It is known that in this life we are all tourists. For some reason we are passing through. Currently, however, I see an excessive amount of people coming and going, perhaps without knowing the reason why they left in the first place. I observe this in the Islands. Excessive tourist consumption, also local, meaning also by Balearic residents who serve the demand of so many foreign visitors. They also need to disconnect from serving and want to be served. In the Islands, for you to understand, in relative terms we have five times more visitors than are observed in Catalonia, and in a much smaller space. But now I notice that locals are filling the planes and boats returning from non-residents. And I believe that, behind this phenomenon, as massive as it is new, which feeds back into the sector, there are sociological and economic explanations of interest. When there is no significant savings capacity to access a mortgage (a form of forced saving), the little possible surplus of many workers who barely make ends meet finds an escape in travel, a basis for emulating what the well-off population is supposed to do. Until recently, these classes were privileged travelers (rich, from the north, foreigners, strangers) and, thus, traveling like them or like the rich of our country becomes a kind of leveling practice for poor workers. At the point of consumption and for a few days, we are equal: destination and clothing, a kind of fungible snapshot of the time of year when we feel as well-off as those we serve in season. We will ignore for a few days how much it has cost - or will still cost - to afford and repeat it. This is why one requires a photographic footprint as a souvenir and so that those closest to us find out. It comes to mind what for a long time it has meant for many Chinese to take out the car on Sundays: despite the short distance, everyone doing the same and being stuck in traffic jams without going anywhere, it was a signal to third parties. It reminds me of what it was like to have a Seat 600 in the post-Franco era. A symptom of personal progress, a standard of normality that, however, makes tabula rasa of the duration of the sacrifice and how this kind of progress has been achieved. In the case of residents, there is now the conviction that one must go abroad, since domestic tourism does not serve to "disconnect" and is often impossible (think of beaches already full first thing in the morning). Everything must be announced, shared, and contrasted, from preparation to the reportage. It is the normality of someone who is not unfortunate.This mass consumption is, for the moment, encouraged by the fact that the price of so much mobility does not cover the negative externalities it generates: the price of transport does not cover its effective cost (congestion on motorways), nor that of fuel, nor that of the consumption of natural resources. For some, this expenditure also grows, and with a different dimension, due to the black money that many still move in the service sector, more prone to the submerged economy, and which is spent with less consideration in order not to pay taxes. Short trips to be able to say "I've been there". On longer trips, the stay has less glamorous variants at times: where to sleep or how many packaged meals have to be consumed to save the budget. Thus, the hotel, the apartment, and the restaurant are shown or not depending on whether they indicate the exclusivity of the tourism one can undertake.When everything returns to normal, that is, when the prices of moving around are much higher than now, it is likely that many things will change. Today, the central cost, more than in transport, is in the cost of overnight stays. If this is the case, perhaps the tourist will look for a complete package of more days to offset the higher cost of the trip, combining experiences: not having a wild weekend in a brochure city, sun and beach, but combining sea and mountain, sun and pool and evening music, sport and leisure in nature, opera and disco, hiking and cycling excursions... And if the stay is extended and complementary experiences are sought, this will sideline some monocultures of only sun and beach, which until today have marked excesses.
