“No longer my cup of tea.”

Whose cup of tea is it these days? I rarely check the website any longer.

In both Iceland and Scotland, we heard tales about celebrities who pay fabulous sums for exclusive fishing rights in privately owned streams. Neither destination offered marina facilities or high-end accommodations for billionaires with super yachts.
We did what elderly, middle class tourists often do and took minibus tours: Mercedes buses with knowledgeable local driver guides. At the places we stopped, we observed other tourists who had arrived in rented cars, together with smaller numbers of hard core trekkers and bicyclists. We were glad to avoid driving, walking, or bicycling since roads were frequently narrow, steep and twisty and often unpaved. Part of our guides’ schtick in both places was driving us over rough back roads to see places and enjoy experiences said to be off the usual tourist routes.
In Iceland, our fellow passengers were a mature (younger than us) couple from Hong Kong, a still active businessman married to a retired banker and a Polish business consultant vacationing by himself. In Scotland, there were three Caucasians, us and a twenty-nine year old male designer from New York. There was one Korean girl, who may have been genuinely super rich. She was traveling by herself, visiting Skye, then Oxford, on her way to watch the tennis finals at Wimbledon. The other eight passengers were Chinese: a family party comprised of a man, his wife, her sister and a son, all from Guangzhou, plus a mother and teenage son and an unrelated stylish young couple, all from Shanghai.
Catering to middle-class Chinese tourists is clearly the biggest thing shaking up global tourism today. Signage in airports and toilets in Iceland is now in four languages: Icelandic, English, German and Mandarin. Mandarin has also replaced Japanese in signage in Scotland.
In both Iceland and Scotland, the tourist industry is heavily dependent on seasonal labor provided by young people, primarily from Central Europe: Polish, Czech, Latvian, etc. The Polish consultant in our first group remarked that he could speak Polish in every hotel and restaurant he visited in Iceland, where a local population of only 340,000 now caters to over two million tourists a year. Skye was a bit different. There the surprise was the small, but biggest on the island, town of Portee, where our B&B was located. There we found two Indian restaurants, one north, one South Indian, whose owners have lived on the island for decades. The owner of our B&B was a German man who had married a local woman.

I am not sure what to make of these observations. It seems clear, however, that the engine driving tourism industry growth worldwide is not the super rich but members of an affluent, cosmopolitan middle class, of whom members of China’s growing middle class, which already outnumbers the whole of the U.S. population, are a rapidly growing percentage.

Thoughts?