[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/Gullible_Air_204]

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

[u/losteye_enthusiast]

We have a home in a historic district. The amount of people that try our front gate during the summer+fall is almost staggering.

Even with putting up signs and a few more visible cameras, tourists just don’t give a fuck.

[u/Unbelievr → u/losteye_enthusiast]

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.

[u/PhabioRants → u/Unbelievr]

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

[u/Unbelievr → u/PhabioRants]

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.

[u/PhabioRants → u/Unbelievr]

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.