Lauren Collins on the drawbacks of European party tourism

“A concentrated influx of tourists can be a welcome boon to an economy, or it can be a pestilence. “I have always been proud to be British, but these degenerates are dragging us through the mud,” Michael Birkett, Britain’s vice-consul in Ibiza, said, before quitting his job, in 1998, in disgust at the behavior of his countrymen on the island, which he likened to that in Sodom and Gomorrah. After EasyJet began flying to Prague, signs went up in local bars: “Please, no groups of drunken British men allowed.” In 2008, Latvia’s Interior Minister deemed the “English pigs” who had urinated on a war monument in Riga a “dirty, hoggish people.” The next year — after shopkeepers in Malia staged an anti-British tourist march — the Foreign Office distributed leaflets and coasters in old town and beach bars across Europe, printed with the reminder, ‘Don’t Be a Dick.'”
–Lauren Collins, “The British Invasion,” The New Yorker, April 16, 2012