For years, people told us about a barbacoa place in San Miguel de Allende called El Pato. San Miguel has rooftop restaurants with views of the Parroquia. El Pato is a tent in a gravel lot beside the bus station.

Nobody led with the food. They talked about Pilar.

She was moving between the tables when we arrived. Before we ordered, she wanted to know where we were from and told us which dishes she was proud of that day. She brought us something we hadn't asked for because she thought we would like it. She introduced strangers to one another. By the end of the meal, everyone under that tent seemed to be there at her invitation.

What we remember is what it did to us. We put our phones away. We asked about the restaurant and her family. Sometime during the meal, we started caring whether she was having a good day. That is why we hugged her goodbye, which is not a thing we normally do at restaurants.

We had walked into a business and behaved as though we were in someone's home.

We have gone back over that meal many times, and it always ends in the same question. When did we stop thinking of ourselves as guests and start behaving like customers?

The Oldest Rule in Travel

For most of human history, the answer was obvious, because travel depended on it. There were no hotels, no reviews, no way to know whether the next town would have a bed. Travelers arrived and hoped someone would take them in.

The Greeks had a name for the arrangement. Xenia is usually translated as hospitality, which undersells it, because it ran both ways. The host fed the traveler before asking his name and sent him off with a gift. The guest didn't overstay, made no demands on the household, spoke well of his host elsewhere, and understood the debt might be called in years later at his own door.

Similar bargains turn up across cultures with nothing else in common. Anyone who saw Nolan's Odyssey sat through nearly three hours of what happens when both sides stop honoring it.

How Travelers Became Customers

Progress ended the arrangement. Railroads and aviation shrank the world. Hotels meant a bed no longer depended on anyone's goodwill, and the internet put every restaurant and museum in our pocket. We started arriving as people who would photograph a place and grade it afterward.

Once we no longer needed a stranger to take us in, we no longer owed a stranger anything. We became tourists, then customers, and a great many of us are now consumers.

A customer asks whether they had a good experience. A guest hopes the host did too.

What Travelers Are Asking For Now

Travelers themselves seem to sense that something is changing. The shift showing up in the research has less to do with where people go than with how they want to be there. Booking.com's 2025 study found a majority now thinking about what tourism does to local communities. Seventy-seven percent want experiences that reflect local culture, 73 percent want their spending to benefit local businesses, and 69 percent hope to leave places better than they found them.

The industry has answered with a widening vocabulary. Intentional travel, sustainable travel, regenerative travel, slow travel. The labels keep multiplying. The behavior is harder to find.

For most of history, travelers understood they were guests, and the rest followed from that. A guest arrives curious and adapts to the household. A guest also understands that the experience belongs to the host as much as to the visitor, and that the best of it gets made by both of them.

Nothing about that requires spending more or staying longer, though both tend to follow. It works at a hotel desk, a market stall, a tasting room, the back of a taxi in a city where we cannot pronounce the street names.

by Paul M. Rand, Founder and Editor of Nomadic Spirit