Responsible Travel: The Time Has Come for Ethical and Decolonized Travel
When I was young, I wanted to collect stamps in my passport.
My bucket list was long—very long. Traveling the world felt like the ultimate dream.
But that dream started to feel different when I witnessed gentrification in Madrid, the city where I lived for many years.
I know tourism is not 100% responsible for gentrification, but it certainly plays a part. That realization led me to ask myself how, as travelers, we can explore the world without harming the daily lives of local communities.
That’s when I discovered new terms—responsible tourism, conscious travel, slow travel, decolonized stays.
Over time, I understood that what I’ve always loved most about traveling is people.
I want to understand the local culture, learn a few words of their language, listen to their traditional and modern music, taste the unique flavors of their food, and discover what it means to be a woman, to be queer, or to be an immigrant in the places I visit.
To truly experience this, I also have a duty: to help preserve local communities. And that’s where responsible travel comes into play.
Why the tourism we practice nowadays is problematic?
The idea here is not to shame anyone, just to shed some light on an issue that, I believe, isn’t discussed enough.
An industry now accessible to everyone (or almost)
For centuries, tourism was a privilege that only the elite could enjoy.
Boarding a plane or a cruise ship was a special occasion—something you did for a honeymoon or a once-in-a-lifetime holiday.
Then the industry changed. Low-cost airlines, tour operators, and travel agencies made the world accessible to the middle class.
Tourism boards began promoting their destinations to all kinds of travelers: from the rich elite seeking luxury to families happy to camp by the sea.
Big tour operators simplify everything. No need to look for your flight, looking for some accommodation in a country you don’t know the language. We do everything for you and at a very economical and attractive price.
Low-cost airlines, especially in Europe, accelerate everything. If you are not too young, you might remember that a Paris–London flight with Ryanair cost just 10 euros.
Suddenly, we all travel: young backpackers heading to Bangkok, retired couples visiting Marrakech, nuclear families exploring Spain.
The (often) harmful impact of Instagram
I love Instagram, but let’s be honest—it has completely changed how we travel.
The prestige of being “a traveler” made us want to share every moment. We hop from one beach to another, take photos without even looking at the view, sip matcha lattes in the same aesthetic cafés, and call it an experience.
We don’t take time to connect, to truly feel the place, to slow down, to ground ourselves in the local rhythm.
Instagram shines a harsh spotlight on trendy spots. Would Bali be so popular among digital nomads without Instagram? Would Sri Lanka have become a new travel trend?
Massive tourism, local consequences
The problem? We all go to the same places.
Tourism boards have done an amazing job promoting their destinations. Everyone knows someone who’s raved about quality of life in Barcelona, the pura vida in Costa Rica, the warmth of people in Mexico City, or the beauty of Thailand’s Phi Phi Islands.
But this success has a cost—a high one for locals.
Apartments become Airbnbs, pushing residents in Barcelona or Mexico City out of the housing market. Costa Rica’s beaches becoming mega residential project destroying indigenous places. And the nature, it is suffering too. Maya Bay, in Thailand, now has restrictions to protect its coral reefs from damage.
Capitalism and the checklist culture
Capitalism feeds our constant need to collect—money, cars, houses, hobbies, relationships. Traveling has become part of that same accumulation logic.
Look at how people react when you say you’ve been to just Spain and Italy, compared to when you say you’ve visited thirty countries before turning thirty. You know exactly what I mean.
This mentality shapes modern tourism: we want to see the world, even if we don’t understand it.
Having photos from 24 destinations feels more important than having one deep conversation with a Bedouin woman in a Jordanian village or listening to a teenager in Zagora share her dreams.
Tourism that ignores both locals and the planet
So obsessed with places to go and experiences to live, too often, we don’t take time to meet locals or learn about their struggles—and by ignoring them, we make things worse. Most tourists in Oaxaca, for example, don’t know the city faces serious water shortages.
We don’t care about locals. We want to live the experience. We don’t want to support their daily life, to make sure our money is coming back to them. We just want to enjoy ourselves.
And the planet? It suffers, too. We take planes from Madrid to Málaga just for a weekend, ignoring the environmental cost. We hike fragile trails in parks without sticking to marked paths. We consume one-use plastics every day.
And of course, a huge percentage of tourists now cluster in just a small fraction of the planet, creating environmental issues in those destinations:
- Traditional landscapes are ruined by developments.
- Land is lost from farming for tourist benefits.
- Polluted water damages aquatic life.
- Litter detracts from the appearance of areas.
- Air travel contributes to global warming.
- Traffic congestion worsens air and noise pollution.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand not everyone can be a “perfect” traveler. When you have 2 weeks of holiday a year, for sure, you will fly many planes to travel in Europe. When a flight from Paris to Toulouse is cheaper than taking the train, and you are on a budget, you will choose the plane. When you are afraid of getting scams in Morocco, I know you will use platforms like GetYourGuide or Viator without checking if they are working with local companies.
Here, I don’t want to blame anyone. I just want to explain and offer some solutions. And remember that you don’t have to do everything perfectly, just try to do your best.
Conscious tourism, a concept to embrace
Conscious tourism has become trendy, but for me, it’s simple: it’s about caring for both the planet and the people.
Prioritize Slow Travel
Before I continue, I have to be honest. I am privileged: I work online, I don’t have a partner or kids, so I can travel slowly for weeks or even months. Not everyone can. But everyone can do a little.
For instance, instead of exploring all of Morocco in 2 weeks, focus on the north of the country. You will see fewer cities, but you will see more of them. Stay 3–4 days in each destination, take time to observe the place, the nature, and the streets. Look at the local people going through their daily lives. Come back to the same restaurants and start meaningful conversations with the waiter.
Don’t limit yourself to sightseeing, but take part in some experiences. Learn how to cook a tagine, accept this tea in the shop, and relax in the local hammam. Just live instead of seeing.
Recognize your privilege
Practicing conscious tourism also means recognizing the privileges that allow us to travel in the first place. The freedom to move, to choose when and where to go, is not universal.
For many people around the world, borders are closed, visas are denied, and opportunities to explore are limited by economic or political realities.
Acknowledging that privilege isn’t about feeling guilty—it’s about being aware. It’s understanding that our mobility comes with a responsibility to move respectfully, to give back when we can, and to avoid reproducing systems of inequality while we travel.
That awareness can change everything: how we negotiate a price at a market, how we talk to a street vendor, or how we choose our accommodation. When we travel consciously, we stop seeing destinations as playgrounds and start seeing them as living spaces—home to people whose stories matter as much as ours.
Focus on the connection
Conscious travel is about connection—with people, and with nature.
It’s the smile of a baker who remembers your coffee order after three days. It’s the quiet moment you spend watching the sunset, realizing how small we are and how vast the world truly is.
And it’s also about reconnecting with nature-noticing the sound of the wind through the palm trees, the way the light changes over the desert at dusk, or observing the bugs moving around and not killing them.
That connection reminds us we are part of something larger. It invites us to tread lightly, to leave places as beautiful as we found them, and to give gratitude for the landscapes that host us.
Decolonized tourism is now a must
I’m brown. I grew up in France and later lived in Spain. I know what it feels like to be seen through a colonial lens—a gaze full of stereotypes and ignorance.
I was born in Sri Lanka, and many people didn’t even know where it was on the map.
Yet, I constantly (and still sometimes) faced assumptions: that I must be poor, that Muslim women aren’t educated (even though Sri Lanka isn’t even majority Muslim, but oh well), or that I must know every page of the Kama Sutra by heart (Sri Lanka/India, it’s the same thing, right?).
I’ve lived under that gaze—and I never want to reproduce it when I travel.
Because let’s be honest: most of us wouldn’t look down on a Finnish or Irish person, but we still carry unconscious biases when visiting countries in the Global South.
Deconstruct the clichés
“They have nothing, but they’re happy.”
How many times have you heard that? What does “nothing” mean? Not having the latest iPhone? Not owning twelve pairs of sneakers?
We need to stop thinking that wealth equals happiness—or that people in the Global South are poor but “spiritually rich.”
These clichés reduce entire countries to the same status, erase social diversity, and turn real people into simplified symbols.
We also have to work on our idea of what’s “exotic,” “authentic,” or “untouched”, which often comes from colonial-era narratives. I plead guilty to that.
We travel to India to watch mysterious women dressed in saree and to Mexico, to meet Mexican men with sombrero in the street, to Africa, to feel the “real poor, mysterious and a bit frightening Africa”.
We project images coming from movies, books, or just a common imaginary without realizing that those phrases carry centuries of exploitation and objectification.
Plus, we are disappointed when we are there and the reality doesn’t match our fantasies.
Avoid Logics of oppression
Let’s face it, even if tourism is mainly democratized, White people coming from the West are still a big part of it.
For the rest of the POC traveling the world, we are also mainly coming from the West, and we also have some internalized colonization mindset. Again, I pled guilty here.
And it is so important to decolonized our minds here, to avoid applying the domination ideology we read in school books or hear on the news to the places we visit.
We need to clear our minds of any kind of oppression, feeling ourselves more important for coming from the west, expecting to have special treatment from the part of locals.
We also need to listen to other voices, to the voices of the people who lived there. They are the only ones who know about how is the daily life, the undertakings in sociology and politics, we need to hear, and we also need to stop speaking for them!
Meeting locals and support their economy
For me, the best way to practice decolonized tourism is to meet locals with an open mind, leaving my assumptions behind.
I talk with them, listen to their stories, and share mine, because sometimes we just listen to them like they should entertain us, and not it is an exchange we need to have with them.
I try to understand their views on politics, education, health system, how tourists treat them, and how they see the future of tourism in their places.
But not everything is about talking.
A great way to know about them is actually living with them. So i would choose homestays over hotels, I would try to help with the food, and go with them to the local markets, participate in food classes or ceramics ones. I would have long talks around a tea or at the bus station.
Whenever possible, I buy from locals—water from small shops, cosmetics from women’s cooperatives, souvenirs from artisans, not big stores.
I always try to travel with these principles in mind. And yes, sometimes I still fail. I get frustrated by other travelers’ comments, or even by my own intrusive thoughts.
But no one will ever be perfect. We’ve all been fed these globalized visions of travel, and unlearning them takes time.
It’s a work in progress—one I hope more of us will start.
Have you started yours?
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