Mass Tourism: The Tourist’s Dream or The Host’s Nightmare? Part Two
environment pollution is light pollution. On Crete, Greece, and in many other countries of course, the night sky, which so many in northern Europe cannot see because of clouds and dust in the air, is a spectacular site and even The Pleiades which have not been properly visible in the UK for years, are a common site. The recent craze for building vast hotels lit up like Disneyland at night has made the night sky impossible to see, so no longer can one lay on the beach at night and survey the universe in all its glory!
One wonders whether visitors from northern Europe are actually afraid of the dark.
With situations like this it is best to let the reader make their own conclusions, but in this brief summing up it is not unreasonable to say that while tourism overall is a good thing providing foreign income and involving as it does cultural and social exchange. As for mass tourism the outcome may not be so good, with tourism operators needing to operate at a profit the host country can find itself being controlled from abroad, but this forcing down of prices does reflect on the price paid by the consumer who can benefit to a certain extent from the ‘buying power’ of the operator.
Development of a mass tourism industry can cause environmental damage to the host country, one wonders what would happen if someone tried to build a 500 room hotel in the National Park on North Island, New Zealand! But if development is done sensitively the damage need not be major.
There is one final point where mass tourism may not be quite so good for the consumer and that involves the often horrific ‘charter flight’. Some prices for flights were mentioned at the beginning of part one, and using these we can do some simpler figures for the cost of flying per kilometre.
A pretty average price for a return trip to Crete, Greece, from London, a round trip of 3,400km can be had for about €180, a trip to NZ on a scheduled flight from London to Auckland, a round trip of 37,000km can be had for about €700. It is not difficult to see that the charter flights run by the mass tourism operator costs just on 5 eurocents per kilometre, while the scheduled flight costs just on 2 eurocents per km.
On the mass tourism flight you get very limited luggage, uncomfortable narrow seats with as many jammed on the aircraft as possible, usually no in flight catering or service unless you want to pay for it (usually at grossly inflated prices), and no entertainment.
Compare this to the scheduled flight to NZ, where you get a comfortable seat, several meals, free drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, and free entertainment in the form of about 40 movies and a plethora of music channels. And at a cost nearly 60% less than the mass tourism charter flight.
Bearing in mind that these tour aircraft are run by the tour operators so any profit they make does not come to Greece, whose side is the mass tourism operator on??
The author has travelled widely around the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. He decided in 1993 that organised tourism was not for him when he arrived in Teneriffe on a ‘package tour’ at 2am and was refused entry to the hotel by the hotel owner because the tour company had not paid him for two years.
He became a ‘Grecophile’ in 1969 after visiting Greece for the first time, and moved to Greece to live permanently in 2004 since when he has been involved with tourists in various capacities.
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