"The anti-tourist rhetoric of consumption usually goes like this: Your holidays demonstrate a lack of sophistication. You indulge in cheap pleasures and buy tacky souvenirs. You show no restraint or moderation, you overeat, overdrink, overspend. You are far too passive, just dozing in the hammock, hanging around the pool, or letting yourself be transported from...

"Unlike anti-tourists, elite tourists don’t have to worry about those other tourists. They have always been able to pay for privacy and exclusivity. The anti-tourists have a more difficult position, because they belong to the category of tourists who crave a chance to experience the unspoiled, the unexploited, and for them it is crucial to...

"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...

"Our incessant commentary on others gives insights into the tourist or vacation mode of consumption. "Those other tourists" come to represent a commodified, fragmented tourism. Here we find a model of tourism as consumption, with vacationers moving along the shelves of the tourist supermarket, falling for today's special offers, the well-advertised, the cheap, the easily...

"Some travelers have always needed to set themselves apart from others -- from tourists. And almost as soon as the word tourist appeared at the start of the nineteenth century, it began to carry derogatory overtones, but the democratization of travel has charged the word with greater irritation and scorn. As more and more tourists...

"In the long history of modern tourism one element is striking. The main tourist attraction tends to be those other tourists. We devote a lot of time and energy to observing and commenting on fellow travelers. At the beach or the café on the piazza we turn into amateur vacation sociologists. In the evening we...