"Disdaining tourists is the last permitted snobbery, a coded way of distancing oneself from the uncultured classes. And it drives me beyond bonkers to incoherence -- so I shall try to settle down. Examined calmly, there is no conflict between tourism and traveling. Just as one may eat one day at McDonald's and the next...

"Tourists, I could now better understand, were not some lesser species. Like all travelers, they had earned their right to travel as they wished, and if that meant organized tours and checklist sightseeing, who was I to tell them they were wrong? Travel did not always have to be hard or deep. It could even...

"According to Kant sublimity lies not in 'anything in nature' but in the 'capacity we have within us' to judge and enjoy without fear the very things that threaten us. Hence the subject of Kant's infinite ideas of reason is the tourist who repeatedly embarks on journeys in search of the extraordinary of enormity and...

"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...

If you haven't read last week's post on the " Rise of the Tourist ", I suggest you give it a quick once-over before reading on. Short on time? No problem. I'll sum up the broader points: Tourism is big business and in 2012 there is expected to be 1 billion global travelers. This trend...

"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...

The goal of many vagabonders is to blend in with the locals so well that they become invisible. Although the color of our skin sometimes makes that impossible, it's still fun to try. The Life magazine website had a great slideshow called How New Yorkers Can Spot a Tourist . Some of the points are...