Some places have gone through an especially striking transformation, for instance Baden-Baden: Formerly reputed as ‘Europe’s summer capital’, where the rich and beautiful were staging their own ‘Vanity Fair’, the spa-city today is a site of convalescence and wellness even for clients on welfare.

More crucial still, is the case of Venice: Distinguished as a UN World Heritage, Venice has been invaded by short-term tourists from mighty cruise-ships threatening the lagoon city’s structural essence and local people’s easygoing serenity. More and more locals have regarded this kind of invasion as an attack – to their city and their social life. Result: The access of cruise-ships is strictly regulated, and day-visitors pay a ten-Euro entrance fee.

The situation elsewhere looks similar: Angkor, once the glorious hindu-buddhist temple city of the Khmer kings, started to decay from the 15th century on and fell into oblivion. Only in the 19th century French explorers discovered the ruins and brought Angkor to daylight. In the wake of the Vietnam War, communist Khmer Rouges conquered the area. Today, the Khmer Rouges have gone long ago, and "hordes of monkeys and tourists” (Christopher Clark, Australian historian) have reconquered the impressive temple ruins of Angkor.

There is an ironical thesis to these patterns: “When Man penetrates the world as a (felt or real) bandit, the world will enforce him to keep living as a bandit. This is the world’s response, we could say, its revenge”, says Ludwig Fusshoeller in ‘Die Dämonen kehren wieder’ (‘The Return of the Demons’). Visitors who are regarded as intruders, will be treated as such, be they simple tourists, outreaching business people or outright invaders. – What does that mean? -- Bye-bye to sweeping welcome culture – and hello to 'Locals – First'!

An irritating factor is the way how we measure business success in Tourism: Usually, our economic activities are determined largely by statistical quantities, rather than by means of a system of product and service quality indicators. Economies of scale outdo economies of scope. While cooperation even within the sector still leaves enough to be desired, competition is fought over the price, rather than over ‘excellence’.

Tourism reflects the society that creates it: Cheap packages lure ‘cheap’ tourists – as more of exactly those people are coming that hosts would have better not welcomed. Opening up more destinations and making them affordable to ever more travellers has been the quantifiable goal to date. Is there any justification to pricing flights for less than airport fees? – Needless to say that we are caught in a system of false efforts to make Tourism seem more ‘democratic’, which means affordable for everyone.  

Who wonders that a kind of ‘discount’ mentality has demanded its tribute: Mass Tourism prevails and determines local life and culture, yet the final bill is high: Negative impacts outweigh positive effects, the travel destination is perceived critically, the image is getting from bad to worse. ‘Overtourism’ is the term that afflicts our digestion, both as hosts and visitors. These prefer to go elsewhere, leaving behind ‘lost places’. Finally, locals may reflect over graffiti-sprayed hotel ruins that by no means show the beauty of the ephemeral. 

We already started to set new trends like shifting away from seasonal to year-round vacation getaways, enhancing last-minute travel and welcoming ‘pod travel’ groups (of like-minded friends), accepting short-term bookings to test potential remote working locations ('home-office in the sun'), offering 'hybrid' travel packages to link up real and digital events for working & vacation purposes ('workation'), creating bucket list travel destinations and ‘homey’ accommodation. Our efforts have been real, sometimes even artistic, and arguably crazy!

What is left is, first, a lack of trained personnel, since tourism staffers earlier laid off, due to the pandemic, found better-paid jobs outside the sector, and second, the lingering suspicion that despite strong individual efforts towards implementing sustainability criteria and regardless of persistent warnings and demands expressed by so many professionals, little communal essence only seems to have been achieved by so few so late.

Travel & Tourism – arguably overrated? Do we have a structural problem, a blocked mindset, motivation deficiencies, too much reasoning and no action, or merely a communication deficit? Tourism and hospitality – a sector that against all odds has been perceived resilient and socially, economically and ecologically relevant, in the wake of the global pandemic, was facing the bitter reality of its weakness and declared systemic irrelevance. What a sobering outcome!

Why could we not prevail in public or non-public cross-sector government circles? Why has destination management largely failed to shine as an integral part of an all-over 'place management'? Why has Travel & Tourism, apart from being an industry, hardly been recognized in its 'holistic' scope, as a whole set of communication tools that is capable to enhance the reputation of the country, region, or city in its totality? Why have we failed to replace corrupt individualism with a more encompassing approach toward 'the other one plus me'? While Travel & Tourism seem to remain overstated 'and' underexposed, post-pandemic glamour has dressed up anew the mirage of yesteryear's nineties and noughties – 'to stay a while …'

Our commercialized welcome culture apparently needs more balls and astuteness to stand up to its ideals and their public perception to help create and show a world worth Faust's Easter Stroll recitation:

“Here is the people’s true Heaven,

High and low shout happily:

Here I am Man: here, dare to be!”

Undisturbed for decades, today’s middle-class lifestyle, enhanced by all kinds of welfare-state conveniences, has allowed us to become short-winded comfort-zone dwellers. Anxious to avoid change, we are happy with an occasional brushing up the scenery.

Our modern throw-away society goes well with the rhythm of drag-and-drop or hire-and-fire, since things are as exchangeable as people – dangerous symptoms of advanced infantile capriciousness. It fits to an appalling contradiction: While too many of us voluntarily digitalize their privacy on social media platforms, a highly sensitized official approach to data protection impedes police from effectively tracking down fraud and crime. Any counter-action,  risking harsh protests over an emering 'surveillance state', bears inherent features of suspicion and denunciation. Trust and confidence are at stake.

Indeed, sometimes we would consider ‘funky’ a more personal friendship, but is there not too much involvement? Our social media-dominated ‘second-hand lives’ may do well without old virtues. Applicable to both running a care-giving home or a concentration camp, they were contemptuously rated as ‘secondary virtues’ by the anti-establishment generation of the 1960/70s. Who cares that honesty, integrity and accountability have been left in the attic of casual oblivion! Party-boopers, as they are! 'Influencers' are our new idols to imitate, disregarding their often biased reporting, standardized poses and angles.

Forty casualties and a hundred-plus injured – that was the horrible outcome of the 2025/26 New Year's Eve blaze at 'Le Constellation' lounge in Switzerland's Crans Montana resort. The calamity sent a horror signal to our society that indulges in little more than image cultivation and You-Only-Live-Once narcissism, fatally converging with Neil Postman's evocative 1985 "amusement to death" statement. Revealing signs include distorted perception and lacking realism in an ambiente of fun and cockiness, yet above all a severe failure of manager responsibility and the total absence of social values.

Today the value of 'old virtues' has been reconsidered, just in the limelight of business and entrepreneurship: In an effort to 'go sustainable', major companies and institutions are sensitized to link up hard and soft factors, hold a mission statement, show their commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and employ a Compliance Manager -- which by the way is comparable to the office of a 'censor' in times of ancient Rome.   

Nonetheless, visionaries, especially in public function, find it more and more difficult to make their vision everyone’s cause. Softening-up family structures, questioning proven values, blasting sound identities to militant ‘agitations of identity’, allowing ‘cancel culture’ to go viral against hitherto uncontested cultural monuments of past glory: Who wonders that disorientation gradually has affected members of all social classes, and that industrialized countries in particular show widening fissures in their social fabric?

More doubts are coming up. Rather than Mephisto's statement to be ”Part of the Power that would Always wish Evil, and always works the Good”, we find ourselves caught in the trap of philanthropy: Well intended – not well done! We need to ask ourselves and those whom we teach: Is the ‘comfort-zone’ the right place to stay? To change life-style: before the pandemic there was a quest to do so, ever since it is an outright urge – some call it slow-down, others reversal, militants demand a total ‘reset’. The buzzword is 'societal transformation'. A double-edged sword; it can be used for the good or the evil. -- We are back in ambiguity – with best regards and a warm welcome to the new ‘Faustian’ age!

Part IV identifies religion and the value of Faith as the sound basis of a society's well-being, illustrated on continuous experiences of social decay and natural and man-made desasters. Fateful anniversaries bring back memories of events unforgotten: The blaze of Notre Dame de Paris was regarded by many as a "first-grade wake-up call".-- Stay tuned.