The golden age of international travel is over, says Pete McMartin

National Post

a day ago

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(The growing disaffection with tourism in Europe wasn't new to us: Over a decade ago, we stepped out of our hotel in Barcelona to see spray-painted on a wall 'F— Off, Tourists' — accommodatingly written, I thought, in English, so as we were sure to get the message.)
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The prolonged heat wave not only ignited these protests; it lent them an apocalyptic air. Record-breaking temperatures of 46.6 C were set in Spain and Portugal — and set off, too, talk of the increasing desertification of the Hibernian peninsula. Authorities closed the top of the Eiffel Tower due to the heat, and closed the Louvre after its exhausted staff, staging an impromptu strike, complained that the crush of tourists had overwhelmed their ability to deal with them.
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Elsewhere in Europe, the heat wave took on more dire forms. At least eight deaths were reported from heat prostration. Schools closed in Germany, and while that might have gladdened the kids, it was offset by tragedy — ice cream-makers there said it was too hot for ice cream production. In Italy, fields of melons cooked on the vine, and farmers covered their fruit and vegetable crops with tarps. Most of Italy's regions banned work between 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and hospitals reported a 20 per rise in emergency admissions.
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The UN climate agency offered little reassurance in the face of all this. Quite the opposite. It warned tourists that the heat wave was 'the new normal' — that Europe would increasingly experience not just singular bouts of record heat but prolonged periods of heat so intense they could affect health, disrupt vacation plans and, in worst-case scenarios, threaten lives. (Insurance companies, already facing a surge of claims due to weather disruptions, had adjusted their rates to this new reality by the time of our trip: Our health and travel insurance cost almost as much as a round-trip flight to Europe.)
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Now, as typifies the climate of our times, there were those who pooh-poohed all this as alarmist — apostate scientists, climate-change deniers and online trolls who view the world as a conspiracy perpetrated by governments and their co-conspirators, the mainstream media.
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To which I thought: They can believe what they want, though I would first welcome them to live through the intensity of the heat wave we did while in France, not only because it was alarming and scared the hell out of a lot of people, but because it was revelatory. It brought home the truth of my own hypocrisy and that of the many millions of other tourists who, by constant travel, help cause the very climate and local animosity that discomforted us.
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The golden age of international travel is over. Tourists will not only think twice about locals who are clearly sick of them, or waver at the thought of climate-related extremes that could leave them stuck in a country not their own, although both those factors will come into play.
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