In Defense of the Tourist Trap: Why Following the Crowd Might Be the Smartest Way To Travel
This is part of Reason‘s 2025 summer travel issue. Click here to read the rest of the issue.
If you ever go to New Orleans, one of your first stops should be the very unhidden gem of Café Du Monde’s French Market location. There you can buy some New Orleans special beignets and, if the weather is hot enough (it almost certainly will be) a frozen coffee to wash them down.
Café Du Monde is popular. The advice to go is often not popular.
If you scan internet messaging boards about what to do in New Orleans, posters will often caution against a visit to Café Du Monde. It is dismissed as the most hated of all destinations, a “tourist trap”: an overrated, overcrowded cliché that exists to suck money from unsophisticated travelers in exchange for an unsatisfyingly ordinary experience.
Yet this aversion to Café Du Monde is obviously mistaken to anyone who does actually go there. The lines are long, yes, but they move fast. The beignets might not be literally the best in the world, or even in New Orleans. But they’re good! Better yet, they’re available at a reasonable price. And once you’re done with your fried treat, you can walk to any number of other serviceable tourist destinations nearby.
Raging against this delightfully efficient travel experience is a particular strand of travel ideology that encourages you to avoid the “tourist track” in favor of more authentic, higher-quality experiences to be found off the beaten path. Travel content creators, whether on social media or the Food Network, traffic in glamorizing the latter travel experience. Not much travel media could persist without it. There’s only so much content one could watch about other people going to see the Louvre or the Vatican or Times Square, after all.
Certainly, when one is traveling vicariously from the couch, it’s fine to revel in hunts for the next world-famous hole-in-the-wall. When we’re transporting ourselves in reality, the real rewards will often be found among the greatest hits.
There’s a reason for this, and it comes down to two concepts: economies of scale and agglomeration.
Economies of scale is the idea that firms can lower their average costs by producing more units. In other words, if you set up your operation to make a lot of widgets, the cost of making each widget is a lot lower than what could be made by a small widget-making operation.
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