The phrase "mere tourist" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe someone who is visiting a place without deep engagement or understanding, often implying a superficial experience.
Example: "While I enjoyed the sights, I felt like a mere tourist in a city rich with history and culture."
Alternatives: "casual visitor" or "simple traveler."
This is no mere tourist attraction.
No one wants to be a mere tourist: we all want to be "travellers," encountering the real country we're visiting.
And Shakespeare's Globe, a decade-old facsimile of the Elizabethan original initially dismissed by critics as a mere tourist sideshow, has created a lively, hope-inspiring dynamic between classic plays and current audiences.
This is partly because people are keen to show how street-smart they are: to be loftily disdainful of the food is to show you are no mere tourist.
The outside world seems far removed from this bucolic landscape, where the scent of cow manure is a reminder that the farms in these rolling hills are not mere tourist attractions.
You'll need to book, but this is worth it – no mere tourist attraction, the hotel employs a dedicated tea sommelier to guide you through the menu, and boasts the current Craft Guild of Chefs Pastry Chef of the Year – which explains the light touch with the scones and cakes.
If Parisians, or Venetians, tried to distinguish between mere tourists and true travellers and adopted visitors, they would never stop.
The Phoenix Suns were mere tourists, but for one morning, they were the brightest light in a dark autumn for New York basketball.
When my friend Tom and I started out on the Camino, we got really swept up in feeling as though we were pilgrims and not mere tourists, but once you begin to press this distinction it just falls apart.
James demonstrates their importance in shaping Western conceptions of the East (and vice versa), and he rejects the charge of Orientalism, insisting that his subjects were not mere tourists but sincerely engaged in translating one world to another.
Subtitled "a fairy tale comedy", the play advocates re-connection with ancient tradition, while also offering a high-spirited satire on the kind of naïve, born-again nationalism of city types who are mere tourists blundering on a false heritage trail.
