Stop Saying You’re a ‘Traveler, Not a Tourist’

• Tourism is bigger than ever, with international tourists set to reach pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
• A new book, “The New Tourist,” talks about balancing tourism’s impacts and being a mindful traveler.
• The author explained to Business Insider why the stigma around the word “tourist” needs to go.

Whether carving their names on the Coliseum in Rome or haphazardly approaching bears at Yellowstone National Park, tourists frequently make the news for behavior that’s, frankly, very stupid.

Well-behaved or not, all tourists can have negative impacts on a destination, from too much traffic and congestion to rising rents and priced-out locals. And yet tourism can also bring economic and cultural benefits to a community — especially when it’s done right.

Paige McClanahan’s new book, “The New Tourist: Waking Up to the Power and Perils of Travel,” is all about how tourism impacts the world, from the good to the bad, and how people who travel can be the right kind of tourist.

McClanahan, an American journalist based in France, talked to Business Insider about what it means to be a new tourist, her experience living in a small touristy village in the French Alps, and why people should stop saying they’re a “traveler, not a tourist.”

The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

BI: Why do you think your book — and conversations about how to be a better traveler — are important right now?

Paige McClanahan: In 2024, we’re expected to see 1.55 billion international tourist arrivals, which is breaking the pre-pandemic record. Tourism is growing. It’s growing faster than the global economy. It’s a huge force.

At the same time, so many of us who are traveling are looking at our travels through a different lens. All of us, of course, were forced to stay at home during COVID because of pandemic restrictions, and I think that forced so many of us to reexamine this aspect of our lives that we had taken for granted.

I’m hoping this book is arriving in a moment where it can really resonate with people because we’re traveling more than ever, and I think we’re more ready than ever to consider the implications of our travels. And actually surveys are showing that people are more concerned about sustainability, they’re more concerned about their impacts on communities. They’re willing to spend more to have a positive impact on the place. So I hope the book is coming really at the right moment to speak to that audience.

Was there a specific moment or an experience you had traveling that sparked the idea for the book?

In 2018, I moved with my family to a little village in the French Alps.

I had a chance to see firsthand how tourism really brought life into this village that would otherwise have become a ghost town, probably 50 years ago. It brought life, it brought energy, it brought culture, it brought all sorts of activities for my family, for me and my children, that we wouldn’t have had otherwise in this beautiful corner of the French Alps.

At the same time, as a resident of a tourist destination, I, for the first time in my life, really had to deal with things like having a heaving grocery store for maybe six or eight weeks a year, or having the parking lot where drop kids off at school overflowing sometimes, or sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on the road that leads to my house when I’m just trying to get home with my groceries.

Tourism is so huge and it has so many impacts that go so much deeper below the surface than most of us think about when we’re traveling. It was really so moving to this village that that inspired me to start looking at travel and tourism in my journalism.

Everywhere I look, there’s complexities, there’s good and bad and it’s so important.

Can you describe what you mean by “the new tourist”? What does a new tourist look like?

In the last chapter of the book, I respond to an essay that was written by an exceptional writer named Agnes Kard and published in The New Yorker last summer called “The Case Against Travel.” She described some tourists as “unchanged changers” — people who go to a place and they change the place, they inflict their presence on the place, and they’re unchanged. They themselves remain closed in their hearts and minds to the experience and they come away unmoved. So, I took that as my starting point. That’s what I see as an old tourist. Let’s have a new tourist be somebody who’s a changed changer, changed and enlightened.

A new tourist is someone who takes the time to educate themselves about the impact that their presence will have on the place they’re visiting and uses that knowledge to do their best to minimize any negative impacts of their presence on the place and maximize any positive impacts, whether it’s economic, social, or cultural impacts.

And they’re changed themselves. They come with a view to having their mind changed. They come with a level of humility. They come with a strong desire to really see the humanity in the people they’re visiting and the beauty in the place they’re visiting and don’t see themselves as superior to the people or the place.

It’s a mindset shift, really, but I think that it’s a really powerful mindset shift that can lead to very constructive impacts both the tourist destination and on the traveler herself.

How might travel look differently for someone who’s embraced that mindset? How would their behaviors change?

To start as an example,…