The only defense against mass tourism is to become a mass tourist?

In observance of Veterans Day, let’s look at the territory that the Greatest Generation fought for in the 1940s…

In the old days there was a tradeoff between being an independent tourist and joining an organized tour. As an independent tourist perhaps you wouldn’t see as many things per day, but you could wander around a city and enter museums and other attractions as the whim struck you. Today, however, due to mass tourism combined with a touch of coronapanic, the headline tourist sites of Europe require booking advance reservations and organizing transportation to arrive on time for those reservations. In other words, the independent tourist now needs to do all of the stuff that a tour company ordinarily does. Three weeks in advance, for example, we tried booking a ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Everything was sold out (we eventually got onto a guided tour for 3X the price, but let’s not call it scalping!). The Louvre was sold out a week in advance. Some of this can be navigated around via memberships (Amis du Louvre) or a Paris Museum Pass. But I’m wondering if the best defense against mass tourism is to become a mass tourist (if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em). An organized tour of Paris could hit all of the major sites in a three days and the participants wouldn’t have to spend evenings pre-booking on the Web and then fretting about how to get from one reservation to another. If desired, spend a couple of extra days as independent tourists seeing the second- and third-tier sites.

Here’s our Eiffel Tower experience. Because we had to book it weeks in advance, it fell on the only rainy day of our trip:

I guess we shouldn’t complain about the lines. If not for the combat veterans of World War II and the desk veterans who kept them supplied, we might have needed to learn German to visit the Eiffel Tower.

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One thought on “The only defense against mass tourism is to become a mass tourist?

  1. Why do you bother with this tourism? Judging from what you wrote on the Louvre it would seem that you would have a better aesthetic experience looking at photos in a book or on line. I mean everyone knows what the Mona Lisa looks like – so what is added by standing in a mobbed room with people taking selfies and the picture behind glass or plastic or whatever & you have 45 seconds to stand in front of it and then move on. Nothing you are describing sounds enjoyable, more like just tick the boxes, I was there. For the kids it is just punishment, no one could pay me enough to go to an art museum till i was about 18, and they are not going to remember much or any of it. So besides having something to write about & the writing seems to be mostly about how dreary the experience is, the point of this European Vacation is what?

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