Why it's cool to be a tourist – and not a pretentious traveller

“Oh no, I’m not a tourist – [pause for effect] – I’m a traveller.” I’ve been faced with this statement (often with a side-dose of self importance and a smug grin thrown in for good measure) in Melbourne bars, at street food stands in Bangkok, and while wandering around the pristine footpaths of the Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia – trumpeted like it automatically entitles the speaker to my undying respect and awe. I should fall at their feet and worship their unique and eternal greatness.

The word tourist has almost become dirty – a base insult and a sweeping, judgmental statement that instantly qualifies one person’s experience as inferior to another’s. I’ve heard it derogatorily applied to daytrippers, members of tour groups, a 20-something that lived in Sydney but only for three months and only in a hostel, and even an ambitious backpacker trying to squeeze six week’s worth of sightseeing into a fortnight.

Google dictionary definitions

“I admit that I have always been slightly disparaging of the ‘tourist’ label”, Kate Humble told me. “A tourist in my mind is someone who travels in a group, with a guide and follows a well-worn path around the obvious attractions. A traveller is more independent, goes their own way and off the beaten track.”

But when did it become so bad to be a tourist? Clergyman Francis Kilvert wrote in the 19th century that “of all noxious animals... the most noxious is a tourist” – so we know it’s certainly been a couple of centuries.

Yet when you look at it objectively, it seems bizarre how widely accepted it is that two words – which by their very definitions are relatively interchangeable – are now used to distinguish so clearly between people that share the same common interest, namely leaving home and heading somewhere new.

The 51 destinations where tourists outnumber locals

In the tourist vs. traveller debate, what’s surprising is that in a society where it’s no longer acceptable to ridicule someone for, let’s face it, pretty much anything, it’s not a problem if you judge them based on how they choose to spend their hard-earned cash or precious time out. It’s a form of snobbery that has delineated from any previous societal divide attributed to wealth and become a damning statement of whether or not your choice of holiday is judged as worthy by your peers.

Is it really fair to say that if you choose to spend your holiday trekking through the Peruvian Amazon living on Suri grubs for two weeks that your experience is any more fulfilling than that of a friend who loves nothing more than taking a city break in Barcelona, sitting on an open-topped bus listening to a tour guide and gorging on tapas accompanied by an oversized jug of sangria? Isn’t it just personal preference? 

“I'm proud to be a tourist,” says Marcel Theroux, the broadcaster and regular contributor to Telegraph Travel. “There's a likeable modesty about the word ‘tourist’, whereas the word ‘traveller’ has an air of presumption, an almost imperial boastfulness about it. Self-described travellers are usually implicitly bragging about their uniqueness, the specialness of their insights and encounters.”  

He adds: “The Tao Te Ching says ‘the wise know without travelling.’ That's because the wise are tourists! Port and Kit Moresby in Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky brag about being travellers, rather than tourists, and – spoiler alert – come to sticky ends.

“Moral: they should have stuck with the tour group!”

While travellers are out there earning themselves a bad reputation as entitled and arrogant, and generally worrying about how others view their escapade, the tourists are embracing their label and having, more often than not, a lovely time. It should be a badge of honour to be a tourist. It means that you’re so self-assured that you’re confident enough to overcome all societal pressure, get over yourself and relax in any way that you see fit – and regardless of what your Instagram followers and fellow travellers/tourists think.

“Ashamed to be a tourist? Absolutely not. It’s a matter of pride,” enthused Anthony Peregrine, our France expert. 

“Self-styled travellers are a terrific pain in the neck. Tourists are jollier, more convivial (don’t disdain a spot because other visitors happen to be there), an absolute economic boon for wherever they gather and, if they are British, share my language. Thus might I talk to them about Preston North End or Nigel Farage over a pint in an Irish bar somewhere. You can’t do that with Laotian goat-herds.

“Tourists are also more honest, admitting to enjoying things that lots of people enjoy – the beaten track is beaten for a reason – and more self-aware. For, in the end, the moment we leave home for pleasure, we’re all tourists – it’s just that the travellers haven’t yet realised it.”