Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Note: As it's Thursday, some of the items below have been borrowed from Lenox Napier's Business Over Tapas
Spain
- More on the prospect of a clock-change in Spain.
- There can be no doubt that eating out in Spain can be/usually is a less formal experience than in the UK, especially if you have 2 small kids and a baby in tow. That said, my elder daughter commented yesterday that a couple of senior ladies at a nearby table were rather frosty-faced about behaviour at ours. I explained that they were Portuguese. "Ah", said my daughter, as she knows that, if anything, our neighbours are even stricter about their children's behaviour in public than the British. Which is one reason why the Spanish think they're even duller than we are.
- Talking of eating 1: Spain's 15 best cheeses.
- Talking of eating 2: Vegans rising.
- Well, British MPs last night had a series of 'indicative votes' around 8 possible ways forward. Which didn't include Richard North's longstanding Flexcit. Not one of the options got majority support, leading one Guardian commentator to say it wasn't so much a case of Bollocks to Brexit as Bollocks to Everything. RN adds that: It all rather confirms Jean-Claude Juncker's observation that the MP's know what they are against but have no idea of what they favour. See his blog post of today - Britain: train wreck - here. RN's I mean, not Junckers' . . .
- By the way, I highly recommend a reading of the Guardian article cited above, for a tremendous hatchet job on Mrs May and one or 2 others. And some lovely metaphors. P. S. The Four Pot Plants reference.
- The article below purports to give a scientific explanation for why Brits - or some of them at least - behave so badly when abroad. Or are widely reputed to do so anyway.
- So, Mrs May really is going soon . . . .
The USA
- Fart has surely kept one group of folk very busy over the last 2 years - psychiatrists. Both professional and amateur. The view of one of the former is that the root of Fart's pathology is 'emotional fragility'. As one blogger puts it this morning: The problem is that, instead of containing his sickness, we as a nation have enabled it, allowing him to put in place individuals and structures that echo his distorted view. Notwithstanding this, I wonder how many people are betting against him getting a second 4 years in office. An odd country.
- Meanwhile, here's one take on 'emotional fragility'.
- A Republican Representative in the USA has claimed Democrats are socialist and, therefore, akin to Nazis. Because the latter word was short for National Socialists. More on this here.
- Word of the Day: Compañero.
- I leave today for Galicia, where it's hotter than Madrid and where the first big forest fires of the year have already broken out.
- Anyone interested in joining a small group doing a camino of 7-10 days in May should write to me at doncolin@gmail.com
THE ARTICLE
The science behind why British tourists behave worse abroad than at home: Annabel Fenwick Elliott. Daily Telegraph
Cast your mind back and answer this honestly: have you ever done something on holiday that you probably wouldn’t have on home soil? If so, join the club.
Granted, bad behaviour tends to be worse in youngsters and at certain holiday destinations over others, but we can all agree that the combination of time off, day-drinking, and that air of anonymity one has in a foreign land can set the stage for looser morals.
But there’s more to it than that. We spoke to a panel of psychologists, sociologists and travel experts about tourists playing up, where in the world they’re most bothersome, and why Britons in particular have such a bad reputation on the Continent.
Why do tourists misbehave?
“Being away from home, travellers tend to lower their inhibitions, standards and behaviour,” tourism scholar Dr Peter E Tarlow writes in his paper on the subject. “Because many travellers enjoy their feeling of anonymity, they are more willing to engage in rude, semi-legal or even illegal activities about which they would not engage at home. The problem of low inhibitions is one that runs throughout almost all aspects of tourism policing.”
In agreement is Dr Denis Tolkach, assistant professor of hospitality, hotel and tourism management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who has studied this in depth. “Tourism is a predominantly hedonic activity,” he tells Telegraph Travel. “Many people travel to escape their daily routines and pressures in a way which can lead to irrational behaviour. There is also an absence of the social norms and the judgement from peers that govern how we conduct ourselves at home.”
Notable too is that feeling that you will (probably) never have to interact with the people you come across on holiday, and that you’re less likely to get in trouble in a far-off place. “Overall, we find that people who consider morally dubious behaviours to be acceptable are driven by consequentialist ethics, meaning they are likely to undertake actions that are personally beneficial and for which they are unlikely to be punished,” Dr Tolkach says.
Is alcohol involved, by any chance?
Of course. Booze lowers those inhibitions even further, to put it simply, and is undoubtedly an aggravating factor when it comes to bad behaviour aboard. It’s also an element that often comes into the equation before travellers have even boarded their departure flight - airports providing one of the few environments in which drinking is socially acceptable at any time of day.
In Britain, it would seem that drunken airport antics are only getting worse with time. Airlines UK, which represents 13 carriers including British Airways, Ryanair and Easyjet, points to a 66 per cent rise in the number of drunk and disruptive passenger incidents between 2015 and 2018, as recorded by UK carriers.
Ryanair has previously suggested passengers should be limited to buying only two drinks each at airports; while low-cost holiday airline Jet2 was one of the first to ban alcohol sales on its early morning flights.
However, some European holiday destinations report the opposite: that restricting tourists’ access to alcohol has a negative effect on their behaviour and that disorderly conduct lessens when clubs and bars are open longer. In the same way that extending opening hours at pubs and bars in the UK was supposed to lead to a more relaxed drinking culture.
In 1987, Holland introduced a set of ‘free closing’ experiments that allowed bars in certain regions to close whenever they wanted to. Dr Peter Marsh and Kate Fox, from the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford, compiled a report which addressed the study, writing: “The police remarked on the distinct decline in late-night public disorder which they attribute directly to the changes in licensing regulations.”
Today in the Netherlands there are no national regulations as to opening and closing hours of bars. Elsewhere in Europe, closing time in the early hours of the morning, when hoards of revellers drain from various bars into the street, is when much of the trouble brews.
What seems to be problematic, according to the same report, is British tourists specifically, and their relationship with drinking. Sociologists studied booze culture in several European countries and found that the French, Spanish and Italians broadly associated alcohol with meals and within positive social scenarios rather than bingeing and fighting. “The research in Italy, in particular, shows clearly that the associations between drinking and aggression which we find in Britain, are almost completely absent in that country,” it reads. “Virtually all of the [subjects asked] failed to understand how or why the British could ‘blame’ drinking for youth disorder.” It goes on: “The same sentiments were expressed by our French and Spanish informants. The Dutch, in contrast, took a view which, in some ways, is similar to that found in Britain [...] and information from Germany, Belgium and Austria lead us to conclude that there may be a very general north vs south divide in European attitudes to drinking.”
Why else do British tourists get such a bad rap?
Foreigners often complain of the arrogance displayed by the worst UK tourists, and that goes beyond their typical refusal to speak anything but English. “It is the negative qualities of the British empire rearing its head in the boorish Brits and their attempts to impose their own cultures on others,” etiquette coach William Hanson says. “Boorish” was a term used too by Londoner Ellery Hanley, who remarked on a forum about Britons behaving badly in Benidorm and Magaluf: “I think somewhere in the British national psyche is a feeling of superiority that is subtly ingrained in us from a young age.”
Dr Tolkach, who has studied Western tourists against those from Asia, weighs in: “British tourists are a large market for these Spanish party destinations. Naturally, they get a lot of attention. Similarly, in much of Asia it is tourists from China that draw a lot of criticism, at least partially this is because they are the largest market.”
He argues that much of the problem is overtourism, and the uncontrolled mob of foreign visitors who descend upon otherwise peaceful areas during the summer holidays, bringing their lowered inhibitions with. “Conflicts between tourists and local residents usually occur in places where tourists spread en-masse to residential areas, rather than stay in tourist enclaves. Short-term rental accommodation in residential suburbs of Barcelona, for example, has greatly contributed to the anti-tourism protests in the city. Partying holidaymakers living next door to locals who go to work every morning are much more disturbing than similarly behaving tourists in out-of-town seaside resorts.”
Why do Chinese tourists have a poor reputation?
In the first year of the new millennium, a modest 10.5m overseas trips were made by Chinese residents. Fast forward to 2017 and the figure was 145m – an astounding increase of 1,380%. So first, tourism is relatively new for the Chinese, and second, there are a lot of them.
A succession of bad apples have, over the years, been reported for incidents including the AirAsia passenger who attacked a flight attendant with a boiling cup of noodles, and a teenager who carved his name into an ancient relief at a temple in Egypt.
In response, the Chinese government was moved to issue citizens with a code of conduct manual under the title, Guide to Civilised Tourism and Travel. As well as condemning behaviours including spitting, vandalism and queue-jumping, other choice tips include: “Don’t lie down in public” and “Don’t cough, sneeze or pick your nose or teeth in front of others.”
But it’s not just the Chinese (or indeed the British). So aware were French authorities of its country's reputation for rudeness, that in 2015 the tourist board launched a multimillion-euro drive to improve their “difficult relationship with service and by extension our relation to others”. In 2013, the Paris tourist board distributed a “politeness manual” for service industry workers; and three years earlier, the city paid “smile ambassadors” to be friendly to tourists at the city’s main attractions – to little avail.
Where do the best behaved tourists come from?
By many accounts, Japan. “The Japanese are not only distinct for their group photo-loving antics, they have also acquired a reputation for being among the world’s most well-dressed, tidy, punctual and polite of travellers,” says our Japan expert Danielle Demetriou, based in Tokyo. “They behave impeccably, if a little restrained. They will queue politely, tip with precision and never turn up late, raise their voices or try to sneakily take a photograph in a gallery when they know they’re not allowed.”
How much can we really rely on stereotypes?
We’ve had a lot to say about tourist stereotypes in the past, on where they originated and whether they stand up to scrutiny. In addition to the defence of our own British travellers, previous articles have looked at German, Italian, French and American holidaymakers. But at least one social experiment casts doubts over such generalisations. Wind the clock back to 1998, and to one of the first ever forays into the “reality TV” genre: Channel 4’s Tourist Trap.
It what was billed by its producers as a “large-scale psychological experiment to observe human behaviour and test out notions of national stereotypes”. Four nationalities (British, American, German, and Japanese) were invited for a week at a Turkish hotel, then secretly filmed while being subjected to set-up disasters that made Fawlty Towers look like the Ritz - staff burning national flags, drunk bus drivers, boats breaking down mid-river, and the like. Despite the producers’ best attempts, the narrator was eventually forced to admit: “The problem with this experiment is it really seems to depend on the individuals... not their nationality.”
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