Barcelona, Venice and Amsterdam are among Europe’s favourite travel destinations and benefit greatly from tourism. However, the massive influx of visitors places a considerable burden on the cities and their inhabitants.
To counteract the negative effects of overtourism, these cities are taking decisive action. Following public protests, no new hotels may be built in Venice and cruise ships will have to use other moorings in future. Amsterdam has banned guided tours of its famous red light district in order to protect local residents. Paris is planning to ban coaches from the city centre in order to improve the quality of life. Other overcrowded cities are also trying to control the situation through various methods.
Do you think that overtourism is a serious problem in Europe?
Sources: National Statistics Offices, Statista, Le Monde, Forbes
benefit greatly from tourism.
burden on the cities and their inhabitants.
Soo, which is it? Sounds like a bad case of wanting to eat your cake and have it, too. Like, what if Las Vegas and Orlando started figuring out ways to curb tourism? WTF?
You may be surprised to learn that not all inhabitants of a city work in the tourism industry.
Quality over quantity. A good start would be a ban on cruise ships and flights within the EU, which can be done with trains.
Honestly I am often shocked how many go to museums, look at old buildings and go to amazing landscapes when on a vacation in another country, but never consider the sights close to home. The great part about those is, that you do not need a hotel and there are no crowds blocking the good views. They for the most part, will not be world famous, but they are quite literally closer to home.
I call it “let’s play tourists at home!” There are still many places we haven’t “used” this way yet.
Anyway, are you really suggesting to ban flights within EU? That is ridiculous. Or do you mean “cruise flights”, a strange thing I have never heard of before?
I want to ban flights between destinations, which can easily be travelled by train. There are quite a lot of those, thanks to high speed trains.
Alright, but… That would probably be win from ecological point of view, but wouldn’t help in this case? If they can be “easily traveled by train”, they can be easily (mis)used by tourists. If the train is somehow less enticing in this case, my original point still stands… It would limit a business travel for example, which is a no-go…
Yes, but without the tourists, who keeps your restaurants open, etc? It’s not like locals eat out every day of the year. There’s only so many times they will go to the museum.
It seems tourists are just the latest in a huge line of things we’ll blame before figuring out that we just haven’t built enough housing in popular areas for all the people that want to be there. That we haven’t bothered to invest in things outside the capitals to try and make people want to be there instead.
Pehaps, and I might be crazy, but hear me out, there just might be some room between absolutely no tourists at all ever and being flooded by literal millions?
Are you really being flooded by “literal millions”? Most of these places will have in the tens to hundreds of thousands of tourists at any one time. That’s no different from having that many residents, only they’re spending a lot more money.
You can’t afford to live there, but that’s not the fault of tourists or the immigrants or the landlords any of the other things you choose to blame. It’s because you’ve decided to pointlessly centralise your economy into a select few physical locations. Why do you want to live there? Why are you contributing to the problem? It’s not always somebody else’s fault.
You’re not in traffic. You are traffic.
We also need to know what proportion of the city’s economy is driven by tourism. For a tourism dominated city, it feels backward for the local population to complain about it. Unless it’s the retired folks in these cities who are complaining the loudest after benefitting from the same tourism earlier.
At the same time if the city relies on tourism and we know that tourism isn’t environmentally sustainable then we might have to accept that some cities will either need to slowly die or get their shit together and diversify.
OK now do Honolulu
