For the fifth time in eight years, a major publisher of travel guides has issued its list of places not to travel to. The Covid pandemic caused its three-year pause.
Fodor’s “No List”, a pun on its “Go List” that covers everything that its guides recommend, might sound like it warns against entering zones notorious for dark alleys or gang wars.
But, no.
Fodor’s 2023 list like its earlier versions alerts us to places where locals have soured on welcoming us.
It’s about overtourism — overcrowding, noise and inflating the cost of rental housing, about locals feeling they don’t belong. Issues of diversity, equity and climate change play into Fodor’s advice that we consider not going to overtrodden places for awhile. There’s no talk of boycotts. Fodor’s caution makes sense.
I know how rare it is for a guidebook company to publish this kind of list. Guidebooks exist by telling people it’s our right to go wherever and whenever we want. I used to write for Fodor’s. If we didn’t want readers to go someplace, we made quick work of it.
From Where the Boys Are to where the young Brit males are
The worst reaction from locals to tourists during my Florida years was from Fort Lauderdale about Spring Break.
Although Spring Break has ended where it began, Fodor’s No List is about the spread of the phenomenon where crowds abuse landmark places “before they’re ruined forever,” or as locals might say, just for the hell of it.
There’s Venice, Amsterdam, the Amalfi Coast, Lake Tahoe, Maui, Thai beaches — 10 in all.
After the summer of 2022 when Venice reopened following Covid lockdown, 80,000 visitors a day poured in. That was 370 visitors for every resident!
Last summer residents of Maui were threatened by heavy fines for watering their lawns or washing their cars. Meanwhile the Grand Hotel Wailea with 787 rooms boasted of 770,000 gallons of water that fill its nine pools.
This year, according to TravelAge West, the State of Hawaii de-funded its tourism promotion agency before relenting for a two-and-a-half year disbursement of $38.3 million while adding an unprecedented destination stewardship program worth $27 million for the same period to the Council for Native Hawiian Advancement.
For Fodor’s, it’s still a matter of choice. No shaming.
They want us to act responsibly by supporting what they call “community-first initiatives.” Among advice for readers, they suggest we travel off season, with a small group, or just behave less frontally. They profile “Earth-conscious organizations with unique sustainable and eco-conscious approaches to tourism.”
Who can fault any of it?
But what Fodor’s isn’t telling you is that they already had a No List 40 years ago that exposed how tourism disadvantaged leisure travelers then and still does.
I will explain further down.
Vigilantes for the climate
This year’s No List is part of a growing public pushback against corporate perpetrators of global warming.
Climate Coach of The Washington Post Michael J. Coren cites a Reuters dispatch of environmental bounty hunters “bagging big polluters with technology from cameras to satellites as rules to curb greenhouse gases go into effect.”
But nonprofits had already begun to call for curbing nonessential travel before Covid shut it down anyway. Activity is centered in Europe, where rail networks connect across borders.
A few examples:
- Stay Grounded of Austria has brought together more than 160 organizations from around the world that since 2016 promote alternatives to air travel. The network includes local airport opposition groups, climate justice activists, nonprofits, trade unions and academics, among others. Unfortunately, no affiliates are named.
- Pledges made to Sweden’s We Stay on the Ground have reached almost 100,000, according to The New York Times.
- Flight Free members forgo air travel across the States, Europe, the U.K. and Australia, although across the vast U.S. where trains are few, slow, and bathrooms often filthy, pledge numbers remain below 500.
- No Fly Climate Sci offers an online forum that links aviation and climate change meant to reduce the need for academics to fly to conferences. Co-founder Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who founded the online forum, told The Times that “When you get on a plane, not only are you responsible for emissions, but you’re also casting a vote to continue expanding that system.”
- European airports are generally ahead of the rest of the world in adapting to climate change. According to Airport World, they outperform the global average in carbon performance, registering a -11.9% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 CO2 emissions, which they control directly or indirectly, compared to the global reduction rate of -8.1%.
Yet none has adopted policies that incentivize airlines to operate greener than the dublin airport authority [sic]. dda is incentivizing airlines to operate the most fuel-efficient aircraft at its Ireland hub by a 25 per cent discount for 24-hour runway operations.
Last year dda began applying higher charges for noisier aircraft at night.
Quantas on its own and with Airbus is investing more than a half-billion dollars in sustainability projects and technologies. It says so up front.
On the downside, the French government’s plan to eliminate domestic flights in favor of trains is so riddled with exceptions, it’s meaningless.
Scientists tell us that guilt-free flying is still a long way off.
When Fodor’s let tourism just say No to leisure travelers
They called me “the soul of the [Florida] book” because I introduced readers to a region they assumed people didn’t want to visit. There was no big league hotel anywhere around.
Instead, I wrote about the heart of sugar cane growing and of east coast winter vegetables. The region just happened to have a huge lake in its middle with an almost completely paved 110-mile trail that’s part of the Florida National Scenic Trail atop the dike built by Herbert Hoover after
catastrophic flooding in 1928. The dike was high, the land flat. You could almost see Earth curve and marvel about the science of gravity.
Makes you wonder what if global warming also disrupted gravity, so that by 2030, gators, dogs and we all became free floating. I reckon that gravity would not be a political issue.
NOTES
https://www.fodors.com/news/news/fodors-no-list-2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/travel/travel-climate-no-fly-pledge.html
https://airport-world.com/europes-airports-lead-the-way-on-carbon-management-globally/ https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/46/130/46130361.pdf
https://airport-world.com/europes-airports-lead-the-way-on-carbon-management-globally/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/24/world/europe/france-short-haul-flights-emissions.html
The Fodor’s reference to me is no longer available.
https://simpleflying.com/qantas-worlds-largest-aviation-climate-fund/
