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The enigma of arrival: Is mass tourism a good thing or bad?

The tourist industry further argues that tourism from the West to smaller economies provides jobs and an inflow of foreign currency. But there is plenty of evidence that all of the above is not necessarily so. Most tourists from the West travelling to places like India, travel in groups and often do not meet anybody there other than their fellow countrymen. They are not adventurous, stick together and tend to become worried if their guide is out of sight.

Many of them admit that they go abroad not to see museums, temples and other cultural attractions, but to enjoy the cheap alcohol and bargain shopping, and the sunshine. The idea that mass tourism brings an influx of foreign currency to the locals is also flawed. Many Western tourism companies not only keep the bulk of the cost of the foreign hotels in the West, where the booking and payment is made, but have ways of forcing down the price that they have to pay to locally owned hotels for their clients.

This creates an intriguing situation, which actually works against the Western tourists learning anything about the country they are visiting. This is because the only way the hotels can make a satisfactory profit is from what the tourist spends in the hotel over and above what the tour company has paid for the room. So it becomes in the local hotels' interest firstly to provide as much entertainment and variety of restaurants, coffee bars, beauty parlours and other facilities as it can, but also to make it as difficult as possible for the tourist to leave the hotel for independent outings. It works. I have stayed at a hotel in India at which many of the British guests have never left their hotel during their whole holiday.

One would think that the development of hotels for the tourist industry is good for the local economy but the proliferation of 5-Star hotels in countries like Spain, Portugal and increasingly in India, has its own dangers. In the Indian state of Goa, for example, the need of these hotels for water during the tourist season has led to Artesian wells that are repeatedly lowering the ground water level to a point that threatens the environment.

What about jobs? Supporters of the tourist industry argue that mass tourism provides jobs for locals. That is true. But the people that the tourist hotels prefer to employ are the well educated. Thus one finds that bright young men and women with university degrees end up working as hotel receptionists — a waste of their talent and education. Most governments are aware of the danger of destroying a country's historical attractions by allowing too many tourists resorts.

The Government of Goa, for example, will allow no development within 200 metres of the high water mark on any beach, thus ruling out the sky scraper hotels right on the beach which shut out the sunshine in resorts such as Surfer's Paradise in Australia. The King of Bhutan wants to discourage mass tourism in his country by making it too expensive for most people to get there — you cannot get a visa unless you undertake to spend at least $100 US per day! Where do we go from here? Nobody knows, and the travel industry, which puts profits, first does not appear to be thinking about this.

Phillip Knightley is a London based columnist