Too many tourists?
Too many tourists?
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
I live in one of the cities depicted here, and I'd say tourism isn't such a big problem here. Airbnb and the holiday apartment "industry" are a big issue though, since they inflate the housing bubble.
It probably depends a lot in with of the cities you live. Berlin has a much more favourable ratio than Barcelona.
I lived in the heart of Bruges for a few years, didn't really mind the tourism. Had great conversations with some, and overall everyone was really friendly. I always noticed people looking like they were in Disneyworld (it's a fairlytale fucking city isn't it?), you can spot a tourist from a mile away.
Worst manners I've seen is walking into a local store to take pictures and walking out without buying anything. And not to add to stereotypes but the American accent is so loud, could hear them 2 blocks away in my apartment lmao
When you visit Bruges, go out at dusk or after midnight. Tourists disappear into their hotels like ants when the sun goes down, stunning views and almost no-one around.
It's a problem at least in Barcelona and in their near cities. Youth people and most of the working class can't pay the price to get a home there. A lot of housing has moved as a tourist service (airbnb... ) missing their social use.
Barcelona is fixing that. They have banned all Airbnbs as of 2028. So if anything there will be a glut of housing available.
It's really fun they let me calculate the ratios by myself. But beautiful circles, really!
right?
pretty sure Hallstatt is the worst by far on the list, but it looks kinda mild...
it's ratio is about 4.3 THOUSAND visitors per resident.
next closest is Étretat with about 125 visitors per resident, the rest seems lower, judging simply by relative orders of magnitude.
Hallstatt is insane!
I feel like the graphic would be more fair if the comparison were in terms of time spent by each category in the city
But I get that it’s a much harder stat to capture in the first place
Yes, a line graph showing residents vs visitors by month would tell a much more meaningful story.
Daaaamn, Hallstatt. 700 residence and 3 million tourists a year? What you got going on there?
The village went viral in Asia, which ended up with a hell of a lot of tourists coming over in short bus tours. It is really beautiful thanks to being located on a large lake in the Alps, with stereotypical Austrian village architecture. Obviously there is a copy in China as well.
We have similar problems in Switzerland. There is a tiny hitherto unknown village somewhere with an even tinier boat mooring place (literally big enough for three people to stand on) that was used as a filming location for a popular Korean television programme.
Cue hordes of Korean people wanting to take pictures on that boat mooring thing. Nothing against Koreans, they are very well behaved and always very welcome, but the sheer number of people creates many problems.
I don‘t think that the 3 million is accurate anymore. Only source mentioning 3 million was forbes. But most german sources I found were estimating 1 million in 2023. Still impressive for such a small village, but feels much more realistic.
I'm going to Spain this fall (though not Barcelona) and I refuse to stay in airbnbs for that exact reason. Affordable housing is a problem in the US city I live in, and a huuuuge problem in all of the ski towns where everything is a tourist rental, and I don't want to contribute to that anywhere else. To be honest, I wouldn't blame a lot of these places if they started requiring tourist visas and seriously limiting the number of them.
I’m also going to Barcelona this fall and same thing. No airbnb for us. But we pretty much had no choice in Amsterdam. We did manage to find a hotel that we could sleep 5 in, but it was insanely expensive compared to airbnbs in the same area.
Hotels probably underinvested in new rooms because airbnb took away so much business.
Remember residents live there 365 days a year. Visitors are typically 2-3 days.
Yeah without context on the numbers (like the time window) it makes the visualization instantly suspicious.
London in particular has a very transient local population - a lot of people move there for a few years then move on. Wikipedia has the city at ~50% 'overseas born' at the moment - it's a very cosmopolitan place. So having about double the number of tourists as 'residents' isn't going to have the same cultural impact that it would in some of the other cities here
I'm surprised that there's as many as 250k 'locals' in Venice, it was my understanding that they mostly live inland or up the coast and commute into the city.
Adding commuter numbers would be good too. There are other non tourist 'visitors' people in cities too.
There are parts of London which are hell to visit because they are overly popular with tourists. An example being borough market at lunch time, it's all tourists and you can't move. I don't begrudge anyone and I can happily just avoid it but it really makes me realise how hard it must be in the much smaller cities with higher ratios.
My wife went to Venice recently with her mum and said that the service staff were predominantly South Asian, so I wonder how much of that 250k is immigrant population there to service the huge 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?
Would we even be able to see the dot for Vatican City compared to the visitors?
I can’t see the dot of Hallstadt 🇦🇹
And just try to get an airbnb in the Vatican, it's like they don't want you to visit.
Are those total visitors for 1 year, or total visitors at any one time?
Yeah. Are we really supposed to believe that at any given time London is 2/3 tourists? Maybe at The Tower of London…
Which makes the whole thing really silly then... My house would have a similar big bubble/little bubble by just hosting a few social events over a year
Considering Venice I think you have to assume it's one year
I'm living in a relatively small community that's blessed with a few pleasant landscape features and unfortunately located relatively close between a bunch of major metropolitan areas. This leads to hordes of day trip tourists (many more than residents) descending upon us, predominantly on weekends or during school holidays, whenever the weather permits (mostly from late Spring to early Autumn). They will park their cars everywhere, often in front of residents' driveways and garage doors, or in all the other other places where you have no business parking a car, then they will stumble through our indeed beautiful landscape for a couple hours, littering the whole place with their garbage and having a bunch of accidents that happen to people who go on a hike in rough-ish terrain without wearing the appropriate shoes, which requires quite some resources to deal with, because those accidents happen well away from easily accessible roads.
Since they are only day trip tourists, they leave very little money, because there fortunately is no admission fee for having a walk out in nature. There are only a handful of tax paying businesses that even can profit from the day trip tourists: Two small kiosks which have little to no relevance to the local population, because they sell tourist refreshments for tourist prices in tourist locations, and two to three pubs/restaurants, one of which has by now gone full tourist trap and is charging prices no local is willing to pay anymore.
There also is a slow but steady influx of wealthy city people buying houses or flats as a weekend retreat, spoiling the prices for and taking the places away from local families, and, on top of that, causing a bunch of trouble by filing a plethora of legal complaints about everything and anything that is normal life on the countryside, but is disturbing their precious peace and quiet. One resident has already been sued into getting rid of his backyard chickens, because the cock was crowing too loud for his new and temporary (weekends only) neighbour from the city. Traditional festivities that have been held for many decades, if not centuries, are getting hit by a bunch of noise complaints from weekend home dwellers, too.
So, yes, overtourism is a problem for me personally, even if it is so only on a relatively small scale. I can easily imagine overtourism being an even bigger problem in other places that are affected by it. Overtourism can easily destroy the way of life of any place.
It was an early December when I visited Venice, locals say it snows one day a year and I just happened to be there!
During peak summer season, I imagine by the turn of August any and all locals have had it up to HERE with the dense throngs of tourists and the logistics/infrastructure overload it all involves.
But during the low season, you get to see the local inhabitants come out with their guard down, relaxed and welcoming. Then somehow or other, I ended up at a party of university students from nearby Padua, they had rented a party hall behind a bar. They made me feel like an ambassador from another corner of the world, but also like one of their own.
Plus since the water is as cold as it gets in the year, it doesn't smell, like they say it does when it's hot and humid.
I wonder how the numbers for US cities compare.
Is that the total number of tourists in an entire year?
Or at a specific time?
Because that is a huge difference.
Interesting, but I feel like expressing these figures as percentages could have been more effective idk
It also depends on what tourists are doing in the city and where they are staying. When they are visiting Disneyland Paris or some musical in Hamburg, they aren't really bothering the locals. That's different when they are all crowding in the old town of Dubrovnik.
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 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.
Fuck AirBnB, nuke it from orbit.
Woah, Venice is on fire lmao
It's so much like no one lives in Venice, and nearly no one's there who didn't arrive on a giant cruise ship or who aren't there selling to the cruise ship class
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.
Also,.tourism invariably leads to a decrease in GDP per capita of its inhabitants, so it's probably a good idea to shrink the importance of tourism and invest in other industries that do have a value for people.
I'd love to see this for the US as well.
OK now do Honolulu
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.
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.
Sure, but having a strong industry in a place benefits those outside that industry too.
Acknowledged that over tourism is an issue.