When in Rome, don't be a dill: how to beat the rise (and rise) of rude tourists

Rarely a week goes by these days without another tale of tourists behaving badly. In the most recent, some Italian students went full knucklehead aboard Bangkok's BTS Skytrain.

The unruly kids mocked a local commuter who'd told them to pipe down, while their teacher, a shining beacon of values-based education, chimed in with a clarion call for our age of entitlement: "Sorry for bringing money to your country."

You can guess what happened next. Phones were brandished, everyone recorded each other, and the victim posted the incident to social media, igniting such viral outrage that the Italian embassy released a grainy video of the perps lined up like hostages, apologising to Thailand, wearing stricken expressions that suggested the cameraman was either a Beretta-toting carabiniere or their mother.

There's plenty to unpack here. First: shouldn't Italians know better? From people whose country annually endures the boorish tourist Olympics, in which elite imbeciles carve their names on the Colosseum, smash sculptures in the Vatican Museums and skinny dip in the Trevi Fountain, you might expect more empathy.

Italy is the answer to the question: what does tourism's worst behaviour look like? Every year, increasing fines fail to curb legions of louts wandering shirtless, eating on monuments, peeing on cobblestones and - in the case of two clowns from Australia's very own travelling circus - riding motorised surfboards in Venice's Grand Canal.

It all begs the question: when did everyone stop bringing their best selves on holiday?

To be fair, brattishness abroad is nothing new. And I should know, because I'm a Brit. For longer than I can remember, my people have dominated the world's worst tourists lists with a signature brand of full-spectrum drunken, disrobed and disorderly ignominy that makes your average prison riot look like an etiquette masterclass.

Even our literary greats were terrible tourists. Back in 1810 on a jaunt to Greece, Lord Byron carved his name into the ancient Temple of Poseidon.

But here's the important point: we only know this because it's still there. We cannot know if Byron also did the Zorba dance with his pants on his head at Super Paradise Beach Club because they didn't have Instagram back then.

Social media shines a spotlight on misdeeds which formerly went unseen. In olden days, that Bangkok bust-up would have made no more than a tawdry tale told over pasta or pad Thai. But now that everyone's a videographer, if you so much as shoot a snidey side-eye, yours will be the face that launched a thousand GIFs.

Also: are we worse travellers or are there simply more of us? An estimated five billion of us took flights last year. With so many on the move, bad behaviour is bound to increase in tandem.

You could blame over-tourism, and it's true that we live in times when a single TikTok can summon swarms of selfie seekers like locusts, turning destinations into shrinking waterholes with tourists the competing wildlife.

But I reckon it's more to do with attitude than numbers. "Money can't buy respect," grovelled the teacher in the Bangkok apology video. A mantra that should be embossed on everyone's passport.

When travel becomes no more than a transaction, turning guest and host into consumer and product, we lose all the loveliest things about it: the reciprocal hospitality, the cultural exchange, the spirit of curiosity and the give-and-take that comes with it.

We start believing that paying for a holiday buys the right to behave like a tool. We say things like: "They should be grateful we're here. We're keeping their economy alive."