Travelers v. Tourists

There’s a difference between a “Traveler” and a “Tourist.” The short explanation of the difference is that a Traveler allows themselves to be changed by the experience. A Tourist expects the experience to change for them.

Travelers expect that the destination will be different. Different sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and culture. They embrace that they’re in someplace new and enjoy the differences. A Traveler expects to learn from a place and is open to being changed by it. For them, travel isn’t a world of make-believe and dress-up but seeing others’ lives and what makes them unique in the world. The Traveler is the ultimate bridge of understanding and respect between one culture and another.

Tourists expect a cookie-cutter experience. Everything and everybody is there to serve them. Hotel rooms are the same wherever they go, with the same amenities. Meals always taste of home. Clean streets with a Starbucks on every corner. And smiling locals selling Chinese-made nicknacks. Tourists dress how they want, act how they want, talk loudly, mock the locals, and get angry when they’re stared at or even told “no.”

Speaking from experience:

After 25 years in the travel industry, we’ve seen the differences firsthand.

• We’ve had clients stay in magnificently restored 16th-century palaces, only to complain that the songbirds in the courtyard were noisy and the TV didn’t get CNN.
• I had a group of Chinese tourists go to restaurants and only order hot water… that they’d then use to reconstitute the MREs they brought with them from China (for every single meal).
• A group of women travelers complained that they were getting rude looks and catcalls as they walked around rural Morocco wearing booty shorts and tank tops (even though we tried to educate them before they departed).
• The list goes on and on and on.

A New Type of Tourist

Recently, there’s a new, even more destructive type of Tourist, one that National Geographic recently named a “Traveler of the Year,” the LGTBQ+ drag queen. That’s right. A man with a mustache in a dress. “As founder of the nonprofit Outdoorist Oath, she brings the queer community together in the parks and wild spaces of Oregon, her home state.” And what is the Outdoorist Oath? It’s pretty much labeling places as racist, homophobic, and filled with imaginary microaggressions. This in and of itself isn’t a bad thing (even if their view is one of constantly looking for reasons to be offended). Anything and everything that brings people out of their comfort zone to expand their horizons in ways they feel welcome is a good thing. But like every bad trend, it starts with one place and then begins to creep into others. A few months later, it’ll grow, expand, and then (surprisingly) start to cause problems across places and industries that wouldn’t have been thought possible when it all started (“Bake the Cake or Else”). Can you imagine a Drag Queen walking through the streets of any Muslim (and others) country demanding that they change everything about their culture to suit them?

Worth the Risk?

Manifest Destinations Group, Inc. has long been known as a reliable partner for our clients and the places our clients travel to. We respect the people and places our clients travel to and, in so doing, have created a level of trust and access that our clients benefit from. What would these places and people think about us if we started having clients who not only disrespect the local culture but openly mock it traveling on a tour under our name? Future clients will lose the welcoming environment our agency has worked so hard to establish, and our partners on the ground will go from welcoming to downright hostile.

And what of the clients who are demanding traditional local culture accept them like they were accepted at home? They won’t have a good time on our tours, at least. At most, they might be harassed and even assaulted. While a lousy time only leads to bad reviews, having any client harmed on a tour is every operator’s worst nightmare. We put plans and people in place to do our best to mitigate any risk, but what happens when the client openly ignores your advice and goes out of their way to create dangerous situations? It’s easy to foresee not only a personal lawsuit but also investigations and lawsuits from a veritable alphabet of government agencies from city all the way to federal with unlimited budgets hell-bent on destroying your business in the name of pandering to someone who made a very obvious mistake.

Damned if you do…

So what can we in the travel industry do when confronted with a client who demands a destination change to accommodate them? Signed waivers often aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, even if they are notarized, carved in stone, and blessed by the Pope himself. Do you refuse to sell them a tour, setting yourself up for an attack from the very same alphabet agencies that would go after you if your clients were assaulted while intentionally offending the locals?

I wish we had the answers, but this bad trend is so new that it hasn’t even made it to the courts yet, but we’re confident it will.