In the last week’s issue of The Gazelle, I came across an article titled “NYUAD, We Need to Travel Ethically and Responsibly”. At first, I was thrilled to see that after the article on sustainable tourism I wrote in Oct. 2020, similar topics came up yet again. Before coming to NYU Abu Dhabi, I spent much of my gap year in Poland, promoting international experiences such as high school abroad or gap years. Ethical travel was a big part of these conversations. Unfortunately, Bechdol’s article fails to adequately unpack this concept.

The piece lists actions that visitors can take to become “ethical tourists”: leave good tips, book tours with companies that fairly treat their employees, try to use local languages and think critically before choosing to visit places with oppressive governments or discrimination. I agree with these points but I also see them as acts of basic decency to be followed everywhere, including New York or Abu Dhabi. Rather, to talk about ethical tourism, we must move beyond the incremental changes that the article lays out, and critically examine the structural inequalities and exploitation caused by the travel industry. I argue that, when traveling, it is hardly ever possible to, as the article naively suggests in the closing line, “avoid any possibility of exploitation or other harm.”

One of the main economic impacts of the tourism industry is the rise of visitor-oriented services. In the best-case scenario, local businesses continue to generate profit for the host communities, even though they cater their services to travelers instead of the locals. In the worst-case scenario, the Hiltons and Sheratons of the world bulldoze through local hotels and restaurants to erect concrete monstrosities that remit profits abroad. Regardless of the pathway, many everyday services and goods become unaffordable for permanent residents. Furthermore, while greater exposure to tourism generates some economic benefits, it creates tremendous exposure to any shocks in steady flow of tourists. Millions of jobs were lost due to Covid-19 in countries like Jamaica, the Maldives, Fiji or Croatia and many impacted people could not make ends meet during the pandemic — not even with the extra few dollars of generous tips left by the last tourists in January 2020.

The tourism industry not only threatens the resilience of the economy but it often actively harms local communities. A good example is the U.S. state of Hawai’i, where in July 2021, the local government restricted nonessential use of freshwater by residents, while hotels with their swimming pools and other tourist attractions (alongside big agricultural corporations) enjoy unlimited access to water. All of this to ensure an uninterrupted influx of visitors from the mainland U.S. and abroad.

Hawai’i, despite being an example of continued U.S. settler colonialism, is a relatively wealthy state where the rule of law and human rights are supposed to be upheld. This case shows that the problems of tourism are not about the developed-developing countries dichotomy. Rather, it is about the global capitalist class that builds on centuries of exoticisation and captures the imagination of those privileged to curate for them the experiences they desire, regardless of the cost that local communities will have to bear. “Exocitisation” and “privilege” are critical concepts that we must unpack here.

Bechdol claims that Lima is a very different city from New York. Reportedly, outside of the tidy and bustling city center, the authors encountered “dirty streets and abandoned storefronts” and “homeless and poverty-stricken” men that made them feel uncomfortable. Paradoxically, to me, the descriptions seem to fit New York pretty well. Here, it is worth noting that homelessness is a structural, not “natural”, issue due to the predatory property market and those who have been made homeless are the last to be blamed.

Beyond poverty and homelessness, Peru and New York also have comparable level of homicides for 2021, 4.3 and 6.25 per 100,000 residents, respectively (as compared to 1.32 in London.

While there might be some unique dangers in Lima, the two cities are not structurally different. What definitely differs is the representation of the two cities: New York is “the capital of the world” while Lima is a part of the exoticised Latin America that often has no control over its portrayal in media and history classes. Hence, a critical step to becoming an ethical tourist is carefully interacting with the new surroundings to avoid falling victim to overt stereotypes but also subtle colonial models embedded in our psyche. In practice, this means refraining from making conclusions about the quality of life or safety only because a place seems dirtier than an average street in New York.

When it comes to “privilege,” another article from last week’s issue of The Gazelle highlights just how much we at NYUAD are sheltered from the real world in comparison to many other college students. Having said that, privilege varies even among NYUAD students, be it due to family wealth or level of financial aid. There are students for whom the stipend and study away allowance is their only source of income. In such cases, spending 13 USD on a “basic cafe breakfast” or a sushi dinner — whether in New York or in Lima — is a rarity, not a cheap opportunity. By being more conscious of the level of inequality in our immediate surroundings, we can learn how to be more mindful of it when we travel and hence, travel more ethically.

Ethical tourism is not about tips and I am not going to give a laundry list of actions to take. In fact, this article is only a tip of the iceberg as I do not have the space to discuss the intersectionality of economic privilege (or lack thereof) with the dimensions of gender or race. At NYUAD there are classes, such as Postcolonial Turn, that are a good starting point for examining how we perceive places outside of the hegemonic West and how we engage with them. I hope we all can use these academic perspectives to make a better sense of travel, an exciting opportunity that we have such wonderful access to.