Stupidity Watch: 'Coolcation' is the New Fad

That is, according to morons in legacy media, the tourism cartel, and local gov'ts who seek to grow int'l mass tourism while regimenting it to a degree un-imaginable by historical standards

Another day, more evidence of the massive decline all across the board: Climate Catastrophism abounds, stupid wasteful spending skyrockets, and fighting erupts across the Middle East.

In the midst of all this raving madness, Scandinavians are celebrating record-breaking mass tourism numbers—with the express aim of marketing™ (weaponising) what these idiots have taken to calling ‘coolcation’, that is, tell people in warmer countries to spend their summers in the Northern rains.

There’s no more talk about emissions™—perhaps the powers-that-be know this to be fake?—but plenty of totalitarian-esque aspirations to centralise and control all civilian movement.

So, welcome to the Brave New World of future mass tourism: you’re hereby warmly invited to spend your vacation money on a virtual summer (internment) camp to minimise idle capacity and optimise traffic flows. Also, no more road-tripping because that makes these planning musing un-workable due to uncertainty.

What a way to go.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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Travelling to Norway for ‘Coolcation’: ‘A Drastic Change’

The sun is blazing in southern Europe, but in Norway, rain, fjords, and fresh air are attracting more and more tourists. ‘Coolcation’ is the new holiday term [nope, it ain’t, the same agit-prop was first pushed last year, e.g., via Euronews (4 July 2024), The Telegraph (19 Aug. 2024), or—even (sic)—by Norwegian state broadcaster NRK (6 Aug. 2024)]

‘COOLCATION’: Priyanka and Sanjivani travelled from the warmth of India to cool ten grades at Sommarøy. Many do the same as they.

By Malin Straumsnes, Andrine Gald Myklebust, and Torkil Stoltz, NRK, 19 June 2025 [source; archived]

The weather is incredible, it’s good for us. It’s a good feeling.

Priyanka from India is smiling even though the temperature is ten degrees centigrade on Sommarøy in Tromsø [located at 61 degrees north].

She and her friend Sanjivani describe their home country as scorching hot at the moment, and they have been planning their Norwegian holiday for a long time.

And while Norwegians would prefer the summer temperatures to rise, the two friends think it’s just right.

‘Living in the hottest country and then coming here—it’s a drastic change. It’s nice for us to experience’, says Priyanka [I’m unsure about that label, though; I asked Grok (I know *eyeroll*), which suggested South Sudan ‘likely’ to be the hottest country, ‘with average annual temperatures around 83.97°F (28.87°C)’, with India ‘matching or exceeding South Sudan’s heat during summer months’ and ‘higher extreme temperatures’ When prompted to compare both countries, Grok hilariously added the following disclaimer: ‘Always consider regional variations within countries, especially for a large nation like India.’—We note the absence of any such thought in this piece]

They are not alone in preferring a slightly cooler holiday.

Last year was a record year for Norwegian tourism, with growth in both foreign and Norwegian visitors, according to Statistics Norway [there were 38.6m overnight stays, with esp. ‘international tourism’ on the rise—what about their emissions, by the way? Oh, that’s irrelevant, right? Right].

The CEO of NHO Reiseliv [Norway’s largest tourism-related trade association, i.e., a kind of cartel, or trust, of the country’s large employers], Kristin Krohn Devold, tells us about increased interest in holidays in cooler countries, so-called ‘coolcations’:

We’re noticing an influx from countries that may not have been here so much before, such as India and Spain. It’s because it’s cooler here [at no point does the drastic drop in exchange rates play a role: in 2014, US$ 1 got you 6.19 Norwegian crowns (NOK); today, US$ 1 gets you 10.05 NOK—depreciation in excess of 62%; it’s not that bad relative to the Euro: in 2014, 1€ got you 8.13 NOK, today it gets you 11.53 NOK—depreciation of almost 42% (source): in plain English: relative to decade ago, a Norwegian cavation became 42-62% cheaper as the currency rapidly fell in value].

Devold goes on to say that foreign tourists stay even if it rains [well, if they’re from, say, India on pre-booked return flights, what else could they do (you moron)?], adding:

They think it’s great with rain.

There have already been heatwaves in southern Europe [which never-ever have happened in the past]. At the same time, Norway is predicted to have the best tourist season of all time [I’m using the metaphor of a hike across the mountain range to illustrate this most recent folly, or mania: once one reaches the highest point, guess where things go thereafter: downhill; if 2025 will be the record-breaking year for mass tourism, the hangover of excess capacity, dependence on income from mass tourism, and borderline systemic bouts of labour shortages in summer vs. high and persistent unemployment in winter will be, of course, ‘suddenly and unexpected’].

Cool Weather as an Attraction

At Sommarøya, they are noticing that foreign tourists are coming to Norway for a ‘coolcation’.

Regardless of what the weather forecast shows, the staff at Sommarøya Arctic Hotel have a lot to do before this year’s summer season.

For Managing Director Haldor Gislason, ‘coolcation’ has acted as an attraction when the hotel is now fully booked:

We play around with it a bit in digital marketing, and it’s worked. When the temperature rises in southern Europe, demand and bookings start to pick up here in the north [wait, didn’t the Science™ lecture everybody that correlation isn’t causation?].

According to Gislason, it’s Arctic nature, local food, and the temperature that are important to foreign tourists.

The German couple Maria and Kalle travel to Norway to cool down.

Husband and wife Maria and Kalle from Germany have travelled to Sommarøy in their RV. In Germany, too, they think it’s too hot at the moment:

At home it’s over 30 degrees, it’s too much. That’s one reason why we’re travelling to Norway and Scandinavia [what are the other reasons, if I may ask?].

More People are Becoming Tourists in Their Own Country

But it’s not just tourists from warmer climes who flock to Norway for their holidays.

This year's survey from NHO Reiseliv shows that Norwegians have also opened their eyes to being tourists in their own country:

An unusually large number of people say they will be holidaying in Norway this year. In fact, 70 per cent say that all or part of their holiday will take place in Norway [this, too, may have to do with the above-related changes in exchange rates: in the past decade, taking a holiday abroad in Europe has become some 42% more expensive due the weak crown, to say nothing about the massive cost increases relative to travelling to the US; I see this ‘even’ in my neck-of-the-woods: neighbours who used to travel to Spain in summer are now going to Montenegro, which is quite a bit cheaper…according to NHO Reiseliv’s own survey, the share of Norwegians able to afford a holiday abroad declined by 6% from a year ago].

This is according to Aase Marthe Horrigmo, Director of Tourism at Innovation Norway.

It’s important that more Norwegian and foreign tourists come to Norway.

[NRK] But if both Norwegians and foreign tourists check in this summer, is there really space for all guests?

[Horrigmo] There’s room for more guests in Norway, but it has to be done in the right way [no-one has any plans to shoehorn you into what they think you must do here in Norway]. And we need to spread those who come here across both seasons and places to stay [hiho, central planning committee determining who gets to come and where to stay]. And it’s fundamentally important that we develop the tourism industry [which also means (drumroll) all the paraphernalia of death-by-tourism in other places, such as Venice or Barcelona: what an un-appealing prospect].

The CEO of NHO Reiseliv, Kristin Krohn Devold, says that the most important thing is that people stay longer in one place.

She has an appeal to both Norwegian and foreign tourists:

The type of tourism where you just drive through and the only thing the locals see is the exhaust from your car is not sustainable tourism [well, what about excessive road-pricing? It’s easily doable, milks tourists, typically after their holiday is long over, and provides the gov’t with more revenues]. Find a local place to stay, stay there for a week, use local facilities, and use your own legs [huhum, but isn’t the point of holidays not being regimented into doing what you’re told?]. That makes for sustainable tourism [it also permits more planning by vacation hotspots].

On Sommarøy, cool summer temperatures haven’t deterred the two Indian friends, who are taking a walk along the chalk-white beach.

‘We manage to adapt’, says Sanjivani [and in that simplistic quip lies quite a kernel of truth: humans have always done so, come hell or high water; those who didn’t, well, they aren’t here to tell about it].

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Bottom Lines

That was painfully stupid, isn’t it? I’m not doing this to take a dump of these journos™ and lobbyists™ (though it may look like that), but I’m bringing you these news™ to make an overarching point via the following anecdote:

In my neck-of-the-woods (pop. around 2,200), we had in excess of 50K cruise ship passengers last year; if all bookings come to pass, we’re looking at more than 70K cruise passengers this year. Whatever you’d like to call that spade, it ain’t sustainable™, not even by the moronic standards™ employed by these journos™ and lobbyists™.

Why would the local gov’t be o.k. with this? Because of harbour fees, of course, which signifies a disconnect between the crapification of life in my neck-of-the-woods due to over-tourism and the benefits accruing to politicos™.

In addition, I recall what the municipality liaison said at the tourism board’s Christmas dinner (I’m moonlighting as a tour guide here because I speak German and English, hence in summer I’m doing walking tours): ‘we need more young people to go into tourism’.

It boggles the mind: the hospitality industry is what you’re doing if you need cash and don’t have other skills, such as artisanal crafts. At the same time, Norway’s farmers require tons of seasonal workers to help with the harvest—and according to official statements and legacy media reporting™ alike, few people find the combination of high taxes, below-average pay, and shitty exchange rates appealing. See below for a long-ish exposé about über-essential healthcare workers, half of whom earn less than average wages:

The Sun is Setting on Big Healthcare and Big Education--in Norway, of all places: buckle up!

The more people—of a declining population—is flocking into essentially seasonal/mostly non-skilled industries, such as tourism/hospitality, the worse the expectable repercussions of declining birth rates and mass (im)migration (expenditures well in excess of benefits accruing to the host society for most immigrants) become, esp. as AI™ appears poised to do away with a lot of white-collar, middle-class jobs.

Fewer and fewer people working jobs that pay high enough wages to support massive gov’t spending on whatever will exacerbate the already locked-in economic dislocations.

And that comes on top of the notion that (mass) tourism is actually an industry that’s almost ideally-suited to a mass-consumption economy: nothing is permanent, people spend (thus creating purchasing power for their hosts), and thereby rendering it an almost cyclical model of an economy. Even event tourism like attending a pop concert or weekend city-tripping is certainly way less destructive than, say, military spending; yet mass tourism also creates other problems, such as massive garbage heaps, accommodations filled at less-than-capacity during off-season months, and massive distortions of a local tax base.

Imagine, if you will, a kind of virtual summer (internment) camp that you may attend every now and then, with mandatory spending controlled via digital currency™ and tourism apps that suggest™ what to do in any of these summer (internment) camps.

I’ve said this before: when rationing and denial-of-access comes to developed countries, it’ll come in the guise of incentives and economic penalties (excess costs). Rationing or even shortages are things for the Third World or countries labelled authoritarian™ or worse.

Doing so ramps up complexity—defined here as differentiation of organisation and structure—to degrees that can hardly be imagined today, let alone managed by any bureaucracy. I personally doubt that AI™ would help in this: if such AI™ systems would follow their underlying binary logic, there are no ambiguities in these systems: the end-result is as predictable as it is inevitable—at some point such AI™-administered systems will become both over-complex (eventually outstripping computing power, albeit that might be farther off due to advances in quantum computing) and totalitarian in the sense of the expectable attempts to manage everything.

I personally think that the essential energy infrastructure will be unable to cope with these demands well be before we reach the stage of all-out totalitarian control. And at that point, we’re back at a potentially diluvian point in time: it’ll be swim or sink once more.

The Great Sorting is Here

And lest you accuse me of Social Darwinism (whatever that means), what I’m describing here, however imperfectly, are evolutionary pressures. Let’s not get bogged down in arguments whether Darwinism is a theory or a fact—I lean towards the former, with everyday life in 2025 providing many, if not an unending stream of, examples that contradict Darwinism—what this means as simple as the following: the coming decades will bring many cases of Darwinism to observe, overcome—or not.

Brave New World, then, is what comes to mind, albeit without cognitive or mental facilities required to run these systems; if morons are pretending to run™ things, we’ll probably end up in any kind of an even more dystopian future.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. And all that’s required is to literally take responsibility for your life. And aspire to live up to this decision.