It was a dizzying array of dream destinations. Smooth-talking salespeople at the world’s largest tourism trade fair stood ready to whisk you out of a dreary German conference hall and take you to far-flung lands that seemed too perfect to be real. High mountains, white beaches, jaw-dropping deserts – the options were endless, and all too available.
I had gone to the ITB Berlin to hear how the holiday industry was feeling about its future and the answer, for the most part, was unflinchingly cheery. The Swedish concept of flygskam, or flight shame, has failed to gain traction beyond a small share of climate-concerned tourists. Covid lockdowns brought only temporary pain to the aviation sector, which was bailed out with vast sums of public money when its planes were grounded. Traveller numbers in 2024 had returned to pre-pandemic highs. It had been a bad few years, everyone agreed, but things were finally looking up.
One talk, however, struck a noticeably different tone. In a speech that the conference organisers billed as a “must-hear session for anyone who cares about the future of travel and our planet”, Stefan Gössling, one of the most-cited travel researchers in the world, calmly declared the approaching demise of the era of mass tourism.
“We have already entered the beginning of the age of non-tourism,” said Gössling, a business professor at Linnaeus University who has consulted for the UN and World Bank, to an uneasy audience of travel agencies, car rental companies, cruise operators and hoteliers.
Gössling argues that worsening weather is raising the cost of travel to levels that consumers’ wallets will soon be unable to sustain. It’s not just the odd heatwave here or wildfire there, he said, when I spoke with him after the talk, but the mounting cost of everything from food to insurance that will render travel as we know it unaffordable.
It’s a big claim. The rising costs of extreme weather would have to outpace expected growth in global incomes by a large margin for his thesis to hold. That seems plausible if global heating reaches civilisation-threatening temperature levels that are 4C or 5C above the preindustrial average – in which case prepper bunkers will hold more appeal to me than all-inclusive resorts – but I find it hard to imagine at 1.5C or 2C, the levels to which world leaders have promised to reach.
And yet. Europe experienced its worst wildfires on record this summer, on the back of a year in which political enthusiasm for climate action has plunged. Even “coolcation” destinations – popularised to beat the heat – such as Norway and Canada have been hit by staggering temperature extremes in recent weeks.
Nor is it just the worsening weather that puts tourism at risk. Flying is one of the hardest activities to clean up with technological solutions and efforts to keep disasters from spiralling will add to that cost. The price of a plane ticket is likely to balloon if it includes the cost of making planes greener or sucking carbon pollution back out of the atmosphere.
That doesn’t paint a pretty picture for tourism industry executives. In blunt terms, they can either go green and raise prices or let the planet burn and raise prices. Either way, it may be time for the long-overlooked domestic holiday – cheap, convenient and often more relaxing – to finally make a comeback.
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