Last October, Patrick Leonard opened Postcard Bookshop, fusing his love for literature with his love for travel. Located in Portland’s Central Eastside neighborhood, the store’s shelves are organized according to countries or regions, from Africa to Oceania and the Pacific Northwest. In addition to travel guides, phrase books and cookbooks showcasing world cuisines, novels on display provide passage to new cultures and worldly journeys.
But running a bookstore geared to customers planning or returning from vacations has made Leonard rethink what it means to be a global traveler today. From Google Translate to Instagram, and Airbnb to Uber, social media and apps are changing tourism and the communities impacted by it. Throngs of visitors to popular destinations are fueling a rise in overtourism which is straining resources, prompting street protests and pricing locals out of the housing market, from Hawai’i to Portugal. Leonard joins us for a discussion about overtourism and the challenge of being an ethical tourist.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Patrick Leonard opened the Postcard Bookshop in Southeast Portland last year. The store fuses his love for literature with his love for travel. He stocks travel guides and phrase books alongside cookbooks and novels that span the globe. But running a bookstore geared to customers planning or returning from vacations has made Leonard rethink what it means to be a global traveler today, because in recent years, people all over the world are saying enough is enough. They’re saying that too many tourists are straining their resources, pricing them out of the housing market and changing the essential nature of their homes.
Patrick Leonard joins us now to talk about this, and we want to hear from you as well. How do you think about travel these days? What does it mean to you right now to be an ethical tourist? Patrick Leonard, welcome.
Patrick Leonard: Hi, thank you.
Miller: I want to start with the voicemail because we asked our listeners in the last couple of days for their thoughts on this question of how they think about travel these days or overtourism these days. This is a call we got from Dan in Tualatin.
Dan [caller voicemail]: I visited Europe, traveled throughout Europe and lived in Europe extensively in the ‘70s while I was in the Navy, and really fell in love with many, many locations there throughout Greece, France, Spain, Italy and even some North Africa. Yeah, I fell in love with Europe. It had not yet been overrun by tourists. I’ve been back many times and without any doubt, the rising crush of tourism is fundamentally changing life for people who live there and of course changing the experience for tourists who go there. It’s a tragedy, frankly. And I’m thinking they probably will want to put in some kind of restrictions and advanced reservations for you to even visit those cities because tourism is killing them and changing – I’m using the word rather generously – the fundamental nature of those communities.
Miller: Patrick, do you have your own definition of overtourism?
Leonard: Yeah, so this is a phenomenon that I think has gotten a lot of news attention in the past several years, but it’s actually been going on for quite a long time. Worldwide international tourist arrivals peaked in 2019, obviously right before the pandemic. Then there was the obvious shutdown and a few years where people kind of took their breath, looked around and thought about how tourism feels in our communities.
Now, just in the first quarter of 2025, international tourist arrivals were around 300 million people, which is up about 5% over last year at the same time, which was itself returned to pre-pandemic records. So, there’s obviously just this enormous number of tourists visiting the top destinations around the world. When that pushes over into the realm of what I would call overtourism, I think it’s really when the concentration and the volume of tourists reaches a point where the services, the offering and the character of a place shifts to prioritize their demands over the interests and needs of the locals.
Miller: Do you think of this primarily, then, as a question of the number of people visiting a place at the scale of tourism or the actions of individual tourists, the way they are being tourists?
Leonard: I think the two are fundamentally connected. The volume of tourists has meant that there are a lot more people traveling than there otherwise would have. And this is a shift that’s happened very fast. I mean, it’s interesting to hear that voicemail saying my first experience “in the ‘70s,” because that was the early days of travel guides, right? Like all of the big flagship guidebooks that we think of – “Lonely Planet,” “Rough Guide,” Rick Steves – all of these people got their start as backpackers in the ‘70s.
Miller: I don’t know how much you’ve dug into the history of tourism or the history of travel writing, but were there people in the ‘70s or ‘80s saying, “oh my gosh, tourists are overrunning my favorite European capitals and they’re changing the nature of Venice or Paris?” Were people complaining even then about the same thing?
Leonard: I think as someone who loves literature, it’s funny because you can look back at that as kind of a record of how people have felt at different moments. Basically, for as long as people have been traveling for leisure, people have been complaining about the individuals they found there …
Miller: The other people traveling for leisure.
Leonard: Exactly.
Miller: I mean, that’s actually not unlike people coming to move to some city.
Leonard: Very much.
Miller: “Portland was great when I arrived, then people came after me and they changed the thing I loved about the city.” Even for people who are moving to a place, you hear that a lot?
Leonard: Yeah, I recently reread the E. M. Forster novel “A Room with a View” and a good half of that book is a very contemporary feeling send-up of European tourist culture.
Miller: These are rich British people in Italy?
Leonard: Exactly, in Florence, exactly. And there’s long debates between the characters about whether to have your Baedeker, which would have been like the dominant guidebook at the time, or whether you should find a local to tour you around. And meanwhile, everyone’s staying in this pension that’s clearly owned by a British person who’s posing as an Italian and you’re surrounded by other British people doing very British things.
Miller: OK, so if there’s something that is not totally new about this, what do you think has changed? I mean, first of all, the numbers you said seem incontrovertible. If there are more people traveling globally than ever before, that’s a real thing. But what else has changed?
Leonard: The volume is the single biggest factor, but that volume is a result of technological changes that really opened up, democratized and took away all of the obstacles that made travel challenging. The ‘70s, the ‘80s, the ‘90s – this was a time where you still had to use a travel agent to book international flights often. There were obviously people who were tramping and backpacking around destinations, but for your average family that was looking to go somewhere, it was complicated. You introduce something like Expedia or Booking.com, and all of a sudden people can book their own flights online, only to then lead into new technologies like Airbnb, Uber, translation tools. All of these things take away the friction and mean that a much wider range of people, who might not be as adventurous or necessarily spending as much time thinking about the culture of where they’re going, are able to go on leisure travel.
Miller: Nancy has called in from Portland. Nancy, go ahead.
Nancy [caller]: OK, well, I just want to say I’ve been a travel agent since 1978, and I have morphed into not just one that is a ticketmaster. My specialty is international travel, sending to people where they fear to go. And that is unusual destinations like Africa, Asia, South America. And I have to add that social media has also created issues.
I was in Chefchaouen several years ago – that is the blue town in Morocco – and I was there with my guide. I tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, but there were people on the steps everywhere trying to get photos, TikTok moments. So some of it is that that has happened, yes. And then Airbnb, which has been rampant in all of our cities throughout the entire world with little regulation on it and it’s been corporatized. I mean, it’s no longer mom, pop and grandma having a hot, little room in the house somewhere. So it’s an issue with that.
But then on the flip side of it, many of the places I send people, they need the revenue. They depend upon this, and we try to make it sustainable. NGOs go in and teach people how to have homestays and the other things that go along with that. But when you have the convergence of people that want to add it to their bucket list with that true desire and interest to see the world, for me it’s a quandary.
We haven’t even talked about climate change where I send people to far-flung destinations. I just spent three weeks in West Africa last October and to get there was really difficult, but it was fascinating. Not everybody can still afford to do that, but also not everybody has the interest. So those places are still protected. But if I send somebody to India, I can’t tell them not to go to the Taj Mahal or if they go to France, I can’t tell them not to go to Paris. It’s how you do it, when you do it and trying to do it responsibly, which a lot of times is going off season. But even so, the off-season now is crazy, too. That’s all I have to say.
Miller: Nancy, thanks very much.
Nancy [caller]: Thank you.
Miller: Patrick, Nancy mentioned Airbnb. We got some disagreement on our comment thread on Instagram specifically about that. Scubadubadave wrote, “Support local, not Airbnb, or VRBO, or whatever the other companies are. Buy from farmers markets and the local artists. Take tours owned and operated by people that live there that are actually locals, not some mega corporation.”
But then Beetlebird.lady wrote, “It is still possible to use Airbnb to support a local resident by searching for specific types of listings. My stay in Lyon was in a young person’s apartment where they stay elsewhere with family or partner while we enjoy and take care for their space. This also builds connection with your host, and you can look forward to welcoming them to your own guest space or returning again to theirs.”
I’m curious how you think about the different ways that we can or do use these technologies.
Leonard: Yeah, I think a lot of them really do make travel easier. There’s so much from these, like just thinking about mapping technology, no longer having to carry a big paper map or printouts from MapQuest, but having navigation that makes you feel much more confident when you’re traveling.
I am an Airbnb user, but I’ve had to reckon with what that actually means. I think one of our responsibilities is to look at what the regulations are in different communities. So if the place is setting limits on an Airbnb, saying an individual can’t rent this for more than three months out of the year, that’s going to prevent that from becoming something that is an investment property. So with the issue underlying a lot of Airbnb frustration around the world is that it’s causing a contraction of housing markets where there is a financial incentive to rent to short-term tourists year-round in corporately managed properties. That then means that locals can’t afford to live in a city center. This is evident in Barcelona, it’s evident in somewhere like Mexico City, where not only do you have tourists, but also you have a lot of expatriate kinds of digital nomads.
Miller: Let’s see another call. Tracy has called in from Bend. Tracy, go ahead.
Tracy [caller]: Hi, how are you doing?
Miller: Doing great.
Tracy [caller]: Hey, I’m glad to make a comment on this. I love international travel. I’ve done a bit myself. The comment I think I wanted to make was, I think especially just focusing on my experience with Americans abroad is we tend to go someplace loud. We want things to be like they are in the States. Sometimes I think people miss out on the actual, great cultural experience by connecting with the real people who live there.
One of the problems that I feel is happening … Years ago, probably 30 years ago, I lived and worked in Portugal for just about seven months. It was a great experience. I loved it. The people are awesome. It was just a great culture. And in the last couple of years, I’ve been hearing everybody’s going to Portugal and it’s like the new hotspot. And it made me a little sick thinking, oh my God, what’s going to happen to it? Like people are going over there buying property, they’re going to go over there, they’re taking their pickle ball and they’re taking all the stuff, all these American things over there.
It just makes me kind of sad because it was a really great … And I realized that no place stands still, and Portugal has obviously advanced in 30 years. Their culture has changed and with people who live there. But still, it just makes me really sad to see that.
Miller: Tracy, can I ask you what you think was different about you going to Portugal and all these other people who you take issue with maybe going to Portugal?
Tracy [caller]: Well, when I went, again, I was working there. So some people might think, oh, I was this was also not good because I was taking a job from a Portuguese person. It was a very specialized job. We were building the Oceanário for the World Expo in 1998. So, as an artist, I was working in a very specialized field. So we had an international crew. We had French, people from Mozambique and Portuguese working on the crew.
I know when I was there, I tried to leave a really light footprint. I went to restaurants, and I was trying to learn a little Portuguese. I wasn’t trying to change their culture. I was going and seeing what their culture offered to me. I didn’t eat in American [places]. I don’t even know if they had McDonald’s there then. When I travel internationally, I don’t eat at anything that’s like any kind of American franchise. I just don’t do that.
I think maybe just respecting the culture, not trying to make it like the United States and being respectful of a place. In Portugal, the clothing issue wasn’t as much because they’re a Western country. But years ago, I was in Israel and Egypt. And while in Egypt, I made sure that the clothes covered my arms and my legs. This was in the summer, it was 110 degrees. But I respected what the culture was.
David Sedaris once wrote, in “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” he said [when] Americans travel abroad, they show up like they’re going to “mow” somebody’s “lawn.” We show up in shorts, T-shirts and tennis shoes, when maybe it’s not an appropriate dress for the place that you’re visiting. So I think maybe that’s the difference, trying to be respectful of that.
Miller: Tracy, thanks very much.
Tracy [caller]: Yeah, sure thing. Thank you. I appreciate the topic.
Miller: Patrick, how much do your customers bring up these issues with you? Do they ever talk about this with you?
Leonard: It’s interesting. So, when I opened this bookstore, obviously I wanted to share this love of travel. So I spent a lot of my days hearing about people’s wonderful trips that they’ve had and talking with them about places they’re going. And over the last several months, I’ve started to hear that feedback from people. And I’m not sure if it’s based on exclusively their experience, or things they’re starting to hear in the news, or making them more aware of these things when they travel.
But particularly visitors coming back from a place like Portugal, which has become one of the really clear examples of this phenomenon, or Kyoto, Japan, which I think is another of the poster children for what’s going on here, they’re explaining the experience of walking down streets that feel like you are standing in a queue for an attraction. And meanwhile, these are just like neighborhoods and districts. [They explained] going to somewhere like the famous Bamboo Grove in Kyoto, which is this quiet place of contemplation, and literally waiting in crowds of people who are just taking their turn getting a shot for their Instagram or social media in which they look like the only person there. But meanwhile, if you were to turn the camera around, there’s thousands of people waiting right behind them.
Miller: Do you ever feel ambivalent about working in a travel adjacent/lubricating business?
Leonard: It’s interesting. I think it’s that old joke of, “you aren’t in traffic, you are the traffic.” Everyone needs to acknowledge that when we travel, we are tourists. There isn’t a distinction between tourists and travelers or things people like to make, but there are different behaviors we can have when we do that. And it’s something I’ve had to reckon with over the last year of working in this. Obviously, I want to share this love of travel in the world and reading about the world through books, but also, what’s my role in helping people to be better travelers?
Miller: The entire thrust of this conversation so far has been focusing on the negatives. But just briefly, what are the best things that can come from traveling, do you think?
Leonard: I mean, tourism has enormous positive impacts. Obviously, economics is a huge one. It’s why so many governments and civic organizations are really heavily invested in that.
Miller: Even if their citizens are shooting tourists with water pistols, some of the mayors, or governors, or leaders of those cities or states know that a lot of their economies are heavily dependent on tourist dollars?
Leonard: Very much so. And I think that whenever you see somewhere that’s been kind of trending on social media, remembering that actually that isn’t an accident. A lot of times there was a very concentrated marketing push behind that.
Miller: By the people who live there?
Leonard: By the people who live there to sell it as a destination. And sometimes that happens for decades. But I think beyond that, tourism promotes cultural preservation when it’s at its best. It can promote pride in the things you have to see when you watch other people coming from outside and really appreciating what you have. Then obviously like the exchange, right? Like that feeling of empathy, that feeling of understanding, it changes the moment you set foot in another place.
Miller: Let’s take another call. Margo has called in from Portland. Margo, go ahead.
Margo [caller]: Hi Dave, can you hear me?
Miller: I sure can.
Margo [caller]: OK, great. Yeah, I think this is a great conversation. I was going to say I think we should do less tourist shaming. Like your guest was just talking about, international travel opens your mind to new experiences, cultures and different ways of living. The problems that you’re talking about are definitely very real, but I think the onus should be on not the tourists, but the places. So do more regulation of Airbnb. If there’s like a landmark monument that the social media people are hogging all the frames, set a rule on how long you can do that for. So that was it. That’s my comment.
Miller: Margo, thanks very much.
Patrick, this reminds me a little bit of that first voicemail that we played. Dan in Tualatin mentioned that he’d like to see cities or countries themselves doing more, or he’s expecting them to do more, to crack down. What kinds of things are you already seeing in terms of either efforts to incentivize good behavior by travelers or require it in some ways?
Leonard: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting, because talking about what our responsibility is, it’s a little bit like talking about climate change. Obviously, you cannot take a plastic straw, but there’s big civic and governmental forces at play that need to really be intentional about how you manage these things. So, I think one of the things that’s been happening in the past several years is, in response to these demonstrations and protests, certain tourism boards for different destinations are changing their whole mentality away from marketing to management. And in doing that, they’re trying to approach it from a lot of different angles. One of them is kind of on the punitive side, right? So like, let’s impose fees.
Miller: Like congestion pricing?
Leonard: Exactly, exactly. Some of that might mean like we’re gonna move the cruise ship port outside of the city center. So that people can’t just walk off the ship into the community for a few hours and leave, but that they have to take a bus in and that you can regulate it in some way. Venice recently instituted a €10 a day visitor fee, but this is pretty inconsequential.
Miller: People have spent thousands of dollars on their vacation and Venice is on their list, they’ll pay that €10.
Leonard: Exactly, right? And what are the restrictions there? Is that money earmarked exclusively for further marketing or does it go back into community infrastructure? If you’re in an area where the sewage systems or the public water systems and those utilities that residents depend on are being inundated by an influx of tourists, can you fund developments there? Can you put in new infrastructure like parking lots, better amenities that ease the congestion? Or can you tie something like fees to a system in which you can kind of throttle the number of tourists, or at least gather data?
But then I think interestingly, the more I would say promising programs are places that are trying to incentivize good tourism. So, changing your marketing to promote the cultural values behind your destination. Think about somewhere like Amsterdam, pushing away from being like, “hey, we’re a place to let loose and have like a bachelor party,” to, “hey, we have these incredible museums, this wonderful cultural scene, great music, art, food, come here to experience that.”
You have Copenhagen, which has put in, I think, a really progressive program that’s returned for the second year now called CopenPay, where tourists can actually earn not just discounts, but free admissions and even free dinners through doing community-minded programs. Some of those things are like using a bike instead of a car share to get to a destination, you’ll go in for free. But others actually embed that visitor in the community by doing volunteerism, community service things. You can have a free kayak rental if you do some waterway cleanup while you’re kayaking, or you can do litter cleanup in a popular tourist destination and then get a free dinner that evening.
Miller: I want to play another voicemail in the meantime. This is Celia from Enterprise, who has the experience of living in a town in Oregon that does see its own fair share of visitors, especially given its size. Let’s have a listen.
Celia [caller voicemail]: I think that being an ethical tourist first and foremost, the important part is to be kind to the locals and know that you are a guest in their home. I think that that’s really important, coming from a place that growing up here is a pretty tourist-heavy economy. It means a lot when people smile, say thank you, support the local businesses and are kind.
Another aspect that I think is pretty important is if you do love a place and you continue to return to it, to be considerate of the local housing market. So maybe instead of buying a house that you visit for six weeks of the year, possibly just supporting the local rental market that’s already there. A lot of these places that are tourism-heavy economies also have housing issues where local people have a hard time finding a place to live. So, yeah, just being respectful of the locals and their ability to live in the places that they work.
Miller: Patrick, I’m curious. Earlier you mentioned that various apps have made it easier to plan trips or to get around. Other technologies have made it easier for us to understand what people are saying or have them understand us. And the word you use is that there’s a lot less friction when it comes to travel. Is that a good thing? Do you see any benefits from having the friction in the past?
Leonard: I think that it’s important when traveling to remember that fundamentally it’s an experience of difference. It’s just an integral part of that, right? Experiencing that difference and being a stranger – that is fundamentally what you are when you travel.
Miller: And you’re saying that this tech makes it … If everything is familiar and it’s all the same mediated way of interacting with the world, then the strangeness, which you see as a benefit, dissipates?
Leonard: Very much so. And that strangeness can be very exhausting. I know at the end of a long day of traveling in a place, where I’m trying to use the limited language skills I have to converse with someone, and I’m trying to navigate different public transit and enter all these things, like it’s an exciting process, but I’m also tired at the end of the day. Sometimes you just collapse back into your hotel bed or your Airbnb bed and just need to rest because it’s not easy. But it’s one of those things where I think it makes the experience richer to make that effort because there’s an exchange. The hosts there in that country are making that effort to meet you part way and you’re making that effort as well. And I think that’s at the core of building that empathy when we travel.
Miller: Let’s take one more call. Den Mark has called in from Vancouver. Go ahead.
Den Mark [caller]: Hi, I don’t mean to repeat what might have been said already because I tuned in late, but two cool things about travel. One would be to go to places which are not particularly popular because the infrastructure there needs support, and the people would like to have visitors. And the second thought is that when going to a country that doesn’t speak English, it’s always cool to learn 10 or 12 words or phrases so that people know that you respect their culture.
Miller: Thanks very much for that call. Patrick, I’m wondering, do you have any travel planned right now?
Leonard: I do. I’m actually going to Japan for the first time this fall and that has been an interesting experience to question how I will be doing that.
Miller: Are you going to some of the most popular places?
Leonard: I actually, years ago, had booked a trip in 2010 and ended up having to cancel it because of a move that ended up happening in my life. So we’ve been wanting to go back for years, and the country is a very different place in the last 15 years. After a lot of thinking about it, we decided not to go to Kyoto, which was somewhere we had always wanted to see. But just hearing all of that pressure, we’ve considered going to some more off-the-beaten-track locations. Also, spending time in Tokyo, which obviously is a hugely tourist city, but it’s also one of the biggest cities on earth and can do a lot more to absorb residents.
But also thinking about what are the day trips I can do, where are places I can go that aren’t necessarily the same things that you see on social media? It only took a little bit of time of starting to follow content creators who are traveling there or talking with customers of mine about their recent trips to start to hear the same recommendations over and over. And it’s been, I think for me, a process of slowing down and reminding myself that some of the best experiences I have when I’ve traveled, haven’t been the must-see sites. It’s really impactful to see the Great Wall of China and get that photo, but my favorite part of one of those trips, like to China that I went two years ago, was taking a cooking class in someone’s home or stumbling upon a community outdoor market one afternoon. Those to me are memories that I carry a lot more than seeing like the sight that everybody else has taken a photo of.
Miller: If you have an amazing experience in some under or not-very-tourist place, will you tell the world about it? [That’s] how a lot of this gets fueled writ large by influencers or family and friends? Or is that part of this, too – not trumpeting the places that haven’t yet been overrun?
Leonard: I don’t think social media in and of itself is the party to blame here. I think the same critique could have been levied against travel guides years ago, saying like, oh, if they keep saying the same destinations, everyone’s going to see those. I think some of what is fundamentally changed with social media is not sharing, I had this really meaningful experience, I saw something that really changed the way I thought about the world, to more of a perspective of, look at me with this incredible backdrop. You’re starting to use places as set dressing for like the movie production of your life.
I think that the question to ask is, when you’re traveling, to say, like, why do I want to go to this destination now? What’s my reason? What’s the impulse? Is it because the photos looked really good there or do I have a connection here? And then when you’re sharing those pictures, did I take the photo in the same place everyone else took or am I talking about something here? Can I share something I learned in this experience? Or is it just about this fantastic dream scenario?
Miller: Patrick, it was great talking to you. Thanks very much.
Leonard: Thank you.
Miller: Patrick Leonard is the owner of Postcard Bookshop.
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