Imagine a Vacation that Gets Burnt

Devastating wildfires surrounding a tourist town. People evacuated on navy ships. Majestic hotels but not a skier in sight. Where there was snow, a drought silently spreads. Even worse, international travel disrupted by poor visibility, storm systems and high winds. The future of the international tourism market might be in for a future shock.  

There is no surety, even of ensuring an Olympics to be held in time. Many records tumbled when the Tokyo Olympics shifted for a few weeks. And there is yet no guarantee that the ongoing winter Olympics will run smoothly till its closure ceremony. Tourists enduring a loss of time, effort, and some currency too. 

Frequent landslides in hill areas will ensure a strict no-no even when it comes to adventurous tourists. The great landslide armageddon of 2021-2022-2023-2024 triggered an unconnected but eerily cascading events of destructive landslides in the western Himalayas. Such visuals, year after year, will likely discourage even the most ardent mountain lover to risk a visit. Even worse, visuals of massive floods still haunt the hills, causing fatigue amongst many friends, who would have otherwise liked to go for a much-anticipated Char Dham yatra.  

Forest fires lead to a reduction in safari sightings or worse ruin an exclusive experience bought by spending obscene sums of money, increased sea storms will discourage millions who will be shelving travel plans to a significantly more vulnerable coast. There are fears that increasingly scarce water supply in hill stations might lead to a societal breakdown. Many towns in the hills suffer from a lack of water and incidentally, most such towns also survive on inbound tourists, enjoying the delights of a hill station. As water shortage increases, tourists will also bear the brunt of a far more inhospitable local populace.  

At this point, though mostly a conjecture, but indications suggest that if one were given an option to set up a government subsidized beach resort in the fragile eastern coastline, no one in their right senses would take the offer. One is no longer sure as a businessman that such a proposed resort will even survive the growing cost required to merely survive on the shoreline.  

There are fears that international symbols of high tourism, places like Florida, cities like New York and wonderlands such as towering snow laden peaks of the Himalayas will probably degrade and pale away into an uncertain and forlorn future. Plagued by floods, storms, hurricanes and an unprecedented melting of ice, symbols of modern tourism will no longer interest travelers. 

No simulation can predict the impact upon millions of travel agents, operations staff, support services, even ancillary services such as vegetable, meat, and milk vendors. Everyone on the supply chain network of international tourism will be affected by this growing climate uncertainty. 

Tourism itself may be undergoing a subtle if not confirmed transition. There has been a definite shift towards various forms of adventure tourism with people opting to swim under the sea and climb the highest peaks. Though it is obviously tragic, but tours now take paying tourists to the edge of one of the many glaciers across the world and show them the tragic moment of its demise into the waiting sea. Thanks to these tourists, the rest of the world finally got to know that there are glaciers in Patagonia, a paradise out of reach of most humans on this earth.  

Though mass tourism is still the norm, mutated brains of the modern mass tourist now yearn for individual gratification for the self. Everyone wants to have a prized experience and is willing to go far to experience a thrill. When everyone is willing to go over the edge, casualties will occur.  

Even insurance may get higher. Increasingly expensive to buy anyways, the cost of covering travel risk will increase many times. There will also be a simultaneous increase of exclusive insurance support and it is only the very rich who could afford the cost of a future insurance company. 

There are growing fears of natural disasters irretrievably damaging natural wonders and man-made illusions. Growing drought in the west of India, storms in the east, glaciers melting in the far north and water wars tear the south away. It will be an unnatural era as trees, older than the earliest human civilizations and fish species that thrived as a top predator for millions of years will die or wither out. Lucrative tourism infrastructure in many such sites will see a steady degradation before they finally die a sudden demise in this chronicle of the last days of tourism. 

While loss in tourism exposure is a valid and often the only source of livelihood, jobs will be lost. Or there may be an increase of hidden unemployment where young boys and girls spend a large amount of their time as work quality increasingly diminishes. This will be a major crisis in creaking economies where millions will ask governments for relief.  

The future sarcastically portends a scenario where reducing human interference in natural systems will perhaps lead to restoration of these natural systems – national parks may overgrow with bushes rendering all roads non-navigable. As tourists avoid natural areas, nature will rebound. People may have to eke out a living by diversifying their life skills as tourism and commerce declines. New jobs need to fill this space or rulers risk discontent. 

There has been a steady explosion of world-famous destinations in the past few years. Everyone has either been or wants to go to Paris, London, and Dubai. The slow decay of tourism in these famous sites will exacerbate a general exodus from these erstwhile tourism havens, leaving their economies shaken. 

The loss of tourism revenue in many desperate lands means facing the double whammy of managing a new climate reality which is highly unpredictable and falling economic status in view of a negative depreciation of its tourism value. The many millions of tourism dependent employees may be left with very few choices to lead a decent life.  

Revenge tourism, disaster tourism, extreme tourism, solo tourism, hitch hiking tourism were all forms of a society’s rebellion against established imaginations. These alternative tourists may well be the very last documenters of fast-evolving climatic upheavals and earn a space in history for sharing the final videos of our disintegrating world, the final hurrah of the tourism industry before it all ends.

Anyways, only the hardiest survive. They and their add-ons. But soon, they die too. The earth was just too harsh to support any life for a few years, albeit less, perhaps two to three years, give or take a few. And that was the end of the last human life, in earth, in as much the reverse sequence as life was itself created. And the joke is on us - Most of us were still enjoying the joys of tourism when tourism stopped existing.