Koreans planning trips to the United States are worried about privacy intrusions, but many are also turning to self-censorship. Posts are piling up on U.S.-travel community sites, including comments like, “I have to go to the United States, so I deleted all my social media posts,” and, “I’m worried even my YouTube comments could cause problems.”
Kyoto, a city beloved by Koreans, will raise its lodging tax tenfold, from the current maximum of 1,000 yen ($6.31) per person per night to 10,000 yen starting March 1. In April, Hokkaido will introduce a lodging tax, with a rate of up to 500 yen, and 13 municipalities, including Sapporo, will also impose their own lodging taxes.
It’s quite weird, I love travel and it’s easy to see that people are clearly making decisions about what they will not tolerate.
As for Japan it’s really become a victim of its own success like many other tourist hotspots, and it’s becoming untenable for locals…and TBH as a traveller many places are too overcrowded and a tacky experience. The result is only gonna lead to more expensive travel options.
With america and many other hotspots now removed due to political reasons I think that means adopting new travel habits unless you are willing to pay through the nose and/or compromise the want to visit list.
I interpreted for an academic conference about sustainable tourism shit fifteen years ago. It made so much more sense than what just feels like whoring out your culture for pennies.
And now, here we are, having to treat foreigners like shit as if it was their fault that we didn’t think ahead.
Yeah, we love traveling a lot, too. The numbers of tourists (which includes us, I know) has gone up so much in the last few years. It’s like COVID made everyone say, “fuck saving money, let’s just travel the world and buy luxury goods instead.” We went to Paris for Christmas 3 years ago, and while some of the bigger stores were crowded, it wasn’t that bad in the rest of the city. We just got back from Paris, and holy hell you could barely go anywhere due to the amount of people every place we went. It was 2C every day, and that didn’t deter anyone.
I fully support raising lodging taxes like this to help locals out who have to deal with idiots like me on a daily basis.