As consumers, tourists participate in social relations with consumers and providers of local goods and services, and cause an impact on the preexisting relation between them. The constant flow of tourists contributes to the increasing size of the market and the generation of job positions, but as the tourist’s consumption capacity surpasses the local consumer’s, it can also create an impact on the prices local consumers have to pay, which generates spaces of potential conflict.

This impact of touristic consumption is expressed mainly in the prices of food, rent of houses and transportation; the inflow of new consumers able to pay higher prices than the local population, concentrated in a small portion of the urban space considered touristic, provokes a revaluation of these spaces, through commercial and touristic rent produced, and the consequent expulsion of the original population. Examples of this, the difficulty to rent small apartments in San Telmo or Bariloche, the attempt to closed down the Bar Britanico, the attempt to “buy” land in Humahuaca quebrada when being declared patrimony by the citadines, the expulsion of the population to outer areas of San Martin de los Andes and San Pedro de Atacama, etc. This process of population substitution is called “gentrificacion”.

Thus, a contradiction takes place where the city and touristic attractives, socially produced, generate a touristic rent that is taken by individual owners while the original population is forced to move to neighbour localities. This appropriation is larger when the impositive system is more regressive, the market is more concentrated, the labor conditions are worse and the rent appropriation by absent enterpreneurs is larger. On the other hand, this differential of consumption potential between the local population and tourists tends to generate vertical social relations more or less merchantilized abased on the consumption expectations of the local population, from convenience friendships to the extreme of sexual tourism. I think the way out to all of this is public policies destined to moderate the impacts of tourism and distribute the generated rent more fairly. I don’t know any examples of this taking place anywhere, maybe the “touristic toll fare” charged in Colca Canyon in Peru to finance other local works, but I don’t know much about the topic.