When I describe my favorite type of neighborhood, I struggle not to say that it is one devoid of tourists. Mostly what I mean is devoid of crowds and people stopping mid-stride on the sidewalk. I like places you have no business being unless you live there or you’ve heard about a good restaurant in the area.

By avoiding the word tourist, I am striving to avoid being a cliché — the vaguely snobby resident of one of the most visited cities in the world, turning their nose up at the cash cow that keeps the metro running. But lately it is also because I am increasingly convinced that we are simply being too hard on tourists.

Tourists, I feel comfortable saying, are more or less universally disdained. The word evokes big tour groups of loud, selfie-snapping foreigners clogging up sidewalks and making no attempt to speak the local language. They are dressed in specific apparel tailored to full days of sight seeing that sticks out like a sore thumb, or they appear in what amounts to local cosplay (e.g., berets, striped shirts, anything on the latest French Cool Girl list) that also sticks out like a sore thumb. They are lost. They are rude. They are gauche. They are pests and they are ruining whatever city you are in, even if you yourself are a — gasp — tourist in that city.

Calling someone a tourist is not an insult but it’s not not an insult. Particularly when you could be a traveler!

You see, elsewhere in these same cities, we have travelers, as, as I’m sure you can imagine, if you are any old player, big or small, a cog, a gear or a piston in the tourism machine, you might have a vested interest in a word that doesn’t insult your target customer.

Over the last couple years, if not longer, I have seen the word traveler increasingly used to refer to people who, by traveling for pleasure, are by definition tourists. In articles, in advertisements, in branding. What makes this more, to me, than just the natural evolution of language is that fact that the word tourist is alive and well — but reserved for negative coverage, most often about environmental and economic damage being caused by these visitors.

The tourist, we can all agree, is a plague. The traveler? Well the traveler is simply someone who is in a city but not from that city. But, and this is very important, they are — as the travel industry appeals to them to book tours, restaurants, hotels, and oh yes let’s not forget “experiences” — not tourists. They are travelers.

(Traveler is the chosen term I see in the media and I get why, but to be annoyingly semantic, I would argue once you arrive in a city you are a visitor and no longer a traveler as you are no longer traveling, but whatever, we’ll stick with traveler for the purposes of this comparison.)

To be a traveler is, we might understand from the illustrious work of branding and sales specialists who want to entice the tourists who don’t want to be tourists, a tourist with taste.

A tourist with an interest in going off the beaten path, but only if it’s the same off-piste option they have seen on social media.

A tourist, enlightened enough to be aware of the oft-negative reception of tourists, who has rebranded themselves — whether by dress, itinerary, or sheer force of social media posting — as something, anything, other than a tourist.

And let’s not ignore the battle between good and evil of it all — tourists are destroying the world!

May I remind/introduce you to the concept of overtourism? (I never know how much of this stuff has become inside baseball for me, but this one is pretty intuitive.) Overtourism is the phenomenon whereby certain places of interest are visited by excessive numbers of tourists, causing undesirable effects for the places visited.

In other words, lots of sites around the world are in danger because we tourists can’t stop visiting. Venice is sinking (faster than normal). The trails to Machu Picchu are deteriorating. The donkeys of Santorini are tortured, tired and unhappy.

There is only a small silver, I imagine, of « travelers » who are genuinely not contributing to over-tourism. The majority of people traveling under this banner might skip the traditional wonders of the world — still a big might — but they are nonetheless all beating the same path to the latest trending hidden gem.

I’m not sure when a place passes from a hidden gem to tourist destination. When did Mykonos go from a secluded refuge where no one would ever find Jason Bourne to a place so saturated in tourism it is a bad PR to develop a hotel there? (A true story: The company for which I work canceled plans for a luxury hotel in Mykonos because it would look bad vis-a-vis its corporate social responsibility commitments.)

I am not sure it matters when these shifts happen, or even why. I am inclined to believe the problem arises before the foot of the tourist hits the pavement and I am happy to throw the blame for overtourism at social media for getting us in the “everyone goes to the same places and takes photos of the same things” situation. (Which, yes, surely dates back to the dawn of travel, but now word of mouth is no longer restricted to those people you actually know.) In any case, here we are.

Point is: Even the name overtourism, while accurate based on the definitions we just established, implies that the tourist, tourism incarnate, is to blame for the ecological, social and economic collapse of the planet. All the worst traits that cause overtourism: littering, not paying for things, lack of original thought, etc. are attributed to the tourist. While the traveler, well, their enlightened footfall causes no damage at all.

Do you believe me? Do you agree that something hinky is going on with how we talk about tourists and how we talk about…well, ourselves? If you don’t — and that’s fine — can you honestly say you use the two interchangeably?

Contrary to what this may have implied up until now, I do think there is a difference between the two words and to whom they should apply. For me, it is the itinerary, which is itself intimately connected to whether it is your first, second or millionth time in that particular place.

Listen, you can call yourself a traveler if you genuinely aren’t going to any of the most famous sights in a city or anywhere you’ve seen posted by 3 or more unrelated people on your social media feeds. Fair play to you if that is the case, but might I suggest that if, with all the respect I can muster, you come to Paris for the first time and don’t see the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre you are — how do I say — a fucking clown.

There are two palaces in the vicinity of Paris: Versailles and Fontainebleau. Fontainebleau is equally adorned in gold and glam, I describe it as Versailles with fewer tourists. But come the fuck on, you don’t want to go to Fontainebleau. You want to see the place you’ve heard about all your life.

So, all right. Accepting that there is indeed a behavioral difference between out-of-towners who engage in sight-seeing and those who don’t, you cannot, however, convince me that someone is inherently less interested in local culture or making an effort to be polite if they want to see the Mona Lisa and are traveling in an organized group.

I can be just as averse to capital-T Tourism as the next person. We took a family trip to Morocco last year — the first time for all of us except my sister — and had the full capital-T Tourism experience with a guide and tours and shuttles and you know what? It was absolutely the way to do it. No one in my family speaks Arabic, none of us are particularly familiar with north African cultural norms and manners. If we had been there with Moroccan family friends to show us around, that might be different (barely, as we would likely have done the same things just without paying for the service). Maybe we stuck out like a sore thumb, but we learned and saw more than we would have otherwise.

I have never called myself a traveler because I am not of Romani origin, but given my druthers, I prefer to plan my itineraries around where I can eat and drink and meander with no particular destination. (In my defense, I have fallen into what may or may not be a rut of exclusively visiting places I have already been and I am proud to say I did Do Tourism — punting!! — when I recently went to see my cousin in Cambridge.)

In any case, it’s all six of one, half dozen of another. Picking under-the-radar neighborhoods for a restaurant or doing a walking tour of Montmartre guided by a family friend are simply different forms of tourism, no better or worse than any other.

Siamo tutti turisti.

To be continued! Because we haven’t even talked about class!