We all love the glamour and excitement of seeing new places, but what we do when we get there can seriously irritate the locals. Award-winning travel writer and editor Mark Jones suggests a great New Year’s resolution to solve the problem

We are all tourists. We go around the world, we visit sites, we take photographs, we get lost and look at maps. Yet often, when it’s on our patch, instead of being helpful and sympathetic, we barge past such visitors muttering impatiently.

Odd really – as if the person who got off at the wrong metro stop in Paris last week wasn’t you at all. It’s a bit like honking your horn at someone learning to drive on unfamiliar roads – with absolutely no recall of yourself at 17 floundering in the same way.

And we get cross with them for much the same reasons. They take their time, are rather bumbling and easily get confused. As we speed along in our focused and professional way down our familiar roads and streets these people hesitate, stall, go left when they seemed to be going right and just – arghhh!!

You can spot learner drivers because they are made to display plates. Tourists aren’t, but they hardly need to since everything about them marks them out as effectively as a big letter ‘T’ pinned to the back of their polo shirts and anoraks.

But here’s what I saw when tourists disappeared from one destination in recent years. Desperation. Economic collapse. Pleading ‘…please tell people where you come from that we don’t hate tourists. Please. You are so welcome here.’

So how about making 2014 Be Nice To A Tourist year? Instead of us, Londoners, getting stressed at the post-Olympics/royal bonanza visitor influx, how about being proud that people are so excited to be in the city? And, gosh, they are, even if in surveys they worry that the British may be aloof and unfriendly. Why not surprise them, Britons?

Let’s cheer the open-top buses that offer a jolly and inexpensive way to see the town. And if Americans get spooked about travelling to Europe, don’t sneer, but personally thank the ones who come regardless and offer to help them with our strange money and funny words.

The editor of a popular newspaper insists on calling his travel section ‘Holidays’. The travel writers I know wince. But for many people travel means holidays. They have earned it. And if they want to dawdle and visit the sights rather than penetrating the ‘real’ city (whatever that is) then what’s not to like?

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This article has been tagged Opinion, Culture