel has] been controversial in a way that is directly due to the fact that businesses arrive in a city and disrupt normal life and commercial activity,” said Tom Jenkins, CEO of the European Tour Operators Association. “In fact, cities are designed for tourism to disrupt normal activity, because tourists are not normal by definition in how they behave. They’re always disruptive and it’s always been controversial. Even if your city becomes rejuvenated, when you get foreigners arriving somewhere exerting financial influence over supply, you get a phobia.”

Why have some cities with pervasive tourism, like Paris, not had the same recent backlash as Barcelona or Berlin?

Jenkins notes that backlash against tourism is a consistent theme throughout European history; people said the same thing about the advent of railways and steamships warping the character of their cities that they do today about cruises and cheap flights.

Let’s take a look at Barcelona’s struggles with increased visitation in recent years. Data from IATA, MedCruise, and Visit Barcelona expose the massive influx of visitors to the city.

The increase in cruisers is particularly striking. Since Barcelona really hit the world stage thanks to the 1992 Summer Olympics, its cruise traffic has gone from about 100,000 cruisers in port to about 2.7 million in 2016. In the greater Mediterranean, the average number of passengers per call has increased from 848 in 2000 to 2,038 in 2016.

Top European Cruise Ports (in passengers) 2000 Passengers 2016 Passengers 1 Cyprus Ports .08 million Barcelona 2.7 million 2 Balearic Islands 0.6 million Civitavecchia 2.3 million 3 Barcelona 0.6 million Balearic Islands 2 million 4 Piraeus 0.5 million Venice 1.6 million 5 Istanbul 0.4 million Marseille 1.6 million 6 Genoa 0.4 million Naples 1.3 million 7 Naples 0.4 million Piraeus 1.1 million 8 Civitavecchia 0.4 million Genoa 1 million 9 Venice 0.33 million Savona 0.9 million 10 French Riviera 0.3 million Tenerife Ports 0.9 million Source: MedCruise

The impact of low-cost carriers, along with the relative strength of the euro in recent years, has also played an important role. While there has been a major focus on the influx of U.S. and Chinese tourists to Europe, evidence suggests that the most frequent visitors are actually from European countries. Indeed, according to surveys from Visit Barcelona, European tourists comprise around two-thirds of those visiting the city.

It follows that if cities and tourism boards would work to make it more difficult to access their destinations, by limiting cruise ship tenders or the access of low-cost carriers to airport terminals, that fewer visitors would be able to come.

There’s also a bit of a contradiction here: Often residents of areas that have been built up and developed by tourism blame the travel industry, and not their politicians and city planners, for the changes.

Boorish tourists become a target for protests and outcries, instead of the local and regional forces that have more or less enabled their ability to visit a destination en masse.

“The moment you start meddling with things, you affect the economic pattern of the town, and all kinds of problems arise,” said Jenkins. “There is a quite startling depiction of giant cruise ships in Venice, but someone gave permission for that at some point. Someone is taking their money. Someone with power and discretion said, ‘You come and park here.’ Similarly in Amsterdam, the inhabitants are very resentful, but the visitors didn’t organize their red light district and permit cannabis shops to open. The residents did. It’s just bonkers and it’s a planning problem, not a tourism problem. It has a planning solution.”

Amsterdam has recently restricted new tourist shops in its city center, a solid first step. The city is still struggling to cope with the effect of rampant homesharing.

Urban dwellers across Europe have announced their anti-tourism sentiment in various ways. Stakeholders should be looking forward and planning to craft a more equitable environment for both tourists and locals, even if it means reducing tourism and those who have built successful businesses serving them.

An easy way to do that — well, nothing seems especially easy when it comes to this issue — is to simply make it harder to visit instead of creating restrictions when travelers are already in destination.

2. Make It More Expensive

Travel has become more of a commodity purchase for consumers than an occasional luxury in recent years, spurred by low-cost carriers and affordable homesharing services.

“[Managing tourism] is a good thing to be talking about because our industry is good at selling the virtues of tourism, but we’re not very good at being honest with ourselves about what we do well and what we don’t,” said Darrell Wade, co-founder of Australia-based Intrepid Travel. “In some ways, the industry hasn’t progressed at all. There are nice towns [all over the world to visit], and you look at places like Croatia where there are several hundred islands, towns, and villages. There’s lots of great stuff to do, so let’s get out of the tourist area in Dubrovnik.”

Countries that suffer currency devaluation are also extremely susceptible to a tourism rush, as in the case of Iceland. We’re seeing this now in London following the Brexit vote, as well.

In recent years, Iceland has moved to offer more luxury accommodations and experiences in a bid to attract higher-yielding travelers as the country’s currency has rebounded from a crash in 2008.

Even if mass market tourism slows down due to increased costs, dropping Iceland’s annual tourism growth rate from around 30 percent to 10 percent, the cool-down would be beneficial for locals struggling to deal with rising cost of goods and a hot property market in Reykjavik.

When Skift went to Iceland last year, the country’s top travel and tourism executives told us the most attractive way to slow down growth is to create more luxury offerings for higher-spending travelers. As gentrification hits major cities worldwide, this can sometimes happen as a result of investment and real estate speculation.

Adventure and luxury tour operators and cruise lines are better positioned to provide experiences outside of the traditional tourist areas in a destination.

“Most of our departures are to the remote destinations, but we have quite a bit of presence in some of that heavily trafficked area [in Europe],” said Trey Byus, chief expedition officer at Lindblad Expeditions. “We take a different approach to that. The east end of the Greek islands is one of the most overrun places in terms of tourism, so we don’t go there during the busiest of seasons, we’ll go on the shoulder seasons. You take a look at the islands and there’s the obvious places where the mass tourists go where we avoid, places where the Greeks would go to holiday….We’ve been in the Adriatic for many years and at one point many years ago we considered a turnaround in Venice, but even then we said we’re not going to go there. That’s going to provide an awful first and last experience for us, so we took that off the map.”

There’s also the question of demand management, which few destinations have embraced in a significant way. Similar to the way attractions like Walt Disney World charge more for tickets during peak periods, destinations can increase the ticket price to access areas when demand is the highest.

Barcelona is considering a tax on tour operators to make it more expensive for tourists to visit, for instance, and the city already taxes hotels, apartment shares, and cruise ships. Perhaps a more concerted legislative effort to make visiting more expensive can replace mass tourism with higher-spending and more respectful visitation.

This would, in theory, at least, not only generate more revenue for cities to deal with the myriad complications of overtourism, but condition tourists to visit during periods of decreased demand when their impact on locals would be more limited. Over time, perhaps, tourists can be trained to be more thoughtful about their travel decisions. At the very least, life for locals would improve.

“What you see looking forward is obviously demand seems to be growing exponentially and you see more and more pressure,” said Jenkins. “Can they tweak capacity in a way that things can be spread out, and that the demand can be managed and controlled through price? I’m absolutely convinced. We’re seeing a huge increase in capacity in some places, can they carry on doing so? They probably can, given there is demand for them and money to facilitate that demand.

“There’s also the scope for demand management. People think if the price goes through the roof, they won’t have to manage the attraction. People will have to get used to paying more to visit peak attractions at peak times. The way we price things [in the travel industry], there’s no incentive to alter your arrival at all. It’s all the same price.”

Many remote destinations do a form of this with permits, only allowing groups of visitors in a few times a day. The Galapagos Islands, Machu Picchu, and others have embraced this form of demand management for decades. Urban destinations could take a page out of their playbooks by limiting access to high-demand areas and increasing the price of access at the same time.

3. Better Marketing and Education

There seems to be one issue that few destinations have figured out: How do you keep tourists from wrecking the environment or crowding cities?

Better education, and more realistic marketing, can help. Gone are the days where famous historic monuments like the Spanish Steps or Kensington Gardens will be accessible without a horde of tourists, and travel companies selling affordable tours need to do a better job of letting tourists know what they’re really buying.

London, for instance, has laid out a plan into the next decade to manage tourism growth, and it includes marketing its outer areas to tourists instead of downtown or Westminster. New York City unveiled a similar plan last year, looking to capitalize on increased tourist interest in Brooklyn.

If tourism companies sell travelers vacations based on certain promises, like deserted beaches and town squares, it can be a problem if their experiences don’t match expectations.

“I see it as everyone’s problem; some organizations are the source, like national tourist authorities, airlines, and cruise lines,” said Intrepid Travel’s Wade. “Part two is the traveler, because they’re a little on the lazy side and they don’t realize the image they saw online of a destination has 100,000 people in it in real life. This isn’t great for our industry either, because it’s a terrible product. I walked around Dubrovnik [recently], and I’m not enjoying it. We want to empower people and change how they think about the world. We don’t want to be sending them to hellholes, it’s not in our long-term interest.”

From an education standpoint, travel stakeholders have to present their products more realistically. They also have to educate their customers on what they’re really getting into on a trip, and the acceptable ways to behave while in-destination.

If travel is really about experiencing a distinct culture, then travelers should be prepared to respect localities and traditions; travel can’t just be a commodity. Some travelers, though, just want to relax on a beach somewhere with a beer in hand for a few days, without having to deal with the complexity of another culture.

“One thing tour operators can do to help destinations is to help educate them about planning or being prepared and thinking through how they’re promoting themselves and who they’re promoting themselves to,” said Yves Marceau, vice president of buying and contracting for tour operator G Adventures. “It used to take years for a destination to become super popular. Now, with China on the move and with social media, a destination can go from unknown to top 10 list within two years. The reality is if the destination has limited capacity, it can be overrun very quickly. You look at place like Iceland and there’s more tourists than Icelanders. That happened very fast, and you see places where it is happening even faster.”

By limiting the numbers of licenses available to tour operators, or the the time of day they can operate in the most popular areas, destinations can limit the impact of overcrowding while providing a suitable experience for visitors. While tour operators often decide to stagger tour timings, regulations can help bring along those that don’t.

Expectations for access can also be set for tourists before they arrive, so they aren’t disappointed or disruptive upon arriving. Exclusivity, as we’ve seen time and again, is actually a major selling point for consumers.

Fueled by compelling global marketing campaigns and the frantic pace of social media, travelers now expect to tick a certain set of boxes while traveling. Destinations need to be aware that the image they present to travelers, and the demand created for access to certain experiences, simply can’t be provided sustainably.

4. Better Collaboration AMONG stakeholders

A rarely discussed problem is that local, state, and national tourism boards are generally tasked with promoting tourism and business travel instead of planning and managing it.

“The large majority of funds that go to any discussion of how to manage tourism go to marketing tourism,” said Wood. “The rough estimate is maybe 80 percent of tax money that goes towards tourism in a destination generally goes to tourism marketing organizations, but they’re not management organizations, they’re marketing organizations. These people are starting to realize they could have a new role for what they do. What if you gave 80 percent of all the money to manage the destination? This was never a problem because we had a big globe and not many people traveling.”

Many destination marketing organizations have begun to reconsider how they can best serve the interests of locals instead of promoting rampant visitation growth. Executives on stage at the Skift Global Forum this year weighed in on their newfound approach to the problem, and this represents a good first step towards some sort of transition.

There is a deeper problem affecting destinations worldwide: There is no codified way to conclusively measure and quantify the impact that tourism has. While not impossible, it could be more fruitful for destinations to develop and test methods for solving overtourism by collaborating and trying to agree on a framework for finding solutions.

Several groups are working on this now, including Wood’s colleagues, but cities and travel companies need to come to the table as well. In the long term, it’s not enough for destinations to just manage demand; they need to measure and manipulate the specific effects of overcrowding.

“We need to come to an understanding of how to measure those impacts and it’s not as simple as demand [alone]… people are trying to speak too generally about the problems and there’s a tendency to vilify certain parts of the industry,” said Wood. “What I don’t think we can do is stop them from doing what they do. We need to do a good job measuring [the effects of tourism]. It’s well-known tourists want to go to specific places at certain times, so we have to think of other ways of managing their use [of destinations].”

Part of the problem, it seems, is having concrete details on where travelers go and how they affect the environment they are in, whether urban or remote. An international group of academics and tourism experts are working on a solution to this involving standardized monitoring methods in multiple cities worldwide.

Some places, like the Australian state of Tasmania, have experimented with offering travelers free smartphones that track their movements to provide more visibility to industry stakeholders on traveler behavior.

The more data and information cities have about the phenomenon and resulting disruption of overtourism, the better equipped they would be to act to prevent it by coming up with solutions based on evidence instead of conjecture or blacklash.

5. Protect Overcrowded Areas

It’s clear destinations haven’t done enough to prevent excessive tourism from hurting communities. The biggest problem is the speed at which tourism provokes change in a community. Cities want the increased economic activity from tourism, but are not well-equipped to make fast and responsive restrictions once unwanted changes begin to occur.

“It takes a lot of work and very quickly these smaller communities can be overrun, much quicker than a city like Barcelona,” said Marceau, of G Adventures. “Those are much more difficult things to fix. That’s a more difficult one because the effect of one company is not as impactful.”

Some cities like Barcelona have turned to legislation to curb the influx of tourists. Tour operators, as well, have shifted how they conduct tours, often staggering the times which certain groups arrive in order to reduce congestion.

As we’ve seen, however, tourism is often interlocked with overall economic development in cities.

“We should be really welcoming to tourists and, yes, it is disruptive,” said the European Tour Operators Association’s Jenkins. “You go to a city, and there’s lots you can’t have if someone wants to pay more for it. It’s totally normal for people to see areas you grew up in as a child become unaffordable as an adult; that’s because new people have arrived.

“In Barcelona, this is what happened. Tourism is economic activity which in broad terms has a very small environmental footprint and has a very massive economic impact. These are people who use existing means of transport and existing infrastructure and patronize preexisting forms of social enterprise.” There’s also the phenomenon of local business owners feeling resentment against businesses that find success catering solely to tourists,  he said.

Marceau has noticed the phenomenon in destinations that have geared up for luxury tourism as well. He mentioned the development of Playa del Carmen into a series of luxury resorts as an example of how the benefits of even expensive tourism don’t necessarily reach nearby communities.

Perhaps large cities should take a page out of the playbook employed by smaller destinations such as the Galapagos Islands, Machu Picchu, and Palau that have had no choice but to limit tourism growth. Those have detailed and stringent forward-looking plans governing access to and the development of their attractions.

Why can’t cities develop similar strategies for coping with periods of the year when more tourists visit than its most popular areas can handle?

Breaking The Pattern

The reality is that the forces of global capital and travel have shaped the development of cities for centuries. Today, however, we are seeing more places built specifically for tourists.

“Even in places that have been built [specifically] for tourists, it’s interesting that tourists go to experience something that is not contemporary,” said Jenkins. “The result of this is places like Disney World or the hotels in Las Vegas. What normally happens is they start as tourism centers, then conference centers, then residential centers, and finally they don’t want tourists anymore.”

We’ve explored this tourism-driven gentrification before, and cities like these represent examples of locales that have embraced tourism and the transition towards an economy serving visitors and wealthy residents instead of the majority of locals.

Wood’s recent book Sustainable Tourism on a Finite Planet: Environmental, Business and Policy Solutions is a thoughtful examination of the issues at play related to overtourism. She concludes that the first step toward a solution entails international collaboration among cities, governments, and companies.

“What most people have seen is that government and industry are not collaborating enough,” said Wood. “They need to see the stakes are so high that joint solutions are necessary and have to be based on data, and not just industry data, because they set their own parameters…People, be they from the industry or a destination, don’t want too many people swamping what is a beautiful cultural or historic site.”

As the stakes become higher in cities around the world, it still remains unclear whether there is the will to push tourists — and their money — away.

[spynotebook]

Greetings, general public whom I serve! “Postal Apocalypse,” io9's mail column, has returned for a second week in a row, so I’ve got a pretty hot streak going on. I’ll try to keep it up! Meanwhile, you’ve got questions about Civil War II, Rogue One, The Winds of Winter, the next Indiana Jones movie, and more. Coincidentally, I have answers.

The Assassination of Carol Danvers by the Knuckleknob, Marvel Comics

Jason M.:

Dear Postman of the future, I need you to tell me about the future by answering a question about...seeing the future.

Ignoring a lot of the secondary reasons most people hated Civil War II, the biggest area of discontent was how people hated the “character assassination” of Captain Marvel due to her outrageous support of Minority Reporting situations via Ulysses. One thing that shocked me is how literally every post, article, comment, and tweet I read said that anyone who would try to fight crimes that haven’t happened yet is horrible and wrong.

And yet...let’s say that something of this scale was all real. Like, a week from now a 50-story guy in a purple dress and the universe’s most fascinating hat showed up to LITERALLY EAT OUR PLANET. Or someone in an Eastern European country who studied science in the US before a horrible accident invented a time machine and was going back in time rewrite the US out of existence. If these types of planetary extinction events were possible (or even the casual cases of powered beings stomping down the street on a daily basis killing or injuring hundreds), wouldn’t you want, nay, demand that we use future-profiling it to stop crimes/events before they happen?

I think Civil War II’s biggest mistake was assuming that people would think of it in real-world terms, not comic-world terms. If some visions of the future could stop a gray dude who bedazzled an oven mitt from killing half the universe, sign me up.

I get what you’re saying, but the real problem is that Marvel was the one thinking about it in “real-world” terms. Had Ulysses’ visions been contained to preventing giant natural disasters like Galactus (and yes, although he is a big dude who wears purple, he has no more intent to do evil than an earthquake does) and/or stopping the biggest, most thoroughly evil supervillains’ plans, things probably would have been fine. Ulysses’ power would basically be a smoke alarm for trouble and evil—detect smoke, stop it before something catches fire. Who could argue with that?

No one, which is why Marvel had to exacerbate the problem so it could have its superheroes punching each other again. The issue had to be morally gray so that Carol and Tony could argue about it, which, as everyone has noticed, basically turned into the plot of Minority Report. So the argument became not just about using Ulysses’ visions to prevent disasters or thwart supervillains’ plans, Captain Marvel used it to imprison people for crimes they hadn’t even thought of committing yet, and that’s messed up.

Let’s go back to the Doctor Doom example: Based on Doom’s long history of being evil, yeah, he probably would eventually build a time machine and attempt to erase the US. But if until he starts actively trying to make the time machine, he has technically not committed a crime—well, not that crime. You would be punishing him for a crime he didn’t commit.

To be fair, Doctor Doom is a poor example, as are most comic book supervillains. They’ve all been evil for decades, so it’s harder to argue that they haven’t already earned life sentences. So imprisoning them for the many crimes they have committed, and their long history of evil, to predict their future behavior is a bit more understandable.

But of course, that’s also not what Captain Marvel was doing. She was imprisoning anyone Ulysses saw committing a crime, regardless of who that person was. She was arresting US citizens, not only without a trial, but again without them having done anything wrong (see above). Best example: Miles Morales, who she wanted to arrest after that vision of him killing Captain America several months in the future. Miles Morales has been a hero 100 percent of the time he’s operated as Ultimate Spider-Man. He’s never done anything like that before, and it’s clear that he had no intention or designs to do it. He was shocked and appalled by the vision as anyone else. But Carol was willing to imprison Miles on the mere possibility he would eventually murder Cap.

This isn’t just morally wrong, it’s stupid. Even if Ulysses’ visions were always 100 percent, inexorably correct—spoiler alert, they aren’t—they don’t give any context about the event. So, as crazy as it sounds, when Miles kills Captain America in the future, there could be some mitigating circumstances—circumstances like, oh, I don’t know, Captain America having been Cosmic Cube-ed into a Hydra agent. All she saw was a vision—nothing else. No motivations, no reasons, no explanations. And she just assumed Miles was guilty anyway.

There’s another reason why this is both idiotic and insidious: Carol assumes that Captain America’s murder is inevitable unless she imprisons Miles. But that makes no sense. Either Cap’s death is certain, in which case imprisoning Miles clearly won’t work because he’ll somehow have to get out in order to kill Cap, or—if the future isn’t certain and Cap’s death can be prevented—then the future can be changed by anything, not just arresting heroes who have done nothing wrong and are not even thinking about doing anything wrong. Either anything is possible or nothing is.

(Also? If everything is inevitable, then no one is really guilty of anything because there is no free will and we’re all locked into fixed loops where everything we do is unavoidable, and thus it’s not our fault.)

So… yeah. Marvel’s the one who made this weird. They love having their heroes fight each other, but it hasn’t figured out a way to gave them do it without turning one of them into a de facto supervillain themselves (exactly like Iron Man was in Civil War I). And for everyone who had been so excited about Carol’s pretty recent resurgence as Captain Marvel and one of Marvel’s biggest heroes, it was equally aggravating and heartbreaking to see her become so, so awful.

Words Are Wind

John W.:

Where do you stand on the debate about whether GRRM owes his fans updates on the status to The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring? I use to be on the side of the “he’s not our bitch” argument but now I’ve switched sides. I definitely think he owes us some kind of update, as to the frequency that’s up for debate, but let’s face it he’s rich and famous because people are reading his books, watching the HBO show, and buying all the ancillary products (merchandise, Dunk & Egg books). He should throw us a bone. What say you?

Let me ask you a question in return: What benefit does him giving an update give to him or us? If he makes it his date, he doesn’t win any prizes. If he doesn’t make it, fans lose their minds and freak out at him.

As a writer, I can tell you that some days I just can’t write. (That’s a softball for you guys.) Some days I can churn out the words, and some days they just don’t come at all. And I mainly write silly and/or mean-spirited stuff for the internet, not a massive fantasy epic with hundreds of characters and centuries of backstory that is also one of the most popular book series in the world.

He doesn’t know when the book will be finished until it’s finished. Yes, he has more facts than the rest of us—how many chapters he’s done, for instance—but it’s still just a guess, because he probably doesn’t know for sure how many chapters The Winds of Winter will be. Some authors can meticulously plan out their stories and stick to it like a machine, but that’s not GRRM, and it’s one of the reasons A Song of Ice and Fire is so good. He won’t know if an Arya storyline is one chapter or three until he sits down and writes it, but when it’s/they are done, it/they will be what’s best for the story.

If you want a guess, I can give you one with almost as much certainty as GRRM: April 2018. Meanwhile, you know who wants The Winds of Winter to be finished even more than you do? George R.R. Martin.

En Rogue

Confused Rebel:

Dear Mr. Postman,

Thanks to the generosity of friends, I was able to see Rogue One recently. Surprisingly, the film was enjoyable even with the stereotype of having an Asian character know martial arts.

But I have to wonder about the uses of the Death Star during the film. One shot was used to take out a city resting atop a mine of the crystals that powered light sabers. Wouldn’t that shot have caused a chain reaction that would have vaporized the entire planet? The second shot hit the planet where the Imperial Archives were stored. Wouldn’t that destruction have crippled the Empire by wiping out important records?

With such questionable bits of destruction, why is it that Grand Moff Tarkin still managed to have a job controlling the Death Star in “A New Hope?”

Kyber crystals don’t store energy, they focus it and amplify it. For lightsabers, they’re what keep the laser from just shooting lasers like blasters; for the Death Star it increases the power of its laser to the point where it can destroy planets. It’s not a power source unto itself, and it’s not explosive. So when the Death Star destroyed Jedha City, it didn’t blow up anymore than it would have without the crystals.

We don’t know much about the Imperial data center on Scarif, but think of it this way: even the loss of a million research and military projects wouldn’t mess up the Empire’s infrastructure. It would massively screw up things in development, but in terms of the day-to-day tyranny, the Empire would keep on chugging. Plus, we know that Tarkin deemed it better to destroy the research center than let the rebels get away with the Death Star plans, which is proof in itself that the Empire considered it at least somewhat expendable.

As for Grand Moff Tarkin, there is 100 percent no doubt that he blamed literally everything that went wrong on director Krennic, who was too dead to defend himself. Had Krennic done his duty and stopped the rebels on Scarif, why, Tarkin wouldn’t have needed to destroy the planet at all!

Flash Facts

Silver Age Fanboy:

Dear Mr. Postman, it’s been fun seeing Flash bring back D.C. villains ranging from Captain Cold to the Bug-Eyed Bandit. But two classic Flash villains, Captain Boomerang and Abra Kadabra, have not crossed paths (I don’t think) with Barry and the Super STARs. Is the problem that visually they’re too silly to work in the world of The Flash? Or is there some other problem I’m not aware of?

Captain Boomerang actually has appeared in the Arrowverse. Not on The Flash, weirdly, but in Arrow season three, during the first Flash/Arrow crossover. I had also totally forgotten until James Whitbrook reminded me like an hour before this went up.

But nothing is too silly to be on The Flash TV series, and I thank Grodd for it. The Golden Glider, the Pied Piper, Weather Wizard, the Turtle, Tar Pit, King Shark, Rainbow Raider… hell, the show even did the Bug-Eyed Bandit. Captain Boomerang and Abra Kadabra are deadly serious compared to some of those guys. (Also, given Barry’s incessant time-travel shenanigans, the fact that Kadabra is a magician from the 64th century makes him practically a gimme for the show.)

The only thing that’s stopped Captain Boomerang from returning to the DC/CW was the Suicide Squad movie, but since WB cleared Arrow’s version of Deadshot to return for an episode (albeit as a hallucination by Diggle) and for Harley Quinn and Killer Croc to appear on Gotham, I can’t imagine why Captain Boomerang would be the one character WB desperately needs to keep their hands on.

Indiana Jonesin’

Mike F.:

Will the next Indiana Jones movie be any good or is Harrison Ford just too old to pull it off? What are the chances it gets made even with Ford, Spielberg, and David Koepp attached? I know it will make money but is Ford too in love with the franchise to see the hieroglyphics on the wall that this probably shouldn’t be made or it will tarnish the brand further? What are the odds they introduce his successor and thoughts on who it might be?

If Harrison Ford was willing to be Han Solo again, he should almost certainly be willing to go back to Indiana Jones, a franchise he actually likes. (To be fair, age may have softened him on Star Wars.) But between the fact that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull tried to introduce a successor in Shia LaBeouf, King of the Monkeys, and failed, and the fact that Ford is now likely prohibitively old at age 74… well, I’m sure Spielberg and Ford are game, and we know David Koepp is currently writing the script, but I don’t see them all pulling it off before Ford becomes prohibitively old. Or at least too old to do much more than make a cameo, at which point the movie’s not about Indiana Jones at all, but the new guy.

Here’s what I predict will happen: The Han Solo movie will come out in 2018, do great, and Disney will take it as a sign that the public is willing to accept new actors playing beloved Harrison Ford characters. They will recast the part, allowing for a script that doesn’t need to accommodate Ford himself with all the action-adventure audiences want from an Indiana Jones movie.

Which is fine with me. Seeing old Indiana Jones in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull depressed me. Sure, a lot of things in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull depressed me, but that was definitely one of them.

Kingspin

Santiago:

Postman, why does everyone praise Vincent D’Onofrio’s performance as Kingpin on Daredevil? I think he’s a great actor but for me, he was the weakest part of the show. The way he talked with that forced accent, or whatever that was, really stood out terribly. I agree that Kingpin as a character was good since they got to really flesh him out, but why did he have to speak like that? Am I the only one that thought he was terrible? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

Well, you may be taking crazy pills, because D’Onofrio doesn’t have an accent in Daredevil. He’s enunciating things weirdly, but that’s something he does a lot when he’s playing deeper, more serious roles. He did it in every episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, for instance.

I don’t think it’s bad at all, but I would describe it as a slightly ominous quarter-Shatner. In fact, I believe it works for the moody, prone-to-fits-of-random-rage Wilson Fisk very well.

Don’t Hate the Leia, Hate the Game

Chris:

After our heroes escape the Death Star in Episode IV, Leia casually notes that the Empire “let us escape” because “they’re tracking us.” Yet she does nothing about it! She didn’t check for a tracking beacon on the Falcon’s hull, or try to swap ships, or even go to a different planet. Instead she led the Death Star directly to the rebel base after personally witnessing its destructive power. So the question is, did Leia do this on purpose in order to lure the Empire in close for a knockout blow, or is she just lazy, or is this just a plotting oversight by GL?

I may be feeling extra-protective of Leia right now for obvious reasons, but here’s how I figure it: The Death Star had just destroyed an entire planet. Getting the plans to the Rebel base on Yavin as soon as possible was more important than keeping the base hidden, because the Rebels needed the plans as soon as possible to figure out how to destroy the Death Star as soon as possible.

Also? Leading the Death Star to Yavin keeps the Empire’s attention on the Rebels and not blasting random planets, killing millions of innocent lives while hunting the Alliance. It was risky to be sure, but between risking the Rebel base versus risking innocents, well, for Leia that was no question at all. Unlike the disturbingly less moral rebels of Rogue One, who are surprisingly okay with killing allies just in case they pose a problem, Leia is all integrity, all the time.

Game Movie Over

Josh N.:

First off, I keep getting more and more excited about the new Logan film. It seems like a worthy send off for Jackman, as opposed to a lame origin with Origins. I’ve seen the plot compared to the excellent game The Last of Us, based strictly on the trailers of course. Do you think that’s a fair comparison (obviously no one had claws in the video game), and do you think more movies could look to games for inspiration? I know the state of straight adaptations is kind of a bust.

It’s a fair comparison—badass adult and child take a journey through a near-future semi-apocalypse—but it’s not like The Last of Us pioneered that particular pairing. It’s a long-used trope, accurately titled “Badass and Child Duo” over at TV Tropes, with oodles of entries, which arguably started with the Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub manga (and subsequent movies). In that, wrongfully-disgraced-samurai-turned-assassin Ogami Itto travels with his incredibly young son Daigoro, in a wooden baby carriage also filled with deadly weapons.

As to your other question, I think that most of the time, video games are looking to other movies and TV shows for their own inspiration, which means movie don’t need to scour them for ideas. Also, I’m no longer sure that a “good” video game movie is even possible anymore—but that is a question someone will have to ask me next week.

Have a nerdy question? Need advice? Want a mystery or argument solved? Email them to postman@io9.com! I’m trying to answer a lot of questions each week to make up for the hiatus, so I need a lot of questions sent to me each week, too. Remember, no question too difficult or dumb! Probably!

[writingwithcolor]

Mixing North America with Old World Cultures in Fantasy: What Are The Issues?

So I sent in an ask several years ago that, due in no small part to your response, I have grown from and eventually led to a complete restructuring of my story. I included a measure of context in this, so if you need to skip it, my main three questions are at the bottom. I think this mostly applies to Mod Lesya.

The new setting is both inspired by and based on North America in the late 1400s where the indigenous cultures thrive and are major powers on the continent. Since there is no “Europe” in this setting the colonization and plague events never happened. Within the continent itself (since it is a fantasy setting) there are also analogous cultures that resemble Norse, Central European, Persian, Arabic, Indian, and Bengali. Although not native to the fantasy continent, there is also a high population of ‘African’ and ‘Oceanic’ peoples of many cultures, the latter usually limited to coastal cities as traders and sailors. Elves are entirely not-human, or at least evolved parallel to humans ala Neanderthals/Denisovans; they have green blood, black sclera, and skin tones that run from pale to dark. 

The main national setting of the story takes great inspiration from a Byzantine/Turkish/Mississippian background, and the neighboring nations are based on the Haudenosee (Iriquois Confederacy), Numunuu (Comancheria), and the Hopi and Zuni (as the descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans) (I also know that 2 of these 3 occur much later than the 1400s, but I love the government systems and they provide excellent narrative foils for the more ‘traditional’ fantasy government that takes place in the story). The Maya inhabit the role analogous to Ancient Greece in that most writing systems on the continent descend from Maya script and all the Great Philosophers were Maya (and nobility from across the continent spend lots of money to send their children to schools in the Maya City-States or in the Triple Alliance (Aztec Empire)). There is magic with varying traditions, practices, and methods spread across the continent, some of which are kept secret from outsiders, so I would hope that this avoids the “Magical Native” trope. 

Beyond the setting, I have three main questions:

When it comes to foodstuffs, I was originally planning to limit myself to Pre-Columbian cuisine from the Americas (eg the Three Sisters and potatoes) but in doing my research, Navajo fry-bread seems to be a fairly integral part of the food culture and that does require flour, which originated in the Old World. Would it be better to incorporate some of the Old World stuff that has since become traditional to indigenous groups?

For place names used in the setting and writing systems would it be better to use existing languages or writing systems or ones inspired by them? EG should I make a language that is very similar to Cherokee, complete with its own syllabary, or should I use IRL Cherokee and its extant syllabary? I ask because I feel like using the real language might step on some toes, but using the conlang might seem like erasure.

One of the main themes of this story is the harm that even a ‘benevolent’ Empire can wreak on people. The Byzantine/Turkish/Mississippian culture is the main Empire on the continent, taking cues from both western and American monarchical systems (eg the Triple Alliance (Aztec) and The Four Regions (the Inca Empire)), but when I think about it having any kind of even vaguely western ‘Empire’ spring up from the soil of a North American inspired setting might be troubling.

Thank you for your time and consideration! Do you guys have a kofi or something so I can compensate you for time spent?

I actually do remember you, and I am going to 99% disregard your questions here because you went from glaringly obvious racism to covert racism, and none of your questions ask if your basic strings of logic for assumptions you built into the setting are okay. 

Since there is some extremely flawed basic logic in here, I’m going to tackle that first.

Question 1: Why did you originally title this “Pre Colombian North American Fantasy World” when you have more old world cultures than new world cultures?

A very simple, straightforward question. The actual content of the setting is what made me retitle it.

If you want to write a North American fantasy setting… why are there so many old world cultures represented here? 

Old world: - Greece (as a societal myth; see next point) - Byzantine - Turkey - Norse - Central European - Persian - Arabic - Indian - Bengali - African (which, let’s be honest, should be heavily broken up into multiple peoples) - Oceana (which, again, should be heavily broken up into multiple peoples)

New world: - Mississippian - Iroquois  - Numunuu - Hopi - Zuni - Maya - Aztec - Inca (maybe? not mentioned as having their own place on the continent, but one of your questions mentions them) - Navajo (maybe? See above)

To account for respecting Africa and Oceana, I’m going to make African cultures count as 3 and Oceanic cultures count as 5, and this is a purposeful lowball.

Old World: 17 New World: 9

It’s a giant discrepancy, especially if your attempt is writing an exclusively New World fantasy. And this is bare minimum old world, considering the fact I tried to limit myself to peoples who would be more likely to interact with the heavy Mediterranean/Alexander the Great’s Empire centricity. 

Question 2: Why does there have to be a Greece analogue?

I haven’t spoken about this topic at length on this blog, but Greek worship in the Western world is a very carefully crafted white supremacy based mythos that was created to prop up European “Excellence” and actually erases the reality of Greece as a peoples.

Cultural evolutionism is a theory that states the (assumed-white-European) Greeks were superior because of their philosophy, their abstract art, and their mathematics. When many of these concepts were refined in Egypt (African, aka Black), or the Arab world (aka brown), but white Europeans did not want to admit any of this so they instead painted everything as coming out of their ideas of Greece lock stock and barrel. 

The theory also ignored Iroquois science, Plains and Southwestern abstract art, and generally everything about North America, because the theory was designed to move the goalposts and paint North America as something it wasn’t, just to make Europeans feel okay taking it over and “bringing it to civilization.”

This theory was still taught in force up until the 1970s, and is still a major school of anthropological thought to this day (and still taught in some universities), so it is still very much influencing the Western world.

While the theory itself is only from the 1800s, it had long-growing roots in white/ noble Europe’s attempt to prop up European “Excellence” during its multiple periods of colonization, from the Crusades, onwards. You can see it in the copious amount of art produced during the Renaissance.

Europeans ignored the sheer amount of settling and travel that happened within Greece and Rome, and you’ll notice how many Renaissance paintings depict Greek philosophers as white, teaching other white people. In reality, we have no idea what their skin tone was, and they could have taught a huge variety of different skin tones. But it was appealing to European nobility to have people like them be the founders of all things great and “advanced”, so they invested huge amounts of time and money in creating this myth.

(Note: I said their nobility, not their population. People of colour existed en masse in Europe, but the nobility has been downplaying that for an exceptionally long time)

Greece took over most of the old world. It borrowed and stole from hundreds of cultures, brought it all back, and was assigned credit for it. White Europeans didn’t want to admit that the concept of 0 came from the Arabs, the pythagorean theorem came from Egypt, etc, and since Greece won, detailed records of how they were perceived and what they stole are long lost. It’s only glaring when they took from other global powers.

Question 3: Why would you pick totally different biomes to mix in here?

Turkey and the Mississippi are very, very different places when it comes to what can grow and what sort of housing is required, which makes them on the difficult side to merge together. They relied on different methods of trade, as well (boats vs roads), and generally just don’t line up.

The fact you pick such a specific European powerhouse—the Byzantine Empire—to mix into your “not European” fantasy world is… coming back to my above point about Greek (and Roman) worship in the West. Why can’t a fantasy world set in North America be enough on its own? Why does it need Europe copycats?

Question 4: Why are you missing a variety of nomads and Plains peoples?

Nomadic plains peoples were a thing across the globe, from the Cree to the Blackfoot to the Mongols. You have hyperfocused on settled peoples (with only one nomadic group named in both new and old world), which… comes across as very odd to me, because it is, again, very European sounding. That continent was about the only one without major populations that were nomadic, and if you look at European history, nomadic peoples were very highly demonized because of the aforementioned Mongols. 

Cultural evolutionism also absolutely hated nomadic peoples, which is where we get the term “savage” (hunter-gatherers, nomads) and “barbarian” (horticulturalists and pastoralists, the latter nomadic); these were “lesser cultures” that needed to settle down and be brought to “civilization” (European agriculture), and nothing good could ever come out of them.

Meanwhile, in North America, nomadic peoples took up a very large portion of landmass, produced a huge amount of culture and cultural diffusion, and mostly ignoring them while trying to create a “fantasy North America” is, well, like I said: odd. 

General Discussion Points

My suggestion for you is to write a fantasy Mediterranean region. Completely serious, here.

With the kinds of dynamics you are attracted to—the empires, the continental powers, the fact you keep trying to make Europe analogues in North America—you will do a much, much more respectful job by going into a really richly researched Mediterranean fantasy world than attempting to mix Europe and North America together in ways that show European traits (settled peoples, agriculture, a single empire dominating the whole culture and being viewed as superior) as the default.

I legitimately cannot see anything in here that feels like it comes from North America, or at the very least, treats non-sensationalized peoples (aka, those outside the Maya and Mississippian region) with respect. 

It falls into Maya worship, which is a very sensationalized topic and is fuelled by racist fascination, assuming no Indigenous peoples could be that smart. 

It falls into settled peoples worship, which is something that has cultural evolutionism roots because under such a model only settled peoples with agriculture are “civilized.”

It falls into placing Western concepts (public schools, large cities, the ilk) as the ideal, better solution, compared to methods better suited to horticulturalists, pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers and letting those teaching methods be respected.

There is no shame in writing inside Europe

The Mediterranean region contains Indigenous peoples, contains a huge diversity of skin tones, contains empires, contains democracy/a variety of governments, and in general contains every aspect of what you’re trying to create without playing god with a continent that did not evolve the way you’re trying to make it. 

A Mediterranean fantasy world would still be a departure from “fantasy world 35″ as I like to call it, because it would be different from the vaguely Germanic/ French/ Norse fantasy worlds that are Tolkien ripoffs. You can dig beyond the whitewashed historical revisions and write something that actually reflects the region, and get all the fun conflicts you want.

You don’t need to go creating a European/North American blend to “be diverse.” You can perfectly respectfully write inside Europe and have as much variety in peoples as you can write in a non-European setting. Europe is not the antithesis to diversity.

North America developed a certain way for a reason. It had the required fauna, space, resources, and climate to produce what it created. The old world developed a certain way for its own reasons, based off its own factors in the same categories.

You’re not really going to get them to blend very easily, and if you did, the fact there is such a strong European way-of-life preference (by picking places that mirror European society on the surface) makes me raise an eyebrow. It’s subtle, but very much there, and the fact you are ignorant to it shows me you still need to do more work before you go writing North American Indigenous Peoples.

Writing in Europe isn’t the problem, here. Writing a whitewashed, mythologized, everyone-not-white-is-a-caricature, ahistorical “Europe” is the problem. And you cannot fix this problem by simply painting European ways of life a different skin tone when the setting isn’t European. In fact, you’re perpetuating harm by doing that, because you are recreating the cultural evolutionism that calls anything you can find in Europe “better.” Indigenous cultures were vastly different from Europe, even if they shared similar trappings. 

Let North America exist without trying to shoehorn its most famous peoples into European analogues.

~ Mod Lesya

[footballghana]

Osimhen: I want to do things my way

Following his reported African record transfer deal from OSC Lille to SC Napoli, Nigeria forward Victor Osimhen would be one of the stars to watch as the 2020/21 Serie A kicks off this weekend in Italy.

In July, the 21-year-old and 2015 CAF Youth Player of the Year, made the headlines far and near when The Partenopei (as Napoli are nicknamed in Italy) announced his arrival from the French Ligue 1 side in a mega move; the biggest involving an African footballer.

Incidentally, Osimhen made his international breakthrough in 2015 at the U-17 African Cup of Nations (AFCON) held in Niger, where he emerged as top scorer with four goals en route to the FIFA U-17 World Cup, Chile 2015.

In Chile, Osimhen set a new scoring record at the global cadet championship, as his 10 goals in seven matches broke the long-standing record of nine goals in a single tournament previously held jointly by Frenchman Florent Sinama Pongolle and Ivorian Souleymane Coulibaly.

In addition to guiding Nigeria to the title, he was deservedly rewarded with the Golden Boot and the Silver Ball as the second-Best Player of the tournament behind compatriot Kelechi Nwakali. He was later in the same year crowned as CAF Youth Player of the Year 2015.

The youngster from Lagos-based Ultimate Strikers Academy was immediately snapped up by German Bundesliga side Wolfsburg, where he had difficult start of his European career before being sent on loan in 2018 to Charleroi in the Belgian Jupiler Pro League.

Osimhen blossomed in Belgium, scoring a remarkable 20 goals in all competitions, including the record-breaking quickest goal in the history of the Belgian First Division A with an 8.15second opening goal against Antwerp on 26 May 2019. He was also declared the club’s player of the season.

Osimhen who earned his first international cap on 1st June 2017 in Nigeria’s friendly 3-0 win over Togo in Paris, was on Nigeria’s 23-man list to the 2019 Total AFCON in Egypt, where he featured only in the Bronze medal winning match against Tunisia.

With the 2019/2020 French Ligue 1 season being called off due to COVID-19 pandemic, Osimhen had scored an impressive 18 goals in 38 matches, and was picked as the winner of the Marc Vivien Foe award presented by Radio France International (RFI) for Africa’s Best Player in the French football championship for the 2019 /2020 season.

As he begins a new phase of his career with Napoli, Osimhen explained his expectations in an interview with CAFOnline.com.

CAFOnline.com: There were so many speculations about offers from clubs in the English Premier League (EPL). Why did you eventually sign for Napoli?

Osimhen: Many predicted I will move to the EPL, and I had a lot of interesting offers from some clubs. But Napoli was the best choice for me. It was so because of the kind of player I want to be in the future, and the kind of great career I want to have. I have no doubt that Napoli is the club I need to achieve that greater height. The relationship between me and Coach (Gennaro Gattuso) and President (Aurelio De Laurentiis) is a very interesting one, because even before I came to Napoli, I spoke with both. They convinced me even more to sign for Napoli. The relationship is going very well, and I just want to repay them on the pitch for the trust they have in me.

How ready are for the challenges of playing against the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo in Serie A?

I’m really looking forward to a new career here in Serie A. Playing against the likes of Christian Ronaldo is something one can eagerly wait. While at Lille, I had the opportunity of playing against some of the best players in the world like Neymar, Kylian Mbappe and it would definitely be a whole great experience to play against Ronaldo, who is one of the greatest players on earth. So, I’m looking forward to facing him soon.

Are you under pressure to perform at Napoli being the Africa’s record signing?

There is no pressure on me since I came here rather, I just need to work and do what I loved doing. I just need to do my work on the pitch and give my all like I have always been doing and getting the goals for both my club and country. This is the most important thing for me and there is no pressure at all. I just want to do my thing in my own way.

You had an excellent pre-season scoring form. What is your goals’ target in your first Serie A season with Napoli?

I am happy for the goals I scored pre-season. I’m not the kind of players that set a number of goals I’m going to score for my team because I’m a team player; I don’t set personal target before that of the team. I just want to score as much as I can for my team, help them doing well and winning trophies. So, there is no personal targets for me; I just want to do well and get the goals for my team.

You have always said that former African Footballer of the Year Didier Drogba is your idol. How do you feel playing for a club where Argentine legend Diego Maradona is usually the reference point?

Drogba would forever be my idol and I’m so grateful to him. Choosing him as a role model has really been helpful since my growing up years. I have not met him yet and I’m really looking forward to seeing him and getting one of his signed jerseys; that would really be a dream come true for me.

Now, playing in a club that used to have Diego Maradona, who is undoubtedly one of the greatest players ever, is inspiring. Maradona is an idol here in Napoli and I have seen his pictures everywhere. He is truly the best. To be here and to play on the same pitch of Maradona is another dream came true.

How are you adjusting to the new lifestyle as well as communicating with other players in the team?

When I moved to Wolfsburg, I had to learn the German language. Since then, dealing with language stuff has been easier, either when I moved to Belgium, France or now Italy. Of course, I’m going to get an Italian language teacher soon.

Napoli is a great team with many international players like Kalidou Koulibaly, Dries Mertens and some other players who speak English. The coach (Gattuso) also speaks English which makes it easier for me. But learning Italian will be very important and I’m really looking forward to it.

  source: https://footballghana.com/

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5 Overtourism Solutions for Popular Destinations

A cruise ship in Venice. Cities across Europe are struggling to cope with increased tourism. bass_nroll / Flickr

Skift Take: As destinations scramble to reduce the impact of tourism on their citizens, foundational work must still be done to create a repeatable framework and process for preventing overtourism.

— Andrew Sheivachman

The world is in an unprecedented period of tourism growth, and not everyone is happy about it. Arrivals by international tourists have nearly doubled since 2000, with 674 million crossing borders for leisure back then and 1.2 billion doing the same in 2016.

As the travel industry has ramped up its operations around the world, destinations have not been well-equipped to deal with the economic, social, and cultural ramifications. Cities have often made economic growth spurred by traveler spending a priority at the expense of quality of life for locals.

Europe has been perhaps hardest hit by the stress of increased travel and tourism. Barcelona, Venice, and Reykjavik are just some of the cities that have recently been transformed by visitors.

For the last few months, news reports have reflected the truth about the global travel industry: Not enough has been done to limit the negative impact of tourism as it has reached record levels in destinations around the world. Anti-traveler sentiment is seemingly on the rise.

“I would consider [these cities] to be canaries in the coal mine,” said Megan Epler Wood, director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard School of Public Health. “The folks that have been protesting are from highly visited destinations and they don’t feel their lives should be interrupted by tourism.”

She continued: “They’re in a position of making a statement… something I’ve been discouraged about is the idea that people who are protesting are making a mistake. It’s important they make a statement because we need to hear from them and come to a new level of understanding of what this means. We need to very seriously find what their concerns are and figure out how to plan with those destinations and think about acting proactively.”

Why have some destinations thrown up their hands in helplessness in dealing with the deluge of tourists? And what have other destinations done to successfully limit the effects of increased visitation?

Skift has identified five solutions to overtourism, drawing from what destinations have done successfully to limit the influx of tourists, and we spoke to global tourism experts about their perspectives. We also looked at the ways in which travel companies themselves have been complicit and what more they can do to grow global tourism in a more sustainable way. We don’t argue that these are one-size-fits-all solutions for every trampled-upon destination, but they may serve as a solid foundation for beginning to tackle the problem.

Furthermore, we look to the future for ways in which the travel industry, in conjunction with local stakeholders, can better measure and limit the adverse effects of tourism.

If the travel industry can help connect the world and build bridges between cultures, why has it struggled to find a sustainable path forward?

1. Limiting Transportation Options

Travel has become more affordable over the last decade, particularly in Europe and developing economies in Asia with the rise of the middle class. Low-cost carriers have proliferated, while megaships from cruise giants have extended their reach around the world.

Various indicators show that more flights are taking place across Europe than ever before, particularly during the busy summer vacation season.

“[Increased travel has] been controversial in a way that is directly due to the fact that businesses arrive in a city and disrupt normal life and commercial activity,” said Tom Jenkins, CEO of the European Tour Operators Association. “In fact, cities are designed for tourism to disrupt normal activity, because tourists are not normal by definition in how they behave. They’re always disruptive and it’s always been controversial. Even if your city becomes rejuvenated, when you get foreigners arriving somewhere exerting financial influence over supply, you get a phobia.”

Why have some cities with pervasive tourism, like Paris, not had the same recent backlash as Barcelona or Berlin?

Jenkins notes that backlash against tourism is a consistent theme throughout European history; people said the same thing about the advent of railways and steamships warping the character of their cities that they do today about cruises and cheap flights.

Let’s take a look at Barcelona’s struggles with increased visitation in recent years. Data from IATA, MedCruise, and Visit Barcelona expose the massive influx of visitors to the city.

The increase in cruisers is particularly striking. Since Barcelona really hit the world stage thanks to the 1992 Summer Olympics, its cruise traffic has gone from about 100,000 cruisers in port to about 2.7 million in 2016. In the greater Mediterranean, the average number of passengers per call has increased from 848 in 2000 to 2,038 in 2016.

Top European Cruise Ports (in passengers) 2000 Passengers 2016 Passengers 1 Cyprus Ports .08 million Barcelona 2.7 million 2 Balearic Islands 0.6 million Civitavecchia 2.3 million 3 Barcelona 0.6 million Balearic Islands 2 million 4 Piraeus 0.5 million Venice 1.6 million 5 Istanbul 0.4 million Marseille 1.6 million 6 Genoa 0.4 million Naples 1.3 million 7 Naples 0.4 million Piraeus 1.1 million 8 Civitavecchia 0.4 million Genoa 1 million 9 Venice 0.33 million Savona 0.9 million 10 French Riviera 0.3 million Tenerife Ports 0.9 million Source: MedCruise

The impact of low-cost carriers, along with the relative strength of the euro in recent years, has also played an important role. While there has been a major focus on the influx of U.S. and Chinese tourists to Europe, evidence suggests that the most frequent visitors are actually from European countries. Indeed, according to surveys from Visit Barcelona, European tourists comprise around two-thirds of those visiting the city.

It follows that if cities and tourism boards would work to make it more difficult to access their destinations, by limiting cruise ship tenders or the access of low-cost carriers to airport terminals, that fewer visitors would be able to come.

There’s also a bit of a contradiction here: Often residents of areas that have been built up and developed by tourism blame the travel industry, and not their politicians and city planners, for the changes.

Boorish tourists become a target for protests and outcries, instead of the local and regional forces that have more or less enabled their ability to visit a destination en masse.

“The moment you start meddling with things, you affect the economic pattern of the town, and all kinds of problems arise,” said Jenkins. “There is a quite startling depiction of giant cruise ships in Venice, but someone gave permission for that at some point. Someone is taking their money. Someone with power and discretion said, ‘You come and park here.’ Similarly in Amsterdam, the inhabitants are very resentful, but the visitors didn’t organize their red light district and permit cannabis shops to open. The residents did. It’s just bonkers and it’s a planning problem, not a tourism problem. It has a planning solution.”

Amsterdam has recently restricted new tourist shops in its city center, a solid first step. The city is still struggling to cope with the effect of rampant homesharing.

Urban dwellers across Europe have announced their anti-tourism sentiment in various ways. Stakeholders should be looking forward and planning to craft a more equitable environment for both tourists and locals, even if it means reducing tourism and those who have built successful businesses serving them.

An easy way to do that — well, nothing seems especially easy when it comes to this issue — is to simply make it harder to visit instead of creating restrictions when travelers are already in destination.

2. Make It More Expensive

Travel has become more of a commodity purchase for consumers than an occasional luxury in recent years, spurred by low-cost carriers and affordable homesharing services.

“[Managing tourism] is a good thing to be talking about because our industry is good at selling the virtues of tourism, but we’re not very good at being honest with ourselves about what we do well and what we don’t,” said Darrell Wade, co-founder of Australia-based Intrepid Travel. “In some ways, the industry hasn’t progressed at all. There are nice towns [all over the world to visit], and you look at places like Croatia where there are several hundred islands, towns, and villages. There’s lots of great stuff to do, so let’s get out of the tourist area in Dubrovnik.”

Countries that suffer currency devaluation are also extremely susceptible to a tourism rush, as in the case of Iceland. We’re seeing this now in London following the Brexit vote, as well.

In recent years, Iceland has moved to offer more luxury accommodations and experiences in a bid to attract higher-yielding travelers as the country’s currency has rebounded from a crash in 2008.

Even if mass market tourism slows down due to increased costs, dropping Iceland’s annual tourism growth rate from around 30 percent to 10 percent, the cool-down would be beneficial for locals struggling to deal with rising cost of goods and a hot property market in Reykjavik.

When Skift went to Iceland last year, the country’s top travel and tourism executives told us the most attractive way to slow down growth is to create more luxury offerings for higher-spending travelers. As gentrification hits major cities worldwide, this can sometimes happen as a result of investment and real estate speculation.

Adventure and luxury tour operators and cruise lines are better positioned to provide experiences outside of the traditional tourist areas in a destination.

“Most of our departures are to the remote destinations, but we have quite a bit of presence in some of that heavily trafficked area [in Europe],” said Trey Byus, chief expedition officer at Lindblad Expeditions. “We take a different approach to that. The east end of the Greek islands is one of the most overrun places in terms of tourism, so we don’t go there during the busiest of seasons, we’ll go on the shoulder seasons. You take a look at the islands and there’s the obvious places where the mass tourists go where we avoid, places where the Greeks would go to holiday….We’ve been in the Adriatic for many years and at one point many years ago we considered a turnaround in Venice, but even then we said we’re not going to go there. That’s going to provide an awful first and last experience for us, so we took that off the map.”

There’s also the question of demand management, which few destinations have embraced in a significant way. Similar to the way attractions like Walt Disney World charge more for tickets during peak periods, destinations can increase the ticket price to access areas when demand is the highest.

Barcelona is considering a tax on tour operators to make it more expensive for tourists to visit, for instance, and the city already taxes hotels, apartment shares, and cruise ships. Perhaps a more concerted legislative effort to make visiting more expensive can replace mass tourism with higher-spending and more respectful visitation.

This would, in theory, at least, not only generate more revenue for cities to deal with the myriad complications of overtourism, but condition tourists to visit during periods of decreased demand when their impact on locals would be more limited. Over time, perhaps, tourists can be trained to be more thoughtful about their travel decisions. At the very least, life for locals would improve.

“What you see looking forward is obviously demand seems to be growing exponentially and you see more and more pressure,” said Jenkins. “Can they tweak capacity in a way that things can be spread out, and that the demand can be managed and controlled through price? I’m absolutely convinced. We’re seeing a huge increase in capacity in some places, can they carry on doing so? They probably can, given there is demand for them and money to facilitate that demand.

“There’s also the scope for demand management. People think if the price goes through the roof, they won’t have to manage the attraction. People will have to get used to paying more to visit peak attractions at peak times. The way we price things [in the travel industry], there’s no incentive to alter your arrival at all. It’s all the same price.”

Many remote destinations do a form of this with permits, only allowing groups of visitors in a few times a day. The Galapagos Islands, Machu Picchu, and others have embraced this form of demand management for decades. Urban destinations could take a page out of their playbooks by limiting access to high-demand areas and increasing the price of access at the same time.

3. Better Marketing and Education

There seems to be one issue that few destinations have figured out: How do you keep tourists from wrecking the environment or crowding cities?

Better education, and more realistic marketing, can help. Gone are the days where famous historic monuments like the Spanish Steps or Kensington Gardens will be accessible without a horde of tourists, and travel companies selling affordable tours need to do a better job of letting tourists know what they’re really buying.

London, for instance, has laid out a plan into the next decade to manage tourism growth, and it includes marketing its outer areas to tourists instead of downtown or Westminster. New York City unveiled a similar plan last year, looking to capitalize on increased tourist interest in Brooklyn.

If tourism companies sell travelers vacations based on certain promises, like deserted beaches and town squares, it can be a problem if their experiences don’t match expectations.

“I see it as everyone’s problem; some organizations are the source, like national tourist authorities, airlines, and cruise lines,” said Intrepid Travel’s Wade. “Part two is the traveler, because they’re a little on the lazy side and they don’t realize the image they saw online of a destination has 100,000 people in it in real life. This isn’t great for our industry either, because it’s a terrible product. I walked around Dubrovnik [recently], and I’m not enjoying it. We want to empower people and change how they think about the world. We don’t want to be sending them to hellholes, it’s not in our long-term interest.”

From an education standpoint, travel stakeholders have to present their products more realistically. They also have to educate their customers on what they’re really getting into on a trip, and the acceptable ways to behave while in-destination.

If travel is really about experiencing a distinct culture, then travelers should be prepared to respect localities and traditions; travel can’t just be a commodity. Some travelers, though, just want to relax on a beach somewhere with a beer in hand for a few days, without having to deal with the complexity of another culture.

“One thing tour operators can do to help destinations is to help educate them about planning or being prepared and thinking through how they’re promoting themselves and who they’re promoting themselves to,” said Yves Marceau, vice president of buying and contracting for tour operator G Adventures. “It used to take years for a destination to become super popular. Now, with China on the move and with social media, a destination can go from unknown to top 10 list within two years. The reality is if the destination has limited capacity, it can be overrun very quickly. You look at place like Iceland and there’s more tourists than Icelanders. That happened very fast, and you see places where it is happening even faster.”

By limiting the numbers of licenses available to tour operators, or the the time of day they can operate in the most popular areas, destinations can limit the impact of overcrowding while providing a suitable experience for visitors. While tour operators often decide to stagger tour timings, regulations can help bring along those that don’t.

Expectations for access can also be set for tourists before they arrive, so they aren’t disappointed or disruptive upon arriving. Exclusivity, as we’ve seen time and again, is actually a major selling point for consumers.

Fueled by compelling global marketing campaigns and the frantic pace of social media, travelers now expect to tick a certain set of boxes while traveling. Destinations need to be aware that the image they present to travelers, and the demand created for access to certain experiences, simply can’t be provided sustainably.

4. Better Collaboration AMONG stakeholders

A rarely discussed problem is that local, state, and national tourism boards are generally tasked with promoting tourism and business travel instead of planning and managing it.

“The large majority of funds that go to any discussion of how to manage tourism go to marketing tourism,” said Wood. “The rough estimate is maybe 80 percent of tax money that goes towards tourism in a destination generally goes to tourism marketing organizations, but they’re not management organizations, they’re marketing organizations. These people are starting to realize they could have a new role for what they do. What if you gave 80 percent of all the money to manage the destination? This was never a problem because we had a big globe and not many people traveling.”

Many destination marketing organizations have begun to reconsider how they can best serve the interests of locals instead of promoting rampant visitation growth. Executives on stage at the Skift Global Forum this year weighed in on their newfound approach to the problem, and this represents a good first step towards some sort of transition.

There is a deeper problem affecting destinations worldwide: There is no codified way to conclusively measure and quantify the impact that tourism has. While not impossible, it could be more fruitful for destinations to develop and test methods for solving overtourism by collaborating and trying to agree on a framework for finding solutions.

Several groups are working on this now, including Wood’s colleagues, but cities and travel companies need to come to the table as well. In the long term, it’s not enough for destinations to just manage demand; they need to measure and manipulate the specific effects of overcrowding.

“We need to come to an understanding of how to measure those impacts and it’s not as simple as demand [alone]… people are trying to speak too generally about the problems and there’s a tendency to vilify certain parts of the industry,” said Wood. “What I don’t think we can do is stop them from doing what they do. We need to do a good job measuring [the effects of tourism]. It’s well-known tourists want to go to specific places at certain times, so we have to think of other ways of managing their use [of destinations].”

Part of the problem, it seems, is having concrete details on where travelers go and how they affect the environment they are in, whether urban or remote. An international group of academics and tourism experts are working on a solution to this involving standardized monitoring methods in multiple cities worldwide.

Some places, like the Australian state of Tasmania, have experimented with offering travelers free smartphones that track their movements to provide more visibility to industry stakeholders on traveler behavior.

The more data and information cities have about the phenomenon and resulting disruption of overtourism, the better equipped they would be to act to prevent it by coming up with solutions based on evidence instead of conjecture or blacklash.

5. Protect Overcrowded Areas

It’s clear destinations haven’t done enough to prevent excessive..