[awucs]

> A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back.

I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.

> How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me.

It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE, Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company.

> In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.

The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete with locals.

[sidibe]

>I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country.

Inequality is another issue, but this "overtourism" is because of the massive growth in the global middle class. It used to be only a tiny fraction of Chinese citizens could afford to go overseas. Now hundreds of millions of them can. And Europeans are also able to get around very cheaply now within Europe.

People travel more. I think that's fine, sorry if you lived in a picturesque town, but I think it's fair to share it with the world if you live in a nice place.