Looking for something new and different, something off the beaten path, this June my wife and I decided on Greenland. A mere year ago few ever thought of Greenland, or if they did, it remained a large blank space on their vague high school memory of the world map. A place where, one Greenlander I met last month said, people were sure nobody lived. In fact, 57,000 do, in scores of settlements and towns. In 2023, before President Donald Trump brought Greenland to broader consciousness, only the most intrepid travelers managed to get there. But now, with United Airlines having started direct flights from New York City to Greenland on June 14, Greenland has joined the ranks of places that used to be very much off the beaten track, and are now, suddenly, about to be on it.
Here is the great paradox of mass tourism: As more and more people think of a place as off the beaten track, the more it becomes a beaten track. As the lead article of the 2023-24 magazine of the Greenland Business Association put it: “Greenland is Creating Conditions for Growth in the Tourism Industry”—new airports, new hotels, and increased port capacity. The year 2023 saw a 50 percent increase in cruise ship arrivals, and while the data for 2024 and the first half of this year are not yet complete, Greenland tourism is clearly on an upward trajectory. But to what end?
If you’re a geologist or ecologist, Greenland is paradise; it is the world’s largest island and has the second largest ice cap, behind Antarctica. Icebergs float in the waters around it, and if you’re lucky you’ll spot a whale. The natural landscape is starkly dramatic, and you can get an eerie feeling of walking over rocks that are billions of years old. On our cruise we learned about the complexity of ice, about plankton, and how the arctic ecology is changing. Going ashore to a few of the settled areas, we saw the colorful houses and the hundreds of sled dogs, chained to their makeshift huts and looking on dolefully as scores of us traipsed by in our cruise line-issued red jackets.
We treaded carefully because we had been lectured on the protocols of Arctic travel (mandated by AECO, the Association of Arctic Expedition Cruise Operators) and were conscious about never touching anything and leaving nothing behind. It was thus disturbing to see plastic garbage strewn among the rocks and crevices as we climbed to a view point. Soon we passed an enormous pile of junk, metal parts, refrigerators, generators, car parts. Who left all this? But then it dawned on us: Where would folks put all this old stuff on an ice-covered island? And the sled dogs can smell bad on a warm day. These are things the guides didn’t mention, and in a sense, because they didn’t, and because we were continually told that this was to be a fantastic experience, we tried to focus only on the natural beauty.
In the end we could not escape the fact that we were invaders of sorts. The vision of hundreds of well-heeled tourists in a line must have seemed strange to the “natives.” Indeed, in August 2023, in the small town of Qaqortoq (population 3,000), two cruise ships docked on the same day, the Zaandam (passenger capacity 1,432) and the Coral Princess (capacity 2,895). As a 2023 Greenland tourism report noted, “The arrival of cruise ships can feel overwhelming for locals, as passengers suddenly can make up a large part of the town scene.” The hundreds of us cruise ship passengers, from the richest countries of Europe and North America, were, it seems, an advance guard of Greenland mass tourism, if not eventually overtourism.
In most of the rest of the world, however, the state of tourism is another matter altogether. Between January and March of this year, 300 million people traveled away from their home countries. Since travel and tourism tend to increase in the summer, the world is on track to meet or exceed the 1.456 billion people who were considered tourists in 2024. Given the 8.2 billion people who currently live on the planet, this means that roughly 18 percent of the world’s people are—or will be—tourists. Now let’s go back a bit, to look just at the United States. In 1820, according to a scholarly analysis, no more than 2,000 Americans traveled abroad. That number is now close to 100 million. In terms of number of travelers as a percent of the U.S. population, in 1850 it was one-tenth of 1 percent. A century later in 1950 it was 0.45 percent, a 4.5-fold increase, but still not a huge number of people. But today, around a third of Americans will go abroad in any given year—a quantum leap over 75 years.
Consider world tourism destinations. The world’s top tourist destination for many decades has been France, followed by well-known staples like the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Mexico. But Albania? It saw a 121 percent increase in tourism in 2024 and will see more tourists than ever this year, as will Mongolia, Bulgaria, and other places that were not on anyone’s bucket list even a few years ago. And finally, let’s look at a few of the poster children of what is now called “overtourism”: Barcelona, Venice, and Prague. The density of people crossing the Charles Bridge in Prague has become an overtourism trope, but even the many images of the crush do not convey what it feels like to be part of that sardine-like crowd, each person separated by inches, hoping to stay together in groups identified by guides holding colored banners aloft. Between 2000 and 2019 Prague saw a three-fold increase in tourism, along with the beginnings of an unwelcome trend of alcohol-fueled visitors. In 2023, Barcelona, the city that made the plastic water pistol the perfect anti-tourist weapon, saw 26 million tourists, 15 times its population. Venice in 2024 saw 5.7 million tourists, or roughly nine times its population. This June saw mass protests against overtourism all over southern Europe.
It is true that tourism has always been a problematic subject. Even in the 1880s people complained about tourists, resenting the intrusions into their culture. But what is new, quite simply, seems to be density. It is density that is turning cities against tourism; it is density that is causing noise during the night, empty beer cans and bottles overflowing from trash receptacles, price hikes for locals seeking housing. It is density that is causing long lines, interminable waits for rental cars and museum entries. It is tourist density that has eliminated once-available experiences, like being able to contemplate the Mona Lisa with only a few people around you. And oddly enough it is density that is causing tourism to transform. The feeling of being herded, prodded, and jostled may not bother some but it does bother many, and over time and with experience, the desire to do something off the beaten track takes hold. Having experienced the displeasures of density, travelers quite naturally ask “Where can I go that most people don’t go?” According to a recent survey, 56 percent of global travelers are seeking “off the beaten track” destinations.
But with rare exceptions, most of such destinations sooner or later succumb to the dynamics of mass tourism. Feeding this paradox are the many travel magazines, exclusive “insider” newsletters, the annual New York Times list of 52 places to go, or regular articles like the recent Times story offering “Six getaways where you can find some peace and quiet.” More recently conceived technologies also play a role: A 2024 McKinsey study stated that “generative AI significantly eases the process of travel discovery,” adding that 92 percent of younger travelers were inspired by social media for their most recent trips. In short, nearly any newly discovered destination or experience seems destined, sooner or later, to move from off the beaten track to on it. As for Greenland, friends who have never thought about going there have asked me, “How was it?” Unthinkingly, I have replied: “It was great—I recommend it.”
Is there a way out of this dilemma, aside from staying home? Not really. One can always try to be among the first to go to new places, but this comes at a cost: You have to work at it, do research, study maps and airline schedules, and/or pay hefty fees to experts who will do that work for you. Or, more radically, one can consider living serially as a long-term tourist—a year in Provence, then a year in Mexico and then a year in Uzbekistan; clearly not an option for everyone, but then again that is the point. Remedies such as reserved time slots and fees for day-trippers have been proposed and tried, with at best temporary relief. In the end tourism will continue to increase and the number of untraveled destinations will surely decrease. Those of us who want to travel will have to learn to live with it.
