Sue_xx_yy

Ah, Xenos, but then I'm doing research - yes! in support of the thesis that I one day hope to publish to great acclaim.....tentative title is, "Psychoeconomics of Lounge Chairs." In it I'll discuss how providing there is no market perception of a shortage of lounge chairs (which is assisted by regular relinquishing of same)hoarding of lounge chairs should decrease.

To return to our regular programming.... maybe why people insist on visiting the same places is the same reason why people insist on living in the same few places. In short, what drives urbanization might also drive tourism. Residents need jobs, while tourists need people to provide services, and so forth.

flanneruk

I'm not at all clear what the point of these questions is.

There's no such country as Europe. The differences between the culture and accessibility of even the closest neighbours massively outweigh differences between countries on the other side of the globe.

Britain is infinitely closer to Australia or New Zealand than it is to France in practically every way that counts. In many senses, even physically: flying to Sydney takes less time for people in Manchester than driving to the Dordogne. And I'd imagine Madrilenos feel a great deal more at home in Buenos Aires than on a Hungarian puzsta - which would take a lot longer to get to.

There's no "European" travel culture. A bunch of British stag party weekenders in Prague can't begin to be compared to a group of Polish old ladies on the Grand Tour of W. Europe's pilgrimage centres. Or even to their British brothers and sisters taking over an Umbrian villa for a fortnight, or doing the ATG Oxford "Approaches to Siena" 7-day walk.

The profound differences to tourism explain why Britain spends nearly three times as much ($56bn) on foreign holidays as identically-sized Italy. Which is about the same as Americans spend ($65bn) - though there are five times as many Americans - and rather less than the world's most important foreign holidaymakers, the Germans.

The answer, for what it's worth (very little), to J's queston is that in 2004 Europe's countries received 12.2mn US residents. The US received 9.6mn residents of European countries.

But so what? Britons aside (who make up roughly half America's European visiors outnumbering Germans over 3 to 1), few Europeans are really very interested in travel to the US. But thyy still spend four times as much on foreign travel as Americans.

walkinaround

logos...
here in the uk, if you've seen one high street, you've just about seen them all. yes, villages have their own flavour as do the large cities but mid-sized towns are extremely uniform. boots, super-drug, tesco, yates, ladbrokes and several other betting shops, council estates from a design challanged era, a pound-stretcher.

oh, i almost forgot...an argos where you can order things from a row of catalogs chained to a table, filling in your selections with a golf pencil, and then standing in queue waiting for the merchandise to be handed to you by a rude lout (very modern business model).

walkinaround

>>>>

But so what? Britons aside (who make up roughly half America's European visiors outnumbering Germans over 3 to 1), few Europeans are really very interested in travel to the US. But thyy still spend four times as much on foreign travel as Americans.
>>>>

flanner, in your stats, what is "foreign travel" when speaking of europeans? of course europeans spend more on "foreign travel"...an american spends a week at the beach in florida eating at applebees and he has done no foreign travel...a briton spends a week on the beach in spain eating fish and chips and he gets "credit" for foreign travel.

logos999

O.K you sometimes don't find the door of you own house, but the U.K is still far from what is standard in the US,
where sometimes you simply have to think "How many times have I been here before?". The majority in Munich voted not to allow buildings to be taller than the church (Frauenkirche), which now is part of Munich building law. The reason: Those tall buildings are so ugly and uniform, people don't even want them in the outskirts. Now imagine entering a city full of them.

JJ5

Thanks flanneruk, for your figures. I'm too lazy to look them up.

I agree that it little matters, but in the sense of the traveler's desire and what he likes- and what he has been shaped to like by home media and marketing of commercialed places. The fact that more Americans cross the pond than the other way around, does not surprise me. Or that I run into Germans and British the most here.

Many small and mid-sized towns in the Midwest, or North of the USA are totally different- one from another. Near me in MI, you may even hit an Amish section of the country, with another language and another type of economy.

This has nothing to do with being "a patriot" but with observation. The Badlands is nothing like the lake country of WI or MI. It doesn't look like it would belong on the same earth, let alone that close to each other.

I have stood in an Iowa wheat field with a German when he couldn't even speak he was so awestruck. He had never been in a place where you could see fields forever to your horizon line and get on a train and see the same, with variance of crops for most of a day. All he could say was "Gott" until dinner time.

It just seems that there are some of us who don't want to go to the marketed places and are often underwhelmed with them when we do, on both continents- so to categorize with such a narrow rote brush- it seems little "difference" to me. I think all tourists/travelers do not differ in the fact that they often lack both adventure and a true spirit of real originality by running to all the same over-hyped and often trite spots. And when they could often find as good or better with less "lounge" chair fighting location factors.

Neil_Oz

At least in the parts of Asia I've visited, Europeans seem much more in evidence than Americans and more likely to travel off the beaten track. Europeans of course live cheek by jowl with other cultures and languages in comparison with Americans - that might help. On the other hand, there are places (Vietnam for one) where Australians, with one-fifteen of the US's population, also seemed to outnumber Americans.

Londonlover

well only 20% of Americans have a passport. you can conclude from that few of us leave north America often.

Tassietwister

I do love the US as a country to visit. I lived there for a bit and wasn't thrilled about that but loved travelling there. It is an awesome country. I have many plans for further travel to that beautiful country and am sure my life will not last long enough for me to fulfill all my ambitions in that regard.

If I feel that way I can understand Americans, with even less liesure time, focusing more on their country than others.

However I do get annoyed at crowds in the US so please take your vacations out of the country so when we go we have room to move

Thank you

ira

My dear L,

>..you have to confess most of the buildings and houses fall in the either "tall and boring" or "wooden and uniform" style. <

Your remark indicates that you haven't been to the cities I mentioned.

ira

>... there are places (Vietnam for one) where Australians,... also seemed to outnumber Americans.<

I'm not exactly certain why, must be my old mind becoming more befuddled than usual, but for some reason I wouldn't expect to see many American tourists in Vietnam.

david_west

Something that hasn’t been touched on is the inherent nervousness of Americans when it comes to travelling. They are always the first to cancel at the first hint of any trouble/unrest etc. They also seem inordinately worried about “fitting in” (you won’t fit in – you’re foreign, just as I wouldn’t in the USA), hence the large numbers of “can I wear a t-shirt in church?” type threads.

I think that this may be a factor of the very insular news reporting that they get. There is so little foreign news coverage in the US media – and a lot of what there is seems designed to frighten people. For example I looked at a few US media websites during the recent unrest in Paris – and they gave a grossly distortionate picture of what was going on – and these boards were full of Americans cancelling, or considering cancelling their trips – even if they were months away. Other nationalities don’t react like this. You try and stop a Brit taking his holiday and there’ll be blood on the walls!

I can appreciate the appeal of holidaying in the USA – it is a big and beautiful place (well most of it). You share this attitude with the French who also largely holiday at home (in fact you’re like the French in a lot of ways – they just smoke more). However as I have said I think a certain number of Americans hide behind this as an excuse not to take risks (or, more accurately, what they perceive as risks).

Ironically, most of the Brits that go to the USA are just as bad – by and large they go to Florida as it’s less hassle than benidorm – and the natives speak a dialect of English. So to say that because lots of Brits go to the USA we’re an adventurous lot is rather missing the point – we just want food we can recognise, guaranteed sun and no language hassles.


P.S. Ira - vietnam has a LOT of American visitors for precisely that reason.

Kate

"I'm not exactly certain why, must be my old mind becoming more befuddled than usual, but for some reason I wouldn't expect to see many American tourists in Vietnam."

Chicken

PatrickLondon

Sadly, David, let's admit that for some Brits it's not a holiday UNLESS there's blood on the walls....

david_west

Kate: In the light of what has been happening to gary Glitter in Vietnam I think the word "chicken" should be used rather carefully in this context

david_west

patrick: Blood on the walls, vomit on the pavement and a lizard in the bidet.

Ah bliss!

(although for me this is all a matter of hazy recollection and will remain so unless Club 18-30 rebrand as club 18-50)

Sue_xx_yy

cmt, one problem is that on the less beaten path, it takes a long time to collect enough data to ensure a representative sample of the tourist population. I don't think that your observations of this or that place in Sicily can be taken to indicate a norm, because you would have to spend a long time in those places, much longer than I daresay you had available to observe while on vacation, before enough people came through that you could reliably identify any trends. (The day after you left, an entire convention of farmers from Nebraska could have come through Basilicata, thus squewing the results entirely.)

You would also have to compare the proportion of, say, German tourists at 'major' sites to the same demographic at the supposedly less-visited ones, before you could draw any conclusions about whether Germans (or whoever) as tourists are more likely to visit less famous sites than any other nationality.

There's also the possibility that people were visiting a given area only partially by choice - maybe their principal reason for being in a given locale was because they were visiting the local hydroelectric plant on business, maybe their bus broke down, maybe they took a wrong turn and decided to make the best of it, who knows?

Even if you could do determine that they were visiting purely for leisure purposes, you couldn't conclude that because a given nationality was in a given area, that this made them more or less imaginative or adventurous as tourists. 'Adventurous' is a highly subjective term - I've routinely been in situations that carry considerable risk of death or injury from exposure and thought little of it, but crossing a major traffic artery in Rome I consider very adventurous, notwithstanding the popularity of this city as a tourist destination. And what makes a given destination 'imaginative' as in 'more imaginative' than somewhere else? How do we know what 'marketing' or whatever inspired someone to go somewhere? Few of us are privy to what goes through someone's head when they view something. They might be staring at the Mona Lisa and noting the rate of oxidation of a given pigment since they last viewed it, or something equally esoteric. They might visit the Parthenon in order to discover what rare molds or fungi are growing in the crevices. In other words, what we view is the sum total of all the thoughts and experiences and knowledge we have as individuals, and a 'typical' or mainstream tourist experience might not even exist.It certainly isn't going to be obvious to the naked human eye.

The question makes for interesting discussion, but as flanneruk says, it is unanswerable.

willit

Kate - with the worries about bird flu, I think Chicken is top of my list of reasons to avoid Vietnam.

(I am too old to be worried about Gary Glitter)

JJ5

A good read for some of you who may be interested in the question of what is "adventurous"- or not, especially within the context of Asia/China/Burma:
Amy Tan's latest "Saving Fish from Drowning". Enjoy! I certainly am.

And although I have friends who have returned, I must agree with IRA on this one, because my two oldest and best friends (male)- one who is an ex-husband, say they absolutely will not return to any SE Asian location- as they feel they had enough of that, Thank You.

Ozarksbill

I am reminded by 5alive of a conversation with an Australian couple as we were headed to Kew Gardens. He asked, "Tell me, are you on the lam?" In the U.S. that would mean are you fleeing from the law, but of course he was inquiring about whether we were on our own. It does seem as though Aussie take very long trips, like five weeks, when traveling because of air travel expenses.

And the quiestion raised by JJ5: I am wondering how many Europeans do travel in the U. S. and to what destinations? We hear of Americans traveling to European destinations, but how about the other direction? I would argue that there is great variety in this huge country despite the lamentable onslaught of a McDonaldization/ WalMartization!

ozarksbill