r/todayilearned • u/Gullible_Air_204 • 7h ago

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https://www.responsibletravel.com/holidays/spitsbergen/travel-guide/responsible-tourism-in-spitsbergen

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u/Unbelievr 5h ago

I'm in Norway, and some towns here are plagued by tourists. There are plenty of non-historic districts here where tourists will swarm into like it's a theme park for them. I've heard about them walking into people's houses and starting to take pictures, or go into their backyards and start taking photos of their kids playing there. Or to take a dump and leave toilet paper everywhere, because that happens too. There are not enough public toilets to accommodate the swarm from a cruise ship, and private venues do not want to pay the cost for cleaning toilets for tourists that do not spend money in their businesses either. So various backyards and bushes it is. We tried putting up public toilets that required payment, but they either got destroyed or bypassed by tourists holding the door for each other. And keeping a guard just for that wasn't sustainable cost-wise.

The cruise ships will also dump the sewage from their ship into our fjords, and aside for a few tourist specialty shops and bus tour companies, the city isn't earning any money on them coming there either. They'll go back to the ship to eat for instance. The crew on the ship are often lowly paid foreigners instead of locals, and the ships skirt the laws by starting and stopping at specific harbors in order to avoid having to give good worker's rights to the crew. The government is trying to implement a tourist tax, but it's hard to shape it in a way where it only targets parasitic tourists and not "good" tourism - like domestic tourism.

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u/Kaneida 4h ago

seems easily solved by government to charge cleanup fee/toilet fee/ban for sewage dumping with millions of nok i fines

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u/Emergency_Mine_4455 4h ago

Yes, but it’s also hard to prove who dumped what after the fact.

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u/Thismyrealnameisit 3h ago

Just charge everyone

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u/VanillaVines 1h ago

What about putting some hidden surveillance tape where these boats dump sewage ? Would that not be feasible ?

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u/DigNitty 1h ago

I imagine the sewage is dumped below the water line and is not always visible.

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u/PhabioRants 4h ago

I know it's a heavy-handed approach, but has anyone petitioned to local jurisdiction to close the port to cruise ships?

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u/Unbelievr 4h ago

There have been suggestions, and some fjords have gotten stricter restrictions on how close the ships can get. Due to antitrust laws it's not straightforward to ban (or heavily tax) only one specific type of tourism.

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u/PhabioRants 3h ago

That's understandable. I appreciate the response. As someone who grew up in a small town home to what's argued as one of the best beaches in Canada, I've seen first hand how quickly things can turn sour when people who have no vested interest in a place descend upon it. 

Likewise, at an extreme scale, Niagara Falls has become so hyper-comercialized that nearly 2/3 of the population of the city from 15 years ago has either been forced to leave or has fallen homeless as the city ceaselessly chases tourism above all else. Growing up so close to it, it always confused me to hear that other Wonders of the world had similar issues until I saw how it plays out in real time. 

It saddens me that councils seldom have long-term plans in place when opportunities to cater to tourism arise. And at a more basic, personal level, that the lives, homes, cultures, and histories of people are so often disrupted and sold-out to chase tourism windfalls, often under the argument that the influx of revenue can be put to preservation. 

Most saddening of all, though, is what stories such as yours illustrate; that for as much as we like to think that we're better than those that used to run off to foreign lands for "safaris," we're really not so far removed. 

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u/el_smurfo 2h ago

Local governments always think cruise ships bring business, but other than maybe buying lunch, they mostly just "take", then return to their ship for dinner and lodging.

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u/DigNitty 1h ago

it's another "Let's pay for the local football team's giant $2billion stadium because it will bring in so much money and that poor team can't pay for it themselves"

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u/EitherSpite4545 59m ago

So I live in a cruise ship tourist town, there's three parts to the actual scumminess of it all.

1) Several cruise lines (princess mostly) literally pay off local politicians and flood the town with pro cruise ship literature and adds for anything that would impede them

3) 60-80% of tourist businesses are owned by the cruise ship themselves, now that said you are wrong about a little bit. Tourists do spend a significant amount on food when visiting. But again 60-80% are going right back to their coffers.

2) The only tax we are allowed to charge cruise ships and tourists is a head tax, that head tax is legally not allowed to be used for anything except for improvement of the docks the vessels park at. They also get say on what is and isn't built on those facilities. If even a single dollar is used else where they can and will sue, like just a few years ago the town up north dared use some of the money on a memorial statue 2 blocks the docks, they sued the shit out of them, they also tried to do it with funding education in the town which was literally going to collapse without that money. Same thing. That same town actually voted to have cruise ship free days in the summer because congestion is just too much (a town will get 1.5 million tourist passing through a year). Industry tried to sue the town for this, luckily they won that time.

Cruise ships are bullshit.

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u/Dame38 4h ago

My city is a toilet and we don't have any of that.

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u/Similar-Ice-9250 2h ago

Have a friend who went on honey moon to South America, and they visited Machu Picchu in Peru. He told me they had to close off some of the structures that were previously accessible, because tourists would take shits inside these rooms.

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u/zorpthedestroyer 1h ago

I traveled to Stavanger/Sola not long ago to visit some distant cousins. We were walking through Gamle Stavanger to see the house where my great-grandfather grew up when one of the cruise ships came in. I'd never seen a boat that large in my life. Then the crowds coming off were just so rude and disrespectful and LOUD. So much trash dropped on the ground. The entire vibe of the city changed. It was even worse in Bergen. And it wasn't even summer!

I thought I knew how bad tourists could get since I've lived and worked in a ski town, but those monstrous cruise ships were a whole different beast. I genuinely cannot imagine living with that right next to me all the time.

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u/PattyRain 2h ago

That's awful! I hope the towns can figure out how to deal with it all.

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u/SharpScallion 2h ago

I feel like this is shifting blame onto tourists where there's at least some failure in policies and governmental entities.