People Who Say They Hate Tourists Are the Worst Tourists — Here’s the Specific Evidence

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There’s a type of traveler recognizable on every popular international route who would be deeply offended to be called a tourist. They stay in neighborhoods away from the historic center. They eat where locals eat — or what they’ve identified as where locals eat, based on an app used primarily by people just like them. They avoid the things other tourists do, which is itself a tourism activity organized entirely around the movements of other tourists.

The irony is structural and self-reinforcing. You cannot opt out of being a tourist by being a different kind of tourist. But the attempt is ubiquitous, and the psychology behind it is worth understanding, not to be superior about it, but because most people who travel — including most people reading this — have participated in it.

The Contradiction That Nobody Notices About Themselves

The contradiction sits in plain sight. A person posts about “escaping the tourist traps” in Bali while staying in a neighborhood that has been developed entirely to serve people who want to escape tourist traps. A traveler in a Moroccan medina complains about all the other tourists in the medina they traveled to Morocco to visit.

Psychologists call the ability to hold contradictory beliefs without recognizing them as contradictory a form of self-serving bias. The version that appears in travel is specific: I am not a tourist because I am aware of tourists and disapprove of the way they travel. My awareness of the problem exempts me from the problem.

This doesn’t work. Awareness of overtourism doesn’t reduce the carbon footprint of your flight. Understanding that mass tourism harms local economies doesn’t reverse the dynamic when you’re the one contributing to the mass. The belief that thinking the right thoughts about tourism makes you a qualitatively different kind of traveler than the couple photographing the Eiffel Tower is a form of magical thinking with very comfortable real-world implications — it allows you to travel as much as you want while maintaining an identity as someone who has transcended the problems of travel.

Where the Identity Split Comes From

The distinction between “traveler” and “tourist” has been part of travel culture for a long time. Paul Theroux wrote about it. Evelyn Waugh wrote about it. The distinction has always functioned as a class marker as much as a behavioral description — “tourist” connotes package deals, guided buses, and cameras around necks; “traveler” connotes independence, depth, and authentic engagement.

This distinction has been thoroughly absorbed into travel marketing. The entire vocabulary of modern travel media is built on positioning its reader as the authentic kind of traveler who transcends the inauthentic kind. Every travel magazine, travel blog, and travel Instagram operates on the implicit premise that following this particular piece of guidance will make you the sophisticated traveler rather than the embarrassing tourist.

The market for this identity is enormous. Travelers will pay premiums for boutique hotels over chains because one signals belonging to the better category. They’ll eat at restaurants without English menus (or with English menus designed to look like they don’t have them) for the same reason. The anti-tourist identity is itself a highly commercialized product.

What ‘Avoiding Tourists’ Actually Produces

The practical consequence of organizing travel around avoiding other tourists is interesting to trace. It often produces a few specific outcomes:

• The displacement of tourism pressure — crowds don’t disappear when one traveler goes elsewhere; the traveler who “found” an undiscovered restaurant tells fifteen people about it online, and the undiscovered restaurant becomes discovered
• The commodification of authenticity — neighborhoods described as “where locals actually eat” get written up, which attracts tourists, which changes the neighborhood, which produces a new round of authenticity-seeking in the next neighborhood over
• Tourism spreading into places not built to receive it — the practical effect of everyone avoiding the main sites is often an expansion of tourism into residential areas that now have to deal with strangers photographing their homes

The person who felt virtuous about eating at the non-touristy restaurant has, by writing about it, done more damage to its non-touristy character than the couple who ate at the famous restaurant in the tourist district. At least the famous restaurant knew what it was signing up for.

The Specific Behaviors That Give It Away

The anti-tourist tourist is recognizable by a specific set of behaviors that are, in their own way, as identifiable as the behaviors they’re trying to avoid:

• Using an app to find “local” restaurants — which is to say, a curated tourist resource used primarily by other tourists seeking the same experience
• Staying in neighborhoods described as “off the beaten path” that are now on every travel list as off the beaten path
• Announcing the avoidance of tourist traps in contexts where other travelers can hear them
• Learning a few words of the local language specifically to have the experience of using them in front of other tourists
• Feeling genuine irritation at other tourists that is not felt toward oneself

This last behavior is the most revealing. The irritation is real, and its object is genuinely the behavior of other visitors. But the logic that exempts oneself from the same category doesn’t hold under examination. The American complaining about other Americans in Paris is an American in Paris. The tourist photographing a sign that says “not a tourist trap” for their Instagram is photographing a tourist attraction.

Why Locals Find This Particular Variety Most Exhausting

Residents of heavily visited cities and towns have documented views about different types of tourist behavior, and they tend to be not what people expect.

The tourist who visits famous landmarks, takes photos, buys souvenirs, and leaves is, in many locals’ view, the most honest and transactional version of tourism. The exchange is clear: you come to see our famous things, we charge money for the experience, you go home. The relationship is understood by both parties.

The tourist who positions themselves as above this — who wants a “real” experience of the local culture, who seeks to “connect” with locals as a tourism goal, who is seeking authenticity as a commodity — creates a different and often more taxing dynamic. They want more from locals than sightseeing requires. They want locals to perform an authenticity for them that validates their choice to travel differently.

People who work in tourism in popular destinations in Spain, Italy, Japan, and Morocco have described the “traveler not tourist” variety as requiring more emotional labor. They need to be told that this experience was real, that this interaction was genuine, that they found the real version of the place. The regular tourist just wants to know where the bathroom is.

The Vocabulary That Signals the Mindset

The anti-tourist tourist has a specific vocabulary that signals membership in the category. Certain phrases appear with such regularity that they’ve become nearly parodic, though people continue to use them without irony:

• “Getting off the beaten path” — a phrase now so beaten that the path it refers to is the most thoroughly documented path in travel writing
• “Finding hidden gems” — often followed by publishing the location of the gem online for thousands of people
• “Like a local” — a phrase that appears in the headline of approximately every travel article written in the past fifteen years
• “Authentic” — used to mean “not designed for people like me,” which is itself a form of tourism desire
• “Overtourism” — genuinely a real problem, discussed most frequently by people adding to the overtourism problem

What Genuine Engagement With a Place Actually Looks Like

None of this means that thoughtful travel is impossible or that all forms of engagement with a place are equivalent. They aren’t. But the markers of thoughtful travel look less like the anti-tourist identity performance and more like specific, quiet practices:

• Slowing down — spending three days in one neighborhood rather than rushing through a city in pursuit of all possible experiences
• Spending money locally — at family-run businesses, with local guides, in ways that create direct economic relationships
• Learning something real about the place before arriving — its history, its current politics, its social landscape — not just its “hidden gems”
• Accepting that your presence is a transaction and engaging with it honestly rather than performing a transcendence of it
• Not making your being-there about your identity at all

This last item is perhaps the most transformative: travel that isn’t organized around the story you’re going to tell about yourself when you return. Travel where you’re genuinely interested in the place rather than in what visiting the place says about you.

The More Honest Way to Think About All of This

Tourism is neither purely good nor purely bad. It transfers wealth from wealthy travelers to places and people who need it. It also creates dependency, commodifies culture, and displaces residents. Both things are true at the same time, and neither is negated by the traveler’s intentions or self-image.

The more honest framework is something like: you’re a tourist. You are visiting a place. The place is not being transformed into something more genuine by your presence than it would be by someone else’s. The experience you’re seeking — connection, authenticity, something real — is available to you regardless of whether you’re standing at the Colosseum or in a restaurant that doesn’t have an English menu. It depends on whether you’re actually paying attention.

The couple photographing the Eiffel Tower might be having a more genuine experience than the person watching them with visible disdain. At least they know why they’re there.