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
Is that the total number of tourists in an entire year?
Or at a specific time?
Because that is a huge difference.
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.
I would love to see the numbers for Annecy. That place has become hell, I absolutely loathe it, but it really breaks my heart to see how fucked it has become.
Wow, our smallish city got 33.9m tourists during the pandemic. The only thing that really annoys me are the tourists going up the bike lanes the wrong way. There are arrows every 40 feet, guys. Move one street over, and you are on the right PBL. :P
That said…god, I’d love our city banning or severely restricting cars on most roads.
I’m positively surprised to learn that there are bicycle lanes in the USA. Well done!
Remember residents live there 365 days a year. Visitors are typically 2-3 days.
