National Park rangers first used the term “touron” for visitors who get too close to wildlife for a selfie. A combination of tourist and moron, it has since spread well beyond the national parks to describe badly behaved travelers around the world.
Alexandra Dubakova, a travel expert with Freetour, saw an example at the Trevi Fountain in Rome last summer. “A young lady in a really nice dress carrying a DSLR pushed past me,” she said. “She got impatient, so she stepped past the barrier, put her sandals in the water and started walking toward the statues. She found one of the marble ledges and started posing.”
“Some people looked at her in disappointment, others gasped, some started shouting,” Dubakova said. “A carabinieri blew his whistle, and two officers came down and pulled her back out as the crowd applauded. She looked absolutely mortified. As they were taking her away, she kept saying, ‘I just wanted one picture.’”
Dubakova said the woman was fined €450 (about $520). “Tourons aren’t always bad people with ill intentions,” she said. “Sometimes, they are sensible people who don’t understand the rules, their significance or origin.”
Amy Mosset, a clinical counselor, said stupidity isn’t necessarily the problem. “Most of our restraint is not internal. It is social,” she said. “Nobody watching knows your name, and you will never see them again, so the ordinary cost of being seen behaving badly drops close to nothing.”
Anonymity isn’t always the reason, though. Sometimes the warning comes straight from a person standing next to you, and still isn’t heeded. Sahana Kulur was on her honeymoon in Greece when her guide told her that very short shorts were not appropriate in Greek Orthodox churches. “I heard him. I just didn’t really act on it,” Kulur said.
“The next day, I went to Roussanou Monastery, wearing shorts and a T-shirt,” she said. “At the entrance, a nun immediately stopped me. She was clearly unhappy with what I was wearing and handed me a wraparound skirt to cover my legs. I wanted the ground to swallow me.” Everyone around her was dressed modestly. “I hadn’t intended to be disrespectful. I was simply in holiday mode.”
Sometimes there isn’t even a warning to ignore, just a failure to prepare. This happened to Sankalp Singh, a travel writer, on Lokrum, the small island off Dubrovnik.
“From the water, the island looked tiny, so we grabbed nothing. No water, no hats, no sunscreen,” Singh said. “Classic ‘how bad can it be?’ logic.” The hike to a viewpoint called the Gateway to Heaven was “relentless, switchback after switchback in the full sun. By the time we stumbled to the top, we were wrecked, soaked in sweat, dizzy, absolutely parched. We collapsed at the fort and, with zero shame left, stripped down to our underwear and just stood there letting the wind dry us off. I’m fairly sure a few of the island’s peacocks judged us.”
Singh had no excuse. “I knew better. I write about travel for a living and had covered Croatia on my site. But the second we got off that boat, vacation brain kicked in.”
Anthony DeMaria, a clinical psychologist, thinks phones are a big part of the problem. “A lot of people now meet wildlife and wild places on a screen first,” he said. “After enough of that, the real world can start to feel like another feed, something safe to step into, capture and post.”
That impulse can be even stronger when a traveler believes there’s no second chance at the shot. “There is a scarcity to travel that changes the arithmetic. This is the one morning you will ever stand here, and the rule is asking you to give that up permanently rather than postpone it,” Mosset said. “People weigh a certain, immediate loss against an uncertain, delayed risk poorly at the best of times, and holidays make it worse. You are tired, out of routine, often mildly disinhibited, and carrying an expectation that this trip is supposed to be extraordinary.”
Kate Connolly saw the consequences of that at Fox Glacier in New Zealand. “Several people in our tour group ducked past the safety barriers purely to get a closer shot of the massive, unstable ice formation,” Connolly said. “It felt harmless to them, just tourists chasing the aesthetic of a dramatic photo. Shortly after we returned home, a story appeared about a tourist seriously injured by an unexpected ice collapse at Fox Glacier.” Tourists have died after venturing past those barriers.
DeMaria said behavior is influenced by the people around us. “If a group is already crowding an elk or edging past a barrier, hanging back starts to look like the anomalous act,” he said. “You may know the distance rule. You may even have followed it yesterday. Then you see 10 other visitors doing the same thing, phones up, and the situation quickly rewrites itself as ‘this must be acceptable.’”
Sometimes the touron endangers everyone else. Connolly watched two men talk their way onto a scuba dive at the Great Barrier Reef.
“It became terrifyingly obvious within minutes that they barely knew how to swim,” she said. The instructor hauled both of them up by their harnesses, masks ripped off, gasping for air. “Do not ever put my life at risk like that again.”
Alex Weihmann saw a touron put an entire plane at risk. He was on an intra-Africa flight out of Casablanca airport, where passengers walk across the tarmac and climb stairs to the aircraft. From his window seat, he watched a passenger smoke on the way up.
“He flicked the still-smoldering cigarette onto the ground, just a few feet away from one of the aircraft’s engines,” Weihmann said. “I remember sitting there thinking, ‘Did I really see that?’” The ground crew reacted almost instantly. “One of them came running over and stomped it out. I’ve never seen airport ground staff move so quickly.”
I have been to more than 100 countries, and I’m still not immune to touronic behavior. A few years ago, in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, I was photographing the white marble government buildings when three police officers rushed over, told me it was illegal, and deleted every photo I took. They warned I’d be in major trouble if I did this again.
I understood the warning. Then I waited about 15 minutes for them to move on and took the same photos again. I still have them. They’re nothing special and definitely were not worth the risk.