9 February

I was talking to my brother about overtourism. Mike is a senior manager in the travel industry. He made the fascinating point that what’s allowed travel to explode to levels of destruction is Airbnb. All of these people need somewhere to stay, before Airbnb cities and locations were simply incapable of accommodating these huge masses of people. This in turn creates near apocalyptic problems for the infrastrtucture of places tourists descend on. That infrastructure historically reached an equilibrium with other local services, because the accommodation providers were part of the local community too. Airbnb, like Uber, and social media, couldn’t care less about any of that.