Can popular European cities ever recover from overtourism?

Since spring, anti-tourism protests have spread through Europe’s key capital cities like a virus. From the Canary Islands and the Balearics through to Barcelona, Paris, Athens and Venice, residents have been rejecting mass tourism and demanding solutions from city authorities to tackle the problem.

A combination of post-pandemic ‘revenge tourism’, rising rents, a cost-of-living crisis and poor job prospects in many patches of southern Europe have created the perfect breeding ground for serious friction between tourists and locals. The question is: can cities like Amsterdam, Venice and Barcelona ever have a happy relationship with tourists again?

What are destinations doing?

Several cities are taking matters into their own hands and actively trying to change the way that tourists experience and behave in their cities. One of the most common European measures has been the tourist tax. Prices vary, but you could expect to pay around €7 on average in many European cities, including Paris and Rome, to stay overnight. After trialling a new €5 entry fee system for day-trippers, Venice looks set to double its tourist tax next year. 

You might think that paying an extra €5 – the equivalent of a pricey cup of coffee – wouldn’t stop you from visiting Venice for the day, and you’d be right. Rather than dissuade tourists from visiting, taxes like this generally exist to manage the associated costs of tourism, like cleaning and maintenance. In Venice’s case, the tax was implemented because Unesco threatened to de-list the city if they didn’t start to tackle the problem. While authorities have deemed the trial a success, local activists in Venice have voiced their opposition to the levy, arguing that it’s little more than a token gesture.  

Do European cities actually want to deter tourists? If they did, they could take a leaf out of Bhutan’s playbook. Bhutan’s government charges visitors as much as ＄100 per day to visit, a fee that the country’s Prime Minister recently hinted could increase. The hefty tax is used as a tool to curb mass tourism and to help the country to comfortably accommodate visitor numbers, which it currently caps at a quota of 200,000 per year. 

For Bhutan, it’s working – but whether such a steep fee could work in cities that rely so heavily on tourist footfall and income is unlikely. Beyond modest restrictions on tour groups and capping visitor numbers to popular attractions, no European countries have implemented annual tourist quotas – and implementing them in destinations that are so well connected is practically impossible anyway. But the fact remains that somehow, somewhere, tourist numbers need to go down. So how is this currently being done?

Fewer beds = fewer tourists

With more tourist beds in its historic centre than actual residents, Venice joins several cities on the continent where the short-term let boom has led to locals being priced out. Promises that holiday rentals allow travellers to ‘live like a local’ ring hollow when locals can’t afford to live in their neighbourhood anymore. 

Promises that travellers can ‘live like a local’ ring hollow when locals can’t afford to live in their neighbourhood anymore

One way to reduce visitor numbers, of course, is by limiting where they can sleep. Amsterdam has recently implemented a one in, one out system for hotels, meaning a new hotel will only be allowed to open when another one closes, and they won’t be permitted to offer a higher number of beds than their predecessor. Barcelona, meanwhile, has promised to completely ban short-term lets from 2028. 

Will it work? Time will tell. New York banned short-term lets in late 2023 in a bid to help with the city’s housing crisis, which so far has only resulted in eye-wateringly high hotel rates and a rental black market. The scheme could, however, push travellers to more affordable options on the fringes of the city, or to other locations.

Discouraging ‘hit and run’ tourism

One issue with new-age tourism isn’t simply the sheer number of visitors, but how they behave. Social media virality has led to a spike in ‘hit and run’ tourism, where travellers hop from one photo opp (which could be anything from an attraction to an entire country) to another, often causing congestion, disruption and rubbish. 

Implementing fines for lingering in ‘no-waiting zones’ is certainly one way to curb this kind of behaviour, but diversion is perhaps a better tactic. Italy’s new fleet of tourist trains aim to encourage tourism to the country’s rural destinations and overlooked cities by making them more accessible to visitors. Across Europe, new sleeper routes and high-speed trains are offering an alternative, albeit a slow and pricey one. 

Formerly Europe’s most popular cruise destination, Dubrovnik now only allows two ships to dock per day. Venice took the approach to ban cruise ships from the centre of the city in 2021, although the ban seems to have not been tightly enforced. Some cities and ports are also hiking docking rates to make it less affordable for them to visit too. While these interventions make a difference for those arriving by sea, there’s a marked silence when it comes to air travel. Cities could also seek to limit the number of flights arriving, although a hike in airline taxes is more likely to happen.

What can you do to help?

If you’re reading this, you’re naturally wondering how to be part of the solution, not the problem (and whether you’ll ever enjoy a guilt-free weekend in Paris again). What can those of us who love to travel do about overtourism? Does it mean we have to stay home?

Justin Francis, CEO of the world’s first responsible holiday company, Responsible Travel, has some ideas.

‘Book a hotel instead of a holiday rental,’ he said. ‘Holiday rentals take up houses that could be in the housing market and hotels don’t do that.’

‘Hire a guide from the local community to show you around: they know how to avoid the crowds, dodge peak periods and give you a more enjoyable experience. 

‘Spend money as local as you can: you come into local’s home turf when you visit as a tourist, so the trade-off is that you should be leaving money behind.’

He notes that for every overtouristed place, there are destinations that have the capacity for more and would welcome travellers. ‘So-called ‘mirror destinations’ that offer something similar to a famous place but that have the capacity for more tourists, are worth looking out for,’ he said. 

Read more: How to be a better tourist in Europe’s most visited cities

What about undertouristed cities?

The inevitable consequence of overtourism in Barcelona, Paris, Florence and Amsterdam is that other cities will be next. Copenhagen’s tourism authority has been working long term to develop a strategy to encourage better tourism. The city has a two-pronged approach: spread tourists geographically through the city beyond well-known hotspots, and encourage travel throughout the year, not just in the summer season. They also measure citizens’ support for tourism with a monthly poll – something that not all city tourism boards do – making sure they have objective data on it so they can address any imbalance that could occur. 

This year, Copenhagen launched a trial project called Copenpay, which rewards visitors for travelling by bike, picking up litter and helping at an urban farm with free food, experiences and museum entry.

‘We developed the idea because we want tourism to make the world a better place,’ said Rikke Holm Petersen, Director of Marketing, Communications and Behaviour at Wonderful Copenhagen, the city’s tourism organisation. ‘We are aiming to inspire a more conscious, greener mindset that could bridge the sustainable behaviour gap – that 82 percent of people want to be more sustainable but only 22 percent take action.’

The future of the city break

It’s hard to estimate how long it will take for any of this year’s changes to make a difference – ‘overtourism’ as a word was only coined in 2016, and many of these interventions are so recent that they haven’t had time to have a real impact yet. But the question remains if city breaking is really sustainable any more.

For Justin Francis, there are reasons to be positive:

‘If you look at the top tier of city break destinations,’ he said, ‘they are buckling right now. But I don’t think they’re over. When capacity is limited, they will become more expensive. It’s not great for the democracy of travel, but there are a lot of other amazing cities around the world, and there is a lot of capacity there.’

This summer’s overtourism crisis does not look like it will be over quickly – behaviour change always takes time – but with the right approach, there are ways to view tourism as a force for good. Be thoughtful about the location you choose, stay in a hotel, book a local guide, explore beyond classic hotspots, and spend money locally. City travel has changed, but it’s not over. 

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