Klaus Westerhausen on how “independent travel” has come to resemble mass travel

“Today’s travelers are following an institutionalized and sanitized version of the travel culture pioneered by those early drifters. Their ever-increasing numbers have spawned a separate touristic infrastructure that operates parallel to its conventional counterpart and represents a viable tourism sector in its own right. Gone are the days of the intrepid explorer. These days, travelers are the inhabitants of a series of singular and transient social worlds. Isolated from both home culture and host society, travelers become acculturated to the subculture through collective activity at subcultural centers.”
–Klaus Westerhausen Beyond the Beach (2002)

De-academicized paraphrase: Today’s independent travelers operate within a kind of grass-roots infrastructure that has sprung up to accommodate their tastes — and in this way independent travel mirrors mass tourism in many respects. Thus, as “independent” travelers travel from backpacker hangout to backpacker hangout, they find themselves within a mobile subculture that belongs neither to their home country, nor to the culture through which they are traveling.