"Europeans may sneer at Chinese tourists who pursue Beethoven, Bordeaux and Hugo Boss with the same undiscriminating avidity. But Europeans used to tour their own continent in a similar way. The original Grand Tour was also a display of relative economic power, as the gilded youth of northern, industrializing Europe headed to France, Switzerland and...

"When some tourists accuse those other tourists of not being good enough tourists, not open enough, not interested in adventures and new challenges, they fall back on the normative ideal developed from the days of the Grand Tour and onwards. They forget that behind the tourist label there are very different kinds of explorers. Some...