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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
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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.
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
They’re not all there at once.
Yeah it’s a bit silly to compare a number of permanent residents to a yearly supply of tourists. To get some fair comparison you should get the average stay duration (which I’m guessing would be <2 days on average and <1 day for many) and then divide that by 365.
Not to say that any number that comes out of that (even if it’s not as drastic) is something that residents should be forced to be ok with. (Local) Governments (municipalities?) exist for a reason and it’s their responsibility to ensure their localities are not taken advantage of. I appreciate this is a bit of a “rose tinted glasses” point of view, but it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s somewhat of a new problem and these outdated structures that have been in place for a long time may not be prepared to deal with it yet.
P.s. fuck Airbnb and all the rest of them taking advantage of “governmental inefficiencies”
Tourism also comes in seasons - a ski resort will be crowded in winter, but empty when the snow melts. A beach town is empty in the winter, but busy in the summer. Some cities are getting a huge influx of tourists for specific events, like Munich for the Oktoberfest. So your calculation won’t be accurate to measure the impact of tourism.
The sensible visualization is a line graph showing resident population and tourists over time. There’s places where residents would shift as well - here in south Florida we have “snowbirds” who spend six-ish months elsewhere.
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.
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…
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.
I wonder how the numbers for US cities compare.
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.
