Chapter 2 The Growth Delusion
Tourism success is measured in arrivals. More tourists means more success. This equation has become so automatic that it no longer requires justification. It is simply assumed, built into the metrics, the policies, the performance indicators, and the research questions of the field. When the United Nations World Tourism Organization celebrates that international arrivals surpassed 1.4 billion in 2019, no one asks: success for whom? Success at what cost? Success toward what end?
This chapter argues that growth metrics in tourism are not merely inadequate but actively harmful. They misdirect attention, misallocate resources, and provide political cover for practices that damage communities, environments, and ultimately tourism itself. The growth delusion is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to transforming tourism into something worthy of human aspiration.
Begin with what growth metrics actually measure. International arrivals count border crossings, not experiences, not impacts, not value created or destroyed. A person who crosses a border to visit family is counted the same as one who visits to exploit vulnerable populations. A respectful traveler who stays a month in one community counts the same as a cruise passenger who touches shore for six hours. The metric captures movement, nothing more.
Tourism receipts fare little better. They measure money captured within national boundaries, but they reveal nothing about who captures that money or what they do with it. When a global hotel chain reports revenue in a destination, much of that revenue immediately leaves for corporate headquarters elsewhere. Transfer pricing, management fees, and imported supplies ensure that headline figures vastly overstate local economic benefit. The World Bank has estimated that leakage rates in developing country tourism often exceed 70 percent. Of every dollar spent, seventy cents flows back to wealthy nations.
Even the money that stays distributes unevenly. Tourism employment concentrates in low-wage, seasonal, insecure positions. The high-paying jobs (management, finance, marketing) tend to go to employees from outside the community, often outside the country. What remains are the beds to be made, the drinks to be poured, the smiles to be performed. Growth in tourism employment often means growth in working poverty.
The obsession with growth also produces crowding, and crowding destroys the very experiences tourism promises. This is tourism's internal contradiction: its success undermines itself. Venice drowns in cruise passengers who make the city unlivable for residents and unenjoyable for visitors. Barcelona's residents protest tourists who have priced them out of their own neighborhoods. Machu Picchu erodes under foot traffic that exceeds any reasonable carrying capacity. The tourism industry responds to these crises not by reducing volume but by seeking new destinations to consume.
This is the logic of capital seeking returns, not the logic of human flourishing. Growth serves investors who need continuously expanding markets. It serves governments that have become dependent on tourism revenue. It serves consultants and marketers who earn fees proportional to campaign scale. But it does not serve communities pushed beyond tolerance, ecosystems degraded beyond recovery, or workers trapped in precarious employment.
The environmental accounting alone should disqualify growth as a goal. Tourism accounts for roughly 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions when transportation, accommodation, and related consumption are included. This share is growing faster than any other sector. A single long-haul flight can release more carbon than the average person in many countries emits in an entire year. The industry's response has been carbon offsets and efficiency improvements, neither of which can reconcile infinite growth with finite atmosphere.
Efficiency improvements face the Jevons paradox: as travel becomes more efficient, it becomes cheaper, and cheaper travel means more travel. A plane that burns 20 percent less fuel per passenger enables 30 percent more passengers. The efficiency gain is captured not by the planet but by growth. Carbon offsets, meanwhile, are largely fraudulent. Studies have found that the vast majority of offset projects fail to deliver promised reductions. They function primarily as conscience laundering, allowing travelers and corporations to claim climate virtue while actual emissions continue unabated.
The growth imperative also distorts policy. Governments compete for tourists the way they once competed for factories, offering subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory exemptions. Tourism promotion receives public funding while tourism harms receive public neglect. Marketing budgets grow while infrastructure for residents deteriorates. Land use favors hotels over housing. The entire policy apparatus orients toward attracting outsiders rather than serving citizens.
This creates what I call the destination trap. Once a community commits to tourism development, it becomes structurally dependent. Alternative economic bases atrophy. Young people train for hospitality rather than other skills. Land prices reflect tourism potential rather than local use values. Political power shifts to tourism interests. Reversing this trajectory becomes increasingly difficult because the alternatives have been foreclosed.
Communities in the destination trap experience growth as compulsion, not choice. They cannot stop growing even when they want to because their economies have been restructured around continuous expansion. Declining arrivals means budget crises, unemployment, and political instability. The system locks them in.
The knowledge infrastructure of tourism reinforces this lock-in. Academic programs train students for growth-oriented careers. Research funding flows to growth-related questions. The journals reward growth-affirming findings. The conferences celebrate growth achievements. Questioning growth marks one as outside the mainstream, which in academic terms means unpublishable and unfundable.
Consider the metrics that tourism studies does not track. We do not routinely measure host community wellbeing, except as it relates to guest satisfaction. We do not measure cultural erosion, environmental degradation per visitor, wealth concentration, or tourism-induced displacement. We do not measure whether residents want more tourists, fewer tourists, or no tourists at all. These omissions are not oversights. They are structural features of a knowledge system designed to serve growth.
What would non-growth metrics look like? They would begin with host welfare rather than visitor volume. They would measure equitable distribution of benefits rather than aggregate receipts. They would track environmental impact per visitor and cumulative impact over time. They would include community consent, surveyed regularly and taken seriously. They would incorporate quality measures: depth of encounter, transformation of visitor, contribution to host society.
Such metrics would produce radically different policy recommendations. A destination that scored high on volume but low on host welfare would be understood as failing, not succeeding. A destination that attracted few visitors but generated deep, mutually beneficial encounters would be celebrated. The entire competitive logic of destination marketing would collapse because competition for volume would cease to be the point.
This is what degrowth in tourism actually means: not the elimination of travel but the end of growth as the organizing principle. Some communities would welcome fewer visitors and receive support for economic transition. Other communities would welcome more visitors and be helped to develop sustainably. The decision would rest with communities themselves, based on their own assessments of their own welfare.
The growth delusion persists because it serves powerful interests, but those interests are not universal. The workers who clean hotel rooms at minimum wage do not benefit from growth. The residents displaced by rising rents do not benefit. The ecosystems degraded by overuse do not benefit. The visitors herded through overcrowded attractions do not benefit. Only capital benefits, and capital's interests are not humanity's interests.
Breaking the growth delusion requires naming it as delusion. It requires building alternative metrics and alternative institutions. It requires political mobilization by those harmed by growth against those who profit from it. None of this will happen easily because the delusion is deeply embedded. But the first step is intellectual clarity: understanding that growth is not success, that arrivals are not achievement, and that receipts are not wellbeing.
Tourism after growth is not smaller tourism. It is better tourism: more equitable, more respectful, more sustainable, more meaningful. The growth delusion has prevented us from seeing this possibility. Releasing it opens a future we have been unable to imagine.