![]() the day before, with an express nasal swab at NYU Langone Medical Center. 7, he found himself heading from New York to Dubrovnik, to see the walled city with nobody there. Brian Kelly, the founder of a website called The Points Guy, had both - plus a few million unused frequent-flier miles. To travel under these conditions required an unhinged urge to take flight and a bureaucrat’s eye for parsing fine print. Pandemic travel was arduous and impeded by knotty, sometimes contradictory governmental guidelines. Airplanes were grounded, then took flight again - ending an age of quick and easy travel and ushering in a new, slower one. After the Diamond Princess debacle, no more cruise ships appeared in the port. Nevertheless, the tourists kept coming.īut then, around March 2020, they stopped. Mayor Mato Frankovic set out to save his city by sabotage, capping passage through the gates at 4,000 daily visitors and functionally banning new restaurants. By 2017, tourism had so overburdened the Old Town that UNESCO was threatening to revoke its World Heritage status. With a main thoroughfare less than a thousand feet long, this pressure on the city’s charm was overwhelming. On busy days, tourists could outnumber permanent Old Town residents about 6 to 1. Venice, Barcelona, certain beaches in Thailand - these places had all faced their own “overtouristing” problems, but even by this standard, Dubrovnik was extreme. They’d seen its walled Old Town on “Game of Thrones,” and they wanted to be there themselves, so they went. They came to Dubrovnik by cruise ship or Ryanair - members of a new hypermobile class of tourist, who traveled for cheap and didn’t stay long.
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