Bad Tourist: When good times become nightmares
The debate about the costs and benefits of tourism for the destinations they visit has been going for a long time. Now it seems that the focus has shifted towards the ‘Bad Tourist’, who has to carry much of the blame for the problems of tourism development.
The CNN list of the worst-behaved tourists from 2023 highlights bad tourists “Stripping off from the waist down at a sacred site. Driving a car across a medieval bridge, as fragile as it is famous. Carving your name into a world icon, and going on a punishing hike… to take illegal drugs.” Bad tourists indeed.
But just what makes a bad tourist? How bad do they get? Is just a small minority bad? Who are these bad tourists? Where do they go? And how can we avoid them?
These questions and more are central to the Bad Tourist website: a review not just of Bad Tourist behaviour and impacts, but also for thinking about the nature of the phenomenon.
In the current debates about tourism, it seems that attention is shifting towards the Bad Tourist who spoils it for all the other tourists, as well as making life difficult for the locals.
In many cases, the view of tourism as a whole is shifting from ‘good’ to ‘bad’. Protests in many cities in Southern Europe in 2023 attributed problems such as increased tourist pressure, rising rents and prices, noise and litter to a bad model of tourism development. When public administrations and commercial operators only measure ‘success’ in terms of the number of tourists who come, unsustainable outcomes are almost inevitable. Although locals often argue that they are not against tourism per se – just badly behaved visitors, it now seems that the focus of attention has shifted from bad tourism to Bad Tourists:
“One of the most worrying deviations of the critical discourse on tourism in Barcelona – and in other cities with similar problems – is the shift from a critique of the tourism model as a system towards a singling out of the individual tourist as the culprit and enemy.”
In this process the ‘problem tourist’ becomes a ‘condenser’ of frustrations with a wider range of issues, “including job insecurity, loss of housing, powerlessness in the face of the real estate market, and feeling expulsed from neighbourhoods” (Klein, 2025).
Recent discourse about leisure has also underlined the fact that people can be bad as well as doing good things in their leisure time. Chris Rojek (2000) highlights the dark side of leisure, which gives people not just with time to do good things, but also bad things, such as consuming internet pornography, sex tourism and drugs. Rojek raises the question of whether this is ‘deviant’ leisure, which may challenge or moral norms (Stebbins, 1996) and if we can talk about ‘good versus bad leisure’ (Mobily, 1999).
Bad tourists are not new. Apparently the Romans were already complaining about the arrival of unwelcome tourists. This may seem strange, given that only the elite could allow themselves the luxury of travel at that time, but then we know that rich people can also behave badly. It seems that Tourists were as stupid 2,000 years ago as they are today
We have already reported on some of the antics of the modern badly behaved tourist. As far back as 2014 we highlighted the antics of a group of Italian tourists in Barcelona, who thought it would be fun to run around the Barceloneta neighbourhood completely naked (Richards, 2014).
“They went on a three hour perambulation, including a visit to a local shop – completely naked. Local residents took to the streets to complain and staged three days of protests. This basically happened because it took place in a local residential area. If it had happened on the beach itself, there probably would have been a more muted reaction. As it was, the Mayor acted swiftly to close 35 tourist apartments in Barceloneta that were operating illegally. He said that he hoped it was not too late to address the problems caused by a ‘low cost’ model of tourism, and that the city would prefer to attract cultural tourists, families and business travellers.”
In other words, the official reaction was to try and replace Bad Tourists with good ones. But it can be hard to filter out the Bad Tourist from the good – they often seem to engage in solitary acts of bad behaviour and vandalism. For example, a lone British tourist:
“scratched the names of himself and his girlfriend into the stones of the Colosseum in Rome. In a letter of apology he claimed that he didn’t know how old the structure was. Even though this case attracted global publicity, it doesn’t seem to have dissuaded fame-hungry visitors. A Dutch tourist recently added his tag in waterproof ink to a Roman wall at the archaeological site of Herculaneum, and was promptly arrested. As the Dutch press reported, the Italians are particularly protective of their tangible heritage, and hefty fines are usually doled out to offenders.”
You can read more about the rise of the Bad Tourist in the following sources:
Tourists behaving badly are a threat to global tourism, and the industry is partly to blame
Tourists Gone Wild: The Most Outrageous Incidents of 2023
Why do tourists behave badly on holiday?
Travel tip: Beware of bad tourists this summer!
The worst-behaved travelers of 2024
What is 'tourist syndrome'? Here are the top 3 offenses by travelers
These and other sources suggest that 2023/24 was the peak period for Bad Tourists so far. This may just be post-Covid ‘revenge travel’, with the Bad Tourists taking out their frustration with months or years of non-travel on innocent locals. But maybe even Badder tourists are on the horizon. We will keep an eye out for them….
References
Klein, R. (2025). ‘Tourists go home’: touristification, urban protest, and social ambivalence in contemporary Barcelona, Current Issues in Tourism, https://doi.org/1080/13683500.2025.2604304
Mobily, K. E. (1999). New Horizons in Models of Practice in Therapeutic Recreation. Therapeutic Recreation Journal, 23 (3), 174–192.
Richards, G. (2014). The naked tourist: revealing tensions in the Barcelona Model. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356343887_The_naked_tourist_revealing_tensions_in_the_Barcelona_Model. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CYN62
Rojek, C. (2000). Leisure and Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Stebbins, R. A. (1996). Tolerable Differences: Living with Deviance. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.