Why China’s real estate crisis should make global travel industry nervous

Fat Kim is laughing at Xi and Putin he is rubbing his hands licking his chopsticks thinking it’s just a matter of time they will come to me and I will own them both are failing miserably on the world stage

The Chinese property crisis is working like Brexit, with similar damage across the board. But the tourist industry has more serious problems. Anti-tourism is rising. AirBnB is being blamed (usually wrongly) for increasing rents and homelessness. In fact governments have failed to build affordable properties for many years - now they simply have someone to blame. Rising nationalism and antagonism towards immigration is starting to target tourists too, who are seen as a form of 'pollution'. Environmental activists are also targeting them (in between travelling long distances to music festivals and demos).

The tipping point may have been the arrival of very large cruise ships, disgorging vast numbers of tourists in one place at the same time. Venice felt the greatest impact from that, but nowhere copes too well with it. Without the infrastructure to deal with this, it was always going to cause problems.

Another issue is the increase in tourism without an increase in tourist management. On holiday, a proportion of people tend to lose their inhibitions, often with help from alcohol. Spanish police have learned how to cope with drunken Brits, but the Dutch haven't. If you welcome more tourists, you need to stump up the cash to support them and police them. Governments have proved to be too cheap and too lazy to do that.

The belief that you can make money with fewer, richer tourists is false. Mass tourism delivers cash where it is needed, across the board. The rich are too picky in how they spend to replace that.

Thus the frequent comments on here condemning tourism as a disease, many from people who regularly go on holiday and expect to be welcomed by locals. There will be more bans and blocks, so it may be another sector to consider exiting. If your income depends upon a sector that either the masses or governments are turning against, it is time to get the heck out of Dodge and diversify.

I hate to sound racist or bigoted, but I hope they stay home forever. During a trip pre-covid to Kota Kinabalu, about 90% of the foreign tourists were mainland Chinese, and their behaviour made the trip considerably less fun for my wife and I, and evidently for the other foreign tourists there, with whom we occaisonally exchanged knowing looks of disgust, raised eyebrows, shaking heads.

Huge groups in huge fleets of huge buses of a scale designed to overwhelm a place, and filled with people without an iota of consideration, manners or cleanliness.

The "travel industry" are probably the only ones unhappy with the lack of additional hordes of Chinese tourists.