Professor John Robertson OBA
The Herald today follows the above headline with these facts:
The number of international visitors to Scotland increased again in 2024, as new figures show a record 4.4 million trips were made to the country last year – a 10% rise on 2023.
And the amount spent by overseas visitors increased by 7% to £3.9 billion, although the number of nights those tourists stayed in the country decreased.
It’s bit of a non sequitur for those of us who speak Scots.
‘The state of’ is always bad.
The state of you, of your bedroom, of Sauchiehall Street, the Herald!
Herald headlines are never accidental. They always use them to have a go at the SNP, Scotland, Swinney……
Why is this one not on their web front page?
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
That’s that tourist levy the Glasgow and Edinburgh are applying driving people away from visiting Scotland!!!!!!!!!!
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Many cities charge a tourist levy. Thing is, will the city benefit or will Edinburgh council just line their own pockets even more. Hmm.
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I presume by “the number of nights those tourists stayed in the country decreased” they actually mean the average length of stay decreased. Because phrased the way it is it sounds as if there were less bed nights in the country overall – a difficult trick to play with such a huge increase in numbers!
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Yep, ‘state of’ implies chaos, and bad.
However we have a problem, housing for residents, it’s unaffordable, if available at all, and Britnat councils such as Edinburgh not giving a damn, disrupting traffic with constant unnecessary digging up roads, and leaving bins overflowing, rubbish in the streets is off the scale. I watched a short video about tenants in Barcelona in what seems like housing association apartments, well they are being given their marching orders so that the apartments, whole blocks of them, can be repurposed for use as student accomodation and holiday air b&bs. Many simply now have nowhere to live, whole families are being made homeless due to greedy property owners.
There are sixteen thousand air b&bs in Edinburgh! Many tourist cities across the globe are getting fed up of excess tourism, it’s affecting services, housing etc, and not in a good way.
Why don’t people stay home, flying is very bad for the planet anyway.
Tourism is good when not excessive, but unregulated it only profits the private property market and councils taking back handers.
I notice flats to rent near us recently are ‘let’, but left empty! I suspect more rich people hiding away more of their excess greed, ie, money.
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WHO IS SUBSIDISING THE HERALDTHEIR ADVERTISING AND CIRCULATI
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