Mass tourism is suffocating Europe

International travel has become a status symbol and a yearly expectation for many Europeans, but popular cities across Europe cannot seem to afford to receive this many tourists.

Venice, for example, has a population of 55 000 people, and an influx of 20 million tourists every year – most of whom arrive by cruise ship and spend only a few hours there. These rapid visits leave Venice with little income or benefit for the local economy, but great strain on traffic, public spaces and infrastructure.

Venice offers few job opportunities besides Tourism, and housing prices are through the roof. Owners convert what could be family homes and lower-income rentals into lucrative short-term holiday accommodations. This is leading to depopulation: the city’s permanent residents have decreased from 120,000 to 55,000 over the last 3 decades. According to Jonathan Keates, chairman of Venice in Peril, if the population falls below 40 000, Venice will not be a viable, living city any longer.  

Amsterdam has become ‘The Venice of the North’ in recent years with its own 20 million tourists a year. Party Tourism has centered  in the famous red-light district, and many visitors engage in offensive behaviour such as public urination, vomiting, littering, drunkenness and noise. This disruptive party tourism has led the government to create an ad that specifically targets 18–35-year-old English men to stay away from Amsterdam, showing a drunk guy being handcuffed by police, fingerprinted and having their mugshot taken. 

But these problems aren’t restricted to the routes of 19th-century English gentry grand tours: the European wage vacuum creates wildly different prices across the continent, and a lot of people travel to cheaper countries to kick back and feel like they’re wealthy for once. Even though Southern and Eastern European countries realize a lot of income from this, it also disrupts their local economies, especially when it comes to housing markets, public transport and cultural life.

This is as true in Prague or Budapest as it is in Mallorca or Barcelona, where local residents have started protesting the effects of a lopsided economy and want to cap the number of incoming tourists. This week’s gusests discuss potential soulitions, form bans to regulations, and the concept of regenerative tourism.

Guests

Júlia Isern is a Lawyer and EU Climate Pact Ambassador from Mallorca, she is the spokesperson for “Less Tourism, More Life”. This platform has successfully brought the issue of overtourism to the forefront of public discourse.

Bálint Kádár is an Architect, curator and urbanism scholar from Budapest. He has researched urban tourism for decades now, including in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, but also in Mallorca.

Alan Godsave  is a Londoner who has lived and worked in Central & Eastern Europe for the past 25 years. He is a member of the UK Chartered Institute of Marketing, and is the Programme Director at the International Business School in Budapest. 

Further sources

Responsible Travel on Overtourism in Venice and in Amsterdam

Amsterdam launches stay away ad campaign targeting young British men