In the past, travelling to a new place meant several challenges.
- Adapting to a new climate
- Trying out a new cuisine
- Struggling to communicate
- Navigating through an unknown city
- Planning the trip without the internet
Today, most of those struggles have disappeared. Travel has never been easier, thanks to the internet, globalization and cheap flights. In effect, we have turned almost all travel into tourism.
While travel is arduous, tourism is convenient. Yet, the difficulty lends meaning to the experience. With tourism, convenience replaces the struggle and pleasure replaces the joy of discovering a new place. If you are in a new country, but eat your own cuisine, speak your own langauge and never get lost, how new is that country after all?
Tourism makes travel more convenient, and thereby robs it of meaning. In today’s convenience-centered world, touristification is rampant. It transcends travel and into nearly every other realm.
Observations 