Pressure to visit as many European destinations as possible is causing harm to local communities and the climate. Is there an alternative?
If any feature of London showcases its scale of possibilities to a new arrival from Aotearoa, it’s the city’s six airports. Six. Each with their own trainline, Pret a Manger configuration, and features attracting praise or contempt: Gatwick has free magazines, Heathrow doesn’t seem to have windows, the winding path through Stansted’s shops is a test of time management and consumer resolve.
These airports all have departure boards with ever-updating lists of destinations that capture Eurocentric imaginations: Athens, Naples, Prague, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Venice. For many New Zealanders living in London, these lists mirror the places we hope to visit and the airports become familiar touchstones for reaching them.
However, the sustainability of these lists feels precarious as we attempt to leave London on a long weekend, cramming into a RyanAir gate to board a delayed plane to Palma de Mallorca, joining the 14 million people visiting the Balearic Islands in 2023.
Like other New Zealanders in London, my travel aspirations are in tightening tension with their impacts on climate change, communities, and cultures. It’s becoming imperative to ask: what are responsible approaches to travel, and do we practise them?
There’s a roll call of questions New Zealanders ask each other in London. When did you arrive? Where are you living and working? Where have you been so far? Where are you going to go? Few questions kill the vibe quicker than asking your peers, Should we be travelling less?
Travel to Europe is an assumed and highly anticipated part of living in the United Kingdom for many New Zealanders. For the current generation, the aftermath of a global pandemic and visas with a time limit adds extra pressure to see as much as we can. The overseas experience also presents an irresistibly hedonistic and highly romanticised lifestyle. There may never be the opportunity to pour money, energy and time into these experiences again. We’re extraordinarily privileged to have the means to do it now.
We’re proud of our friendly, benign reputation as global citizens. “I’ve never met a New Zealander I didn’t like,” my manager from Essex tells me. However, we are not immune to the inherent conflicts and ethical questions of being visitors, and asking these of ourselves – and the tourism industry we’re participating in – is becoming more urgent.
In London, the low cost airlines are like Briscoes in Aotearoa. There always seems to be a sale. Save up to 15% on flights to culture-filled hotspots in France, Spain and Italy. Offer ends Wednesday, so don’t miss out! T&Cs apply. Premised on a high-volume, low-cost model, short trips have been further normalised by platforms like AirBnb and Booking.com. With the exception of COVID-19, the number of trips by UK residents abroad for holidays has steadily increased in recent decades and tourism records are now being broken in European countries. In 2023, Spain’s population of approximately 48 million, was visited by a record 85 million tourists.
In this environment, New Zealanders have become competitive with travel. We compare notes on how many countries we’ve been to, for how long, and for what price. A long, slow summer holiday in Europe for previous generations of New Zealanders in the UK has morphed into a common goal of one international trip a month, and informal challenges to visit “30 countries under [age] 30”. Compared to my parents’ generation, it also seems we’re making trips home more frequently.
As demand for travel and tourism grows, so does its share of global emissions. After moving to London from Aotearoa in 2022, Miranda Hitchings found work supporting NHS property services to navigate climate change risks. “Flooding and overheating is happening already,” she says. “Hospitals weren’t built for the temperatures we’re dealing with now.” Outside of work she volunteers for Kiwis in Climate, a non-partisan group of internationally and domestic-based New Zealanders working to reduce emissions and meet climate change targets.
Hitchings also goes on a lot of trips to Europe. These aren’t guilt free. “I definitely compartmentalise my professional and personal life. You arrive here and become subsumed in a culture where everyone does it. It is so normalised.”
London is distracting. The city is so consuming – the endless events, the crush of suits on the Northern Line, the frenetic energy in Hackney – that climate change is steadily pushed to the periphery. Hitchings describes straying from values held back home, like feeling protective of the nature around her. For many New Zealanders in London, our relationship with the landscape is different, more transactional. You’re regularly in the land on the Underground, and when above ground, you’re sandwiched between the trains and endless planes looping the sky.
As Hitchings points out, our emissions in our daily lives in London are generally lower than back home. The city’s infrastructure supports us to take public transport, and there’s a stronger working from home culture. “The meat here is gross,” she says, so she eats less meat. We’re shown a different way of living. It is easy to feel like our emissions pale in comparison with the private jets, cruise ships, and ultra-wealthy influencers. As we diligently follow advice to cycle to work and recycle our rubbish, horrified at the disposable coffee cups spilling out of London bins along the way, we can convince ourselves that our carry-on RyanAir flights aren’t too bad.
Unfortunately these perceptions don’t align with the evidence. A recent study analysed the long-distance travel of England residents, including international flights, and its role in carbon emissions from passenger travel. It found that while only 2.7% of a person’s trips are for long-distance travel, they account for 69.3% of that person’s greenhouse gas emissions from personal travel. Flying for leisure and social purposes are the largest contributors to personal long-distance emissions, and are disproportionately higher than our emissions for daily commutes.
Flying also raises significant equity concerns. One-fifth of fliers in the United Kingdom take around three-quarters of all flights. The number of flights taken is closely linked to income, with energy research finding that those combining low car emissions with high emissions from air travel in England are more likely to be urban residents, higher-income groups, younger adults, females, migrants, and people with dispersed social networks.
From a policy perspective, flying to Europe for a holiday is discretionary, or a luxury. Researchers are calling for policies that target long-distance travellers and specific types of trips (such as holidays and short city breaks) to reduce emissions in wealthier countries and change travel behaviour. In the United Kingdom and Ireland there are already proposals to introduce a frequent-flyer levy. The tourism industry itself is also vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as rising temperatures.
Future policy changes may force the focus of the New Zealand OE to change. In the meantime, while our presence in London may be temporary, we are leaving permanent tracks behind.
In Barcelona, there’s a hill tourists climb to watch the sunset from the Bunkers del Carmel. On the recommendation of another New Zealander, a friend and I climbed it in late summer 2023. With cans of Mahou lager and Lay chips from a convenience store by the bus stop, we pressed upwards through the dry heat and steep streets of La Salut. Beneath us, the magic of Park Güell was quietly in shadow.
At the top, visitors with the same idea occupied every inch of the bunkers (left over from the Spanish Civil War), phones in hands waiting for the sun to descend over the Sagrada Familia. We perched on the edge of a path, occasionally shuffling out of the way of locals walking their dogs. When we eventually wound back down, we noticed the angry hand-painted signs in the windows of local homes. You didn’t need to speak Spanish to understand the message. Members of the local community didn’t want you, a tourist, there.
Tourism, and its displacement of local peoples and cultures, has long been critiqued. In A Small Place, a book published in 1988, author Jamaica Kincaid draws on the connections between tourism in Antigua and colonisation: “[F]or every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere … but some natives – most natives in the world – cannot go anywhere … they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go.”
On European islands, Mallorcan residents have protested tourism for decades, pointing to increasing rents, overcrowding and cultural disruption. In the past, regional and national authorities have tended to dismiss these protests as “tourism-phobic” or “anti-tourist”. However this year, as protests throughout Europe gained volume and intensity (with some locals in Barcelona even spraying tourists with water pistols), this conversation has become more prolific.
Guillem Colom-Montero, lecturer in Hispanic studies at the University of Glasgow and expert on tourism in Spain and Europe, welcomes the discussion about the impact of tourism. In his view, the heightened antagonism from locals towards tourists demonstrates the urgency of tackling the structural problems with tourism and the need for policy change. “Regional authorities and tourist stakeholders need to understand that this model is not working. The economic benefits and wellbeing that tourism brings have been lost.”
Colom-Montero’s research indicates that overtourism is starting to affect destinations throughout Europe. In the United Kingdom, the promotion of the North Coast 500 road trip in Scotland has triggered similar problems to those seen in Mallorca, with overcrowding and high rents. “Locals in the Highlands feel their communities of place cannot continue as they have been because tourists are being prioritised by local authorities,” Colom-Montero says.
While tourists and locals have agency in their relationships to tourism, Colom-Montero says the onus is on local authorities and tourism operators to transform the status quo on a local level. “Locals want action here and now,” he tells me. For Mallorcans, this includes controls on illegal AirBnbs, reducing the large number of car rentals, and requirements that tourism tax be spent on local communities, rather than tourism promotion to draw in new markets.
“The authorities need to be brave,” Dr Colom-Montero says. There are growing signs of courage. Amsterdam has restricted the presence of AirBnbs. Venice has introduced an entry fee for daytrippers. Copenhagen is offering rewards for good behaviour, such as free coffee or extra time on an artificial ski slope for riding bikes and picking up rubbish. Since our visit to the bunkers in Barcelona, the bus route we took has been quietly removed from Google Maps.
How can New Zealanders in London also be brave and untangle ourselves from the pitfalls of tourism?
There are a range of strategies for pivoting to low-volume, high-value travel. Slow down and be creative by thinking harder about an unnecessary flight. Embrace the novelty of the train networks and keep an eye on Eurostar deals. Spend more time closer to home, and pay attention to the layers of the local places and communities around you. Do you need to see the mediaeval centre of Prague, or can you encounter ancient history in the fields of the English countryside? Do you need an Aperol Spritz on the Italian coast, or is a picnic in a London park with friends enough?
When visiting places further afield, Colon-Montero encourages us to focus on the local communities and be aware that they might be uneasy about your presence. Don’t tag locations on Instagram, he advises, as it leads to overcrowding. Avoid staying in AirBnbs and instead find a hotel or family-run accommodation. Research whether your money is spent locally. Make an effort to use the local language. If a business only operates using English, it is most likely not catering to local populations. Most importantly, he says, “you must learn from the locals, rather than the locals adapting to you. It must be both ways.”
In Madrid, our AirBnb host encouraged us to visit the National Archaeological Museum. As we wove through dim rooms of artefacts full of Prehistoric pottery and Bronze Age jewellery, it was striking that as long as humans have lived communally on what we now call the Iberian peninsula, there has been intercultural exchange. Ancient and complex relationships were woven throughout the Mediterranean, between the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Moors, the Christians.
Anthropologist Dean MacCannell, author of seminal work The Tourist (1976), describes tourism as a framework that offers a common space for shared experiences. In a recent interview with Novara Media, he describes human curiosity in new places as being “as old as myths and legends.” He’s hopeful that travel can be the basis for a new globalising humanity, but to achieve this we must travel “with a purpose rather than checking off a destination on a bucket list”. We need to return to the core principle of travel being a conversation with other people and ourselves.
New Zealanders collectively gather around travel not only in WhatsApp group chats organising dates and leave, but through the stories and reflections we cultivate and share afterwards. In many ways, we are already having meaningful experiences beyond tourism. A significant number of us are retracing the migration and colonial histories of our families or ancestors, and have an opportunity to dive into all the self-reckoning and learning that brings. We are often visiting family and friends and experiencing landscapes with social, cultural, and political significance to our individual and collective identities, that can trigger important self-awareness and sometimes discomfort. If we make a trip to Hastings, say, a small coastal English town, we encounter the site of a battle between the Normans and Anglo-Saxons that changed the course of the world’s history, including for the east coast of Aotearoa.
For New Zealanders on an “overseas experience”, revising our reasons for travelling may shorten the lists, but that doesn’t mean closing the door on once-in-a-lifetime experiences and rich cultural exchange. In fact, it only opens it.