An American mom who moved to the French Alps experienced the impacts of over-tourism firsthand. She says there's a better way to do it

Journalist Paige McClanahan, author of "The New Tourist," says there's a better way to do tourism, for the destination and for the traveler.

• Tourism is bigger than ever, with international tourists set to reach pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
• A new book, "The New Tourist," talks about balancing tourism's impacts and being a mindful traveler.
• The author explained to Business Insider why the stigma around the word "tourist" needs to go.

Whether carving their names on the Coliseum in Rome or haphazardly approaching bears at Yellowstone National Park, tourists frequently make the news for behavior that's, frankly, very stupid.

Well-behaved or not, all tourists can have negative impacts on a destination, from too much traffic and congestion to rising rents and priced-out locals. And yet tourism can also bring economic and cultural benefits to a community — especially when it's done right.

Paige McClanahan's new book, "The New Tourist: Waking Up to the Power and Perils of Travel," is all about how tourism impacts the world, from the good to the bad, and how people who travel can be the right kind of tourist.

McClanahan, an American journalist based in France, talked to Business Insider about what it means to be a new tourist, her experience living in a small touristy village in the French Alps, and why people should stop saying they're a "traveler, not a tourist."

The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

BI: Why do you think your book — and conversations about how to be a better traveler — are important right now?

Paige McClanahan: In 2024, we're expected to see 1.55 billion international tourist arrivals, which is breaking the pre-pandemic record. Tourism is growing. It's growing faster than the global economy. It's a huge force.

At the same time, so many of us who are traveling are looking at our travels through a different lens. All of us, of course, were forced to stay at home during COVID because of pandemic restrictions, and I think that forced so many of us to reexamine this aspect of our lives that we had taken for granted.

I'm hoping this book is arriving in a moment where it can really resonate with people because we're traveling more than ever, and I think we're more ready than ever to consider the implications of our travels. And actually surveys are showing that people are more concerned about sustainability, they're more concerned about their impacts on communities. They're willing to spend more to have a positive impact on the place. So I hope the book is coming really at the right moment to speak to that audience.

Was there a specific moment or an experience you had traveling that sparked the idea for the book?

In 2018, I moved with my family to a little village in the French Alps.

I had a chance to see firsthand how tourism really brought life into this village that would otherwise have become a ghost town, probably 50 years ago. It brought life, it brought energy, it brought culture, it brought all sorts of activities for my family, for me and my children, that we wouldn't have had otherwise in this beautiful corner of the French Alps.

At the same time, as a resident of a tourist destination, I, for the first time in my life, really had to deal with things like having a heaving grocery store for maybe six or eight weeks a year, or having the parking lot where drop kids off at school overflowing sometimes, or sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on the road that leads to my house when I'm just trying to get home with my groceries.

Tourism is so huge and it has so many impacts that go so much deeper below the surface than most of us think about when we're traveling. It was really so moving to this village that that inspired me to start looking at travel and tourism in my journalism.

Everywhere I look, there's complexities, there's good and bad and it's so important.

Can you describe what you mean by "the new tourist"? What does a new tourist look like?

In the last chapter of the book, I respond to an essay that was written by an exceptional writer named Agnes Kard and published in The New Yorker last summer called "The Case Against Travel." She described some tourists as "unchanged changers" — people who go to a place and they change the place, they inflict their presence on the place, and they're unchanged. They themselves remain closed in their hearts and minds to the experience and they come away unmoved. So, I took that as my starting point. That's what I see as an old tourist. Let's have a new tourist be somebody who's a changed changer, changed and enlightened.

A new tourist is someone who takes the time to educate themselves about the impact that their presence will have on the place they're visiting and uses that knowledge to do their best to minimize any negative impacts of their presence on the place and maximize any positive impacts, whether it's economic, social, or cultural impacts.

And they're changed themselves. They come with a view to having their mind changed. They come with a level of humility. They come with a strong desire to really see the humanity in the people they're visiting and the beauty in the place they're visiting and don't see themselves as superior to the people or the place.

It's a mindset shift, really, but I think that it's a really powerful mindset shift that can lead to very constructive impacts both the tourist destination and on the traveler herself.

How might travel look differently for someone who's embraced that mindset? How would their behaviors change?

To start as an example, how you decide where you're going to go on a trip. When you're thinking about where you want to go, really take some time to reflect. Are you going to a place because it's on some top 10 list that you saw, and you feel like you're obligated to cross it off? Or are you going for a deeper sort of reason, like you want to connect with the culture? Maybe there's something meaningful there that you want to take the time to really learn about or get engaged with when you're there. I think it starts with self-reflection and making sure your motivations for where you want to travel are coming from a deeper place and not a superficial bucket list.

At a really practical level, maybe taking fewer trips, but staying longer and really taking the time to engage in a place. Because if you, as an American, come to Europe for two weeks and hit five major cities with two to three days in each place, that's not going to give you the chance to engage in a meaningful way with anybody who lives there or with the culture and history of the place. But if you come to Paris for two weeks, you settle in, and you're seeing the same people at the corner shop every day, you're going back to the same bar at the corner, the same cafe at the corner, and you have a chance to build some relationships. You have a chance to really get to know this corner of Paris. You have a chance to explore beyond the top five things to do and explore other perspectives of the city, not just the cliché.

Visiting fewer places is also better for the climate and it's better for the economies of the places you're visiting because every tourist destination wants people to come and stay longer. Be a high-quality visitor. And hire a local tour guide, whether it's for an hour or half a day or a full day, or multiple days. It gives you a chance to really have a personal, human, one-on-one interaction with someone who lives in that place, and you're directly supporting a local.

That's one of the highest aims we can have as new tourists: to come away with a real human connection and not just photos for our Instagram feed.

You write in the book that the stigma around the word "tourist" needs to change. Why?

I think the problem with somebody saying, "I travel a lot, but I'm not a tourist when I travel, I'm a traveler" — It's like, OK, sure, you're a traveler, but I want you to remember that you're a tourist too. If we dissociate ourselves from this phenomenon of tourism that means we don't feel any ownership over the problems that tourism presents. If tourism is something that only other people do, then why should we be bothered about the problems that come with it?

If we implicate ourselves in tourism, if we say, "Yes, I'm a tourist," then we might hopefully feel some ownership over the problems with tourism and we might be inspired to actually do something to change it.

Because if tourism is this thing that only other people do, and everyone in the world, all of us who are lucky enough to travel, see tourism as something that other people do, nothing's ever going to get better.