Wanderlust's Twin Faces: Self-Discovery versus Escapism — Epoche B2
In defence of the traveller who only wants to lie down There is a hierarchy in the way Europeans talk about their holidays, and everybody knows the rankings without having been taught them. At the top sits the journey of self-discovery: the month on the Camino, the language course in Bologna, the winter spent somewhere difficult. At the bottom sits the package week on a Mediterranean beach, which one is expected to confess rather than describe. The distinction between the two is real enough. The moral ranking attached to it is a marketing product, and it has done more damage to European cities than the sunburnt tourists it looks down on. That last sentence is a strong claim, and what makes it payable is not either traveller's state of mind but the buildings each one requires. Conceding the distinction: two kinds of departure Some departures are genuinely a confrontation: you go somewhere that does not accommodate you, you are incompetent in the language, and you come back altered in some small way you can name. Others are a suspension. You want three days in which nobody requires anything, and a beach supplies them efficiently. Blaise Pascal, in the Pensées — the notes for an unfinished defence of Christianity, published after his death in 1662 — put the whole matter unkindly and probably correctly: that our troubles come from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. His name for what we do instead is divertissement , diversion: the hunting, gaming and business we fill our lives with so as not to think about our condition. Two features of his account are usually lost when the line is quoted. First, he does not think diversion is a vice of frivolous people; he thinks it is the universal structure of ordinary life, kings included. Second, he does not exempt the strenuous version. A man who walks five hundred kilometres and a man who lies on a beach are both, on Pascal's account, arranging not to be alone with themselves — the walker simply has a more respectable arrangement. Montaigne is the useful corrective, because he was honest about the mixture. He left for Italy in 1580 and was away for seventeen months, partly to take the waters for a kidney complaint and partly to be out of a household he found wearing; his essay 'On vanity' says of his travelling that he knows what he is fleeing from but not what he is looking for. That is not a confession of failure. It is a description of most journeys, and it refuses in advance the tidy division into flight and quest that the ranking depends on. Where the ranking came from The contempt is not new, and it has two well-known statements, twenty-five years and one reversal apart. Daniel Boorstin, in 1961, set the lost art of travel — from travail , labour, a journey that costs the traveller something — against the modern tourist, who is insulated, passive, and expects the experience to be delivered to him. It was Boorstin who coined the term pseudo-event for a happening arranged in advance for the sake of being reported: not a lie, but not something that would have occurred if nobody were watching. The tourist attraction, in his account, is a pseudo-event with a car park. Dean MacCannell answered in 1976 that the tourist is no dupe. Borrowing a distinction from the sociologist Erving Goffman — between the front region, where a performance is put on for an audience, and the back region, where the performers relax and the work is done — MacCannell argued that the tourist is a genuine seeker after the authentic, someone specifically trying to get behind the front. The difficulty is that the industry noticed. What the seeker is shown is a back region built to be seen: MacCannell's term for it is staged authenticity, and its distinguishing mark is that it is designed to look undesigned. Neither writer is an authority on how to holiday. What matters is that the vocabulary the ranking uses — real, authentic, off the beaten track — was identified fifty years ago as the industry's own, not the traveller's. Only one impulse is sellable, and it needs somebody's flat What has changed since MacCannell is that the seeking is now the product. No tour operator advertises rest. Everything is an experience, an immersion, a chance to live like a local — and that language has consequences, because the traveller who wants a beach needs a hotel, while the traveller in search of authenticity needs somebody's flat. The economics of that second sentence are the mechanism by which a mood becomes a housing shortage. Take a flat that could be let to a resident. Write $p$ for the nightly rate a visitor pays, $o$ for the fraction of nights it is occupied and $R$ for the monthly rent a tenant would pay. Converting it to short-term letting is attractive when $$p \times o \times 30 > R + c,$$ where $c$ covers cleaning, platform fees and management. Put in figures of the order seen in a central European city — $p = 150$ euros and $o = 0.6$ — and the left-hand side is $150 \times 0.6 \times 30 = 2{,}700$ euros a month, against a long-term rent that in most such neighbourhoods is well under half of that. These particular numbers are illustrative rather than measured, but the inequality does not need precision to bite: wherever it holds, every flat that changes use removes a home from the residential stock, and it keeps holding until rents rise to meet it or the law intervenes. The effect on rents has been measured. Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López and colleagues studied Barcelona neighbourhood by neighbourhood, tracking the spread of Airbnb listings over time against rents and sale prices, and using the uneven timing of that spread across the city to separate its effect from general trends. In a neighbourhood with average listing activity they estimated rents about 4 per cent higher, transaction prices about 8 per cent higher, and advertised sale prices about 17 per cent higher than they would otherwise have been. The percentages are averages and depend on modelling choices, but their