I just came across an article in a leading Istrian newspaper that argues that tourist travel is no longer a luxury but a basic need in today’s world. People put it into their budgets, just like they put their food, accommodation, transport, children’s education, and so on. According to the article, tourist travel thus grows even in economic doldrums, for it is not something that people can skip nowadays no matter how much they struggle to make their ends meet. There is something to this argument, no doubt, but I focused on the way Istrians now perceive themselves. By providing a variety of tourist goods and services, they are no longer catering to people’s fancies, which can vanish without a trace, but to their essential demands. Which sounds quite wonderful at the time when the peninsula no longer provides any other goods or services worth mentioning. Put somewhat differently, now that providing goods and services to tourists is no longer a luxury to a just few Istrians, it is a necessity to all of them. In fact, they could not survive without it at this stage. And this is what the article fails to point out at all. All it offers is an exercise in shallow ideology explaining tourism as a basic need, which is supposed to calm down all those who worry about the devastation of the rest of Istrian economy ever since Croatia’s independence. To puncture the ideological bubble, it is enough to ask what will happen with tourist travel once climate change starts showing its teeth. Will tourism still keep growing as a basic need?