http://money.cnn.com/2016/07/18/news/travel-flight-holiday-turkey-egypt-france-tunisia/index.html
It’s obvious that hurting tourism is among the goals of today’s Islamist terrorists, and they’re succeeding.
You might think, at first blush, that this isn’t all that big a deal. After all, isn’t tourism something of a frivolous and dispensable luxury?
Well, not really. Significant dips in tourism seriously harm travel agents, airline employees, tour guides, hotel employees, bus drivers, restaurant workers, and their families — as well, of course, as entire national economies in the aggregate. And such damage ripples across societies generally. If the restaurant worker can’t afford new clothes for his children, that hurts clothing stores. If the tour guide is without work, she can’t afford the new apartment that she dreamed of, and that hurts builders and construction tradesmen and real estate people. And so forth.
The fact is, of course, that hundreds of thousands of tourists are out there every day, even in these places. And that the odds that any one particular tourist will be hurt are microscopically small. But the threat is real, and it urgently needs to be dealt with — and not merely for the convenience of some upper middle class travelers spending their retirement money.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In