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Make Me Smart

Is it possible to be a "good tourist"?

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Summer is here and like many you might be planning your next vacation. But here’s the thing, a lot of popular destinations are grappling with the pressure of overtourism or mass tourism.


On today’s episode, we dig into the phenonmenon of over tourism, the growing tensions between locals and visitors and the global economic forces at play. Plus, is it possible to be a responsible tourist or have we pushed some destinations too far?


Later, listeners sound off on the power of labor unions and food allergies. Finally, are you team check-in bag or carry-on? This week’s answer to the Make Me Smart question might make you rethink everything!


Here’s everything we talked about today:




We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question: What’s something you thought you knew, but you later found out you were wrong about? Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams.

0:08.5

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

0:13.2

And I'm Rie Mae Makhres. It is Tuesday, the 1st of July. It is time for our weekly deep dive.

0:19.0

We are going to be talking today about tourism, specifically the problem of there being too many tourists.

0:23.7

I know it's something I've been thinking about when figuring out my summer travel, so I am excited to get into it.

0:29.3

Yeah, we want to know more about this growing tension between tourists and locals and the global economic forces that play into all of it. So here to make us smart is

0:39.4

Christopher Gaffney, professor at the Tish Center of Hospitality at New York University. Welcome to the show,

0:45.4

Christopher. Thanks very much. Pleasure to be here. And I understand you're in quite the tourist

0:50.9

location yourself. I am. I'm in Rome, Italy, where it is

0:56.6

excruciatingly hot and chaotic with tourists. Oh my gosh. So first of all, can you lay out

1:05.1

what has set up this moment where there are these protests happening, particularly in Europe,

1:12.1

against tourists,

1:16.4

and why they're getting so much attention right now, because these have been tourist spots for ages.

1:22.5

They have been tourist spots for, in some cases, 150, 200 years.

1:27.2

In case of Rome, since Christian pilgrimage became a thing.

1:36.3

And the explosion of tourism in the last 20 years has really taken its toll on city centers,

1:40.6

and especially for people who are not involved in the tourism industry.

2:03.0

And what we see with tourism numbers increasing, I was just looking at the numbers today, this year there were probably 1.5 billion international tourist flights and Europe receives the lion's share of those international tourists. And so if we think of a city like Barcelona where there's some very well-documented protests,

2:04.7

it's a pretty small city.

2:12.2

The metropolitan Barcelona is probably 3 million people, and they receive 20, 30 million tourists a year,

2:15.5

which is a lot of pressure on the city center.

2:18.7

And so when tourists come, they consume more resources in terms of, they occupy transportation, but they also generate trash and noise and use more water,

...

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