SENTIDO > CULTURE > TRAVEL

TOURISTS SHOULD SPEND THEIR MONEY WISELY
OVERPRICED TOURIST HOTSPOTS CAN UNDERMINE A LOCAL ECONOMY
23 March 2006 :: Joseph Robertson

Tourists are often and well advised to always be aware that areas which favor tourists also often contain "tourist traps", set up specifically to wrest more than the going rate from unsuspecting and often giddy or jetlagged outsiders. A traveler's advice to fellow travelers would be: responsible tourism shouldn't aid in the disintegration of local neighborhoods or the extreme distortion of basic living costs, but careless tourism can.

Economists may disagree about this, and some may argue that the more
"tourist dollars" (or euros or pounds or rupees) that pour into any tourist destination, the better, going by the principle that each additional dollar is one that wasn't there before, so the whole local economy is growing. But in reality, tourist economies are often highly stratified and can have adverse effects for those who have long lived in the vecinity.

To rely on anecdotal evidence, I can think of an example from years ago, traveling in the Spanish city of Zaragoza. In the central plaza across from the cathedral where you find La Virgen del Pilar, the city's religious icon, point of pilgrimage and one of its main tourist draws, there was an heladería, selling ice cream and other sweets and snacks.

It was really a bar that also sold ice cream, and many of the patrons were tourists, waiting for their tour bus to navigate the nest of old city streets to get to them, and keeping cool while the hot September sun beat down on the plaza, the pigeons and the old ladies selling sprigs of lavender.

The going rate in a lot of cities, if you could find an area not overrun by tourists, would have been about 120 pesetas for a cone, with one small ball of ice cream teetering on top. At the time, that equated to something like US$0.90, which wouldn't be all that bad.

This little tourist-trap pseudo-heladería was selling one of these wispy desserts for 225 pesetas. This was nearly two to three times what one could have paid in the US for high quality home-made ice cream in a small shop, and Zaragoza is not a city so small or remote as to have a hard time importing dairy or in particular helados.

That's just one example of the practice. Now, an example of the effect: in the center of Barcelona's old city, there is a charming array of overlapping plazas around the Esglesia del Pi (the church of the Virgin of the Pine). In one of the plazas is of course a bar that uses the name of the church and its adjacent plaza.

If you can find a place at the busy café terraza, or outdoor seating area, you might find a tasty menu of typical Spanish tapas and order a few. But, you'll also find that some of the dishes may be priced as much as three to four times their normal value. That's because the café is almost never empty, and even if locals stay away, there's a steady stream of tourists who will pay those rates, either because they don't know or because they don't care.

If you speak Spanish or Catalán, you might find yourself treated so favorably by the waiters that they'll tell you honestly that they would never pay those prices, and that "you'd be better off going down the street to get a menú [a fixed-price meal]" at a nearby restaurant if you want a good deal on lunch. Ours even added "Esto es todo un business [a money-making scheme]."

Regardless of the motives of the owners or the quality of the food, the place is a tourist trap. It has inflated prices which no one who knows the value of the items on the menu would pay, and a cheeky disregard for normal standards of service.

This is driven by intense activity in and around this plaza during certain times of the week. The reason the waiters might object and many locals might stay away is two-fold: 1) There are incredible pastry shops and small restaurants around the corner that provide incredible value; 2) the inflated prices and the over-spending of the clientele are driving the cost of living up throughout the barrio.

While the injection of new cash into a tourist market may help to stimulate a certain level of economic vibrancy, it also has casualties. People who have lived in the center for decades, who have worked for 30, 40 or 50 years to own and refurbish their flats in an elegant old city, are now being pushed out by developers who want to strip traditional interiors and façades, or even just tear down entire apartment blocks (often without permission), because they can capitalize by building "tourist-friendly" apart-hotels.

The extra cash enjoyed by the businesses which focus on grabbing inflated income from unsuspecting tourists alter the economy of cost and delivery, alter the economy of licensing and can make it difficult for other small businesses in less favorable locations to sustain their revenues. One often finds small hostels have raised their rates two and three times in one year, because as I've been told "la vida sube" [life keeps costing more].

There is no hard and fast way to avoid this or to direct one's spending, but knowing the lay of the land can be helpful. Having an idea of what the normal rates for a given service or product might be, can help defend not only one's own purse, but indirectly the quality of life of the locals.

And, if one is willing to take a moment and watch the way a neighborhood functions, one will see that when there is a local fabric, the scene is more enjoyable, the atmosphere richer, the experience more rewarding, and the souvenirs one chooses to purchase just might have a more unique character and a more authentic feel.

But most importantly, tourists need to think environmentally. They are part of the economy, and their actions have an effect on the local economic environment. If the exuberance they feel at having a few days' break leads to exorbitant spending, they may lead the local economy into a dependence on that sort of spending.

The question is: will local retailers, renters and restauranteurs, demand sustained levels of those rates from locals, forcing up prices and squeezing lifelong members of the community to the point where they need to leave? If tourist spending is 200% of the going rate, or higher, what does that do to people whose incomes are increasing by less than 2% per year?

The best places, the most vibrant and intriguing neighborhoods, the most dynamic and creative atmospheres, the places that have a "character all their own" are struggling to come to grips with this. Spain, as one of Europe's leading tourist economies, is facing this problem in a comprehensive way. The government has had to issue a program for nationwide low-cost housing for students and recent graduates, because the economy cannot provide the cash they need to keep up with cost of living.

Now, to complicate matters, this is not to say that money shouldn't be spent or that local items and/or services should not be high-priced. The question is value and the going rate. A local community, wherever it is, will benefit more when hard-working small businesses with an everyday, community relevance do well. The same cannot be said about situations where huge amounts of money are poured into businesses that sell cheap objects, trinkets and foreign-made goods to undiscriminating outsiders.

It is that kind of shop, and the customary profusion of useless or unreasonably structured or stocked businesses, attuned solely to less than curious or time-pressed travelers, that has lent a negative connotation to the word 'tourist'. But think of it a different way: if the tourist is curious to know the otherness of other places, interested in feeling the texture of new places, learning about life there, and wants to spend time in touch with the uniqueness of each place, and that's the tour one is on, then the word means good news to the places that person visits.

Even on vacation, we have a role to play; even in a foreign land, we are part of society; even where we feel that spending constraints can be lifted or we can "give ourselves a gift", it is best to think about where our money can best be spent, and spend it accordingly, thinking about what besides the cash itself we are introducing into a place we will soon leave behind. [s]