‘They don’t need the rabble anymore:’ Why Europe is rising up towards mass tourism

As protestors have taken to the streets throughout Spain, disrupted a billionaire’s marriage ceremony in Venice, and even brought about a shutdown of the Louvre within the form of a workers mutiny about overcrowding, Noel Josephides has been watching with one phrase on his thoughts: I advised you so.

“I could have told you that would happen 10 years ago,” he says. “And I said so. I said, ‘This is going to get out of control.’”

Josephides is the longstanding chairman of Sunvil, a UK-based tour operator that has been sending comfortably-off Brits on trip since 1970. He’s additionally a former chairman of ABTA and AITO, each UK journey business our bodies, which makes him one of many huge beasts of European tourism.

And he says he noticed Europe’s present overtourism meltdown coming.

“I said there’ll be enormous problems going forward,” he recollects of a speech he delivered to the ABTA annual conference, held in Dubrovnik, in 2013.

He delivered that warning because the sharing economic system — spearheaded in journey by Airbnb — was mushrooming throughout Europe. His concern, nonetheless, was not simply short-term leases.

What he noticed coming was an ideal storm: quickly increasing finances airways working in tandem with proliferating short-term leases to create huge new trip capability, driving down costs and ushering in a brand new period of large-scale finances journey.

Of course, as a tour operator, Josephides works in direct competitors with short-term leases and the impartial travel-planning that finances airways encourage. Yet in the present day, he looks like a Cassandra determine — he foresaw the chaos, however nobody acted. Now his worst fears have come to go.

“The local populations are quite right,” he says in regards to the spiraling protests. “It’s out of control. I’m on the side of the protestors, even though it affects my business.”

The state of affairs in Europe this summer time is a far cry from the empty streets and clear waters of the summer time of 2020. During the pandemic, many locations vowed to reinvent tourism for the higher. But as soon as journey restrictions have been lifted, issues rapidly reverted to the previous methods — and in lots of circumstances acquired worse, due to what got here to be generally known as “revenge travel.”

For some locals, the reminiscence of lockdown has taken on a halcyon glow.

“I remember walking in the streets very close to Las Ramblas and hearing birds singing and church bells,” says Maite Domingo Alegre, who lives in Barcelona. “I’d never realized the bells tolled. But I never get to hear them anymore. Tourism has brought so much noise it’s unbelievable.”

An English trainer and affiliate professor on the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Domingo Alegre lives within the metropolis’s historic heart close to the cathedral and works close to Las Ramblas. She says her metropolis has modified past recognition.

“We’ve always had tourism, and mass tourism, but over the last 10 to 15 years this has changed dramatically,” she says. “It’s not seasonal anymore, it’s 365 days a year. And the visitors are much more than the number of inhabitants.”

Crowded streets are one factor; the knock-on results, she says, are worse.

“Most of the shops — even food shops, clothes shops, restaurants, everything in the center — is basically addressed to tourists,” she says. “Prices have gone up. Airbnb basically evicted many locals. Most of my friends have fled the neighborhood because they can’t afford to live there anymore.”

The pandemic, she provides, intensified the issue, attracting distant staff from throughout Europe. “They don’t really mingle with the locals. They’re not interested in Catalan or even Spanish culture. They think it’s cheaper, and they have nice food and cheap drinks, so most bars and restaurants are also thought of for them.”

In Venice, it’s the identical story. The native pop musician Ornello’s latest video reveals him dressed as an astronaut, wading via the summer time crowds. In his real-life identification, Alessio Centenaro, he feels equally misplaced in his hometown.

“I’m a cyclist and on Sundays I take my bike from Piazzale Roma (Venice’s road terminus). I’m going out and I’m going against all the tourists arriving on the island and I feel like I’m a salmon going against the flow. Sometimes when you’re surrounded by tourists, with hundreds all around you, you feel like you’re the foreigner.”

Venice has all the time been a metropolis of vacationers, he provides, however it additionally as soon as had a large resident inhabitants. “There are 48,000 people officially, but nobody says what’s the percentage of old people. I’d say it’s perhaps 70% over 70. If they will live another 15 years, what will happen then?”

For the previous 5 a long time, Josephides has watched locations go from charming to overcrowded. The trajectory, he says, is almost all the time the identical.

First a boutique tour operator like Sunvil identifies a little-visited vacation spot that appears good for its purchasers — folks searching for a trip the place they received’t be surrounded by different vacationers. It’ll add that vacation spot to its books, normally chartering a weekly flight to get purchasers there initially. And so the primary few seasons can be a halcyon interval of comparatively few guests. They benefit from the peace and quiet; the residents benefit from the cash they inject into the native economic system.

But then phrase will unfold. A finances airline — as a result of it’s low-cost carriers, not legacy ones, who put money into lesser-known locations — will begin working to the vacation spot. The following yr, its rivals observe go well with, keen to not miss out. What if Jet2 is aware of one thing we don’t?

Suddenly, there’s a surfeit of planes going to the vacation spot, and to fill them airways slash fares, that means that the finances market turns into the “volume market,” as Josephides places it. Accommodation strains to maintain tempo with the rising variety of guests, prompting locals to put money into short-term leases.

Soon, that “secret” vacation spot is swamped — not simply by the early, extra prosperous pioneers, however by that quantity market, who fly in on the finances airways, keep in an Airbnb and customarily spend much less regionally. So the primary wave strikes on to a brand new place, and the cycle begins once more.

Josephides earmarks the Greek island of Samos as one of many subsequent locations to undergo this cycle. This yr there’s one direct weekly flight from the UK, he says. “Next year TUI (a German travel company) have Thursday and Sunday. Jet2 have put on four flights: two Manchester, one Birmingham and one Stansted. So wait to see Ryanair and easyJet pile in.” The mass market gamers, he says, “move in like a vacuum cleaner. The nature of the island will change but local governments do not understand what will happen until it is too late.”

Even established scorching spots might be victims of their very own reputation. Airports on the Greek islands of Corfu and Crete, Josephides notes, are inundated with flights. “The volume market won’t go to destinations that aren’t known, so you get this bottleneck of cheap flights fueling the likes of Airbnb. The local population are quite right — it’s out of control.”

An Airbnb spokesperson mentioned in a press release: “Airbnb offers a different way to travel that better spreads guests and benefits to more communities. The fact is that overtourism is getting worse in cities where Airbnb is heavily restricted: in Amsterdam or Barcelona, the introduction of stringent restrictions on short term rentals have coincided with a steep increase in guest nights driven by hotels, and a surge in accommodation prices for travelers. Cities that want to have a significant impact on overtourism should embrace tourism that supports families and communities.” They added that 59% of “guest nights” bought within the EU on Airbnb in 2024 are in locations outdoors cities, whereas their research published in June reveals that almost all of vacationers nonetheless select accommodations. VRBO, one other main short-term rental supplier, didn’t reply to a request for remark.

Pedro Homar is aware of this stress effectively. As tourism director for Visit Palma, he’s caught between guests behaving badly within the Spanish metropolis, and residents demanding motion.

“We need to ensure that tourism is a sustainable industry, not just from an environmental point of view but also from a social and economic point of view,” he says. “Our economy depends on tourism, so we either make sure we’re physically sustainable or we will not have a future.”

Since the pandemic, Palma has stopped selling itself outright. Instead, it runs “image campaigns” to form perceptions — even operating adverts to name out delinquent conduct in sure resorts.

In 2022, town capped cruise ship arrivals at three a day, though the port can deal with six (Barcelona has adopted go well with, saying in July that it’s going to close two of its seven cruise terminals from 2026). It banned short-term rental flats and Airbnbs in city-center residential buildings and has set a cap of 12,000 lodge beds: for a brand new lodge to open, one other should shut.

Palma has additionally constructed up a 50-million-euro ($58 million) fund to purchase and take away outdated accommodations from circulation — usually cheaper properties that have a tendency to draw finances vacationers. “It’s a way of taking out of the market all these obsolete and old hotels that are no longer competitive and not the kind of product that we want for the destination,” Homar says.

Palma’s method raises a query: Who has the “right” to journey?

Some locations have lengthy used excessive prices to discourage mass tourism. Bhutan prices a $100-a-day “sustainable development fund” charge. A gorilla-trekking allow in Rwanda prices $1,500 per person. Even Venice’s 10-euro day-tripper charge has drawn criticism from locals for promoting town to the rich.

Homar argues that locations ought to have the correct to decide on their guests, likening it to deciding whom to ask to dinner.

“I really do believe that as mature destinations, we have the right to choose the tourists that we want, and don’t want,” he says. “We need vacationers that respect our character, our way of life, our traditions.

“If you are thinking of coming over without a respectful point of view, we say, respectfully, we don’t need you.”

Josephides is blunter. “They don’t want the rabble anymore,” he says. “It sounds awful to say so, and everyone’s entitled to a holiday, but the numbers just keep growing. The whole thing is out of control. I can understand the democratization but it’s up to the destination if they want clients without any money,” he provides. “I’d like to drive a Ferrari, but I can’t afford it.”

For now, he says, most European locations appear centered on capping numbers fairly than pricing out finances vacationers fully.

Restoring the goodwill of residents is simply as essential as tackling the crowds.

“A city where residents are not satisfied is a city that doesn’t work,” says Ruben Santopietro, CEO of Visit Italy, a advertising firm for varied locations throughout the nation. “It loses its identity completely. Residents feel excluded and neighborhoods become touristic.”

Born in Naples, which noticed protests over lack of housing and rising short-term rental numbers in March, Santopietro has watched his hometown surge in reputation — and housing costs — over the previous decade.

He warns that if progress continues unchecked, “in five years, 50% of the città d’arte (Italian cities of culture) will become inaccessible.” Rome, Florence and Naples, he says, are already “suffocated by tourism” virtually to the purpose of no return.

Visitors, he provides, truly need locals round. “Venice belongs to the Venetians. If locals aren’t there, they won’t go. Putting residents at the center of tourism models is the only way to preserve our cities from becoming open-air museums.”

Homar agrees, echoing the identical phrase — “putting residents at the center of the tourist strategy” — when speaking about Palma’s new five-year plan, adopted in 2023. Some accommodations town buys can be changed with inexperienced areas or transformed to housing. In November, Palma will launch free cultural actions for locals — organ recitals, kids’s days within the old atelier of artist Joan Miró, theater concert events organized by Spanish nationwide radio stations, guided architectural walks across the metropolis — to “uplift the sense of belonging and the pride of being a citizen.”

“All these initiatives will be in spaces that residents for some reason believe are just for tourists,” he says. “We’re seeing that the sense of belonging that residents used to have about being in Palma, they were slowly losing that and we need to change that dynamic.”

Redistributing guests can even assist. The drawback in Italy, Santopietro says, isn’t that the nation can’t deal with the numbers — it’s that everybody goes to the identical locations.

This summer time, his company launched a marketing campaign, “The 99% of Italy,” encouraging vacationers to go to lesser-known locations from Genoa to Tropea (a few of which have been their purchasers, however not all). “We used social media platforms as they have created these imbalances,” he says, including that they count on tangible ends in the long run, as regional advertising campaigns take longer to take impact.

Santopietro says that even within the busiest locations, steps might be taken to disperse guests. He suggests incentives — for instance, discounted tickets to Rome’s Colosseum for individuals who’ve already visited the traditional coastal city of Ostia Antica.

In the quick time period, protests are more likely to unfold, says Estrella Diaz Sanchez, affiliate professor of selling at Spain’s University of Castilla-La Mancha.

“Some locals are frustrated about the number of tourists they receive, but I think the main factor is skyrocketing rents, driven by short-term holiday lets, pushing locals out of the housing markets,” she says. “The solution isn’t to reject tourism; it’s to make it more inclusive and respectful.”

Even Josephides, the tourism business doomsayer, thinks restoration is feasible. He factors to Estoril, on the Lisbon coast, which within the Seventies was a mass-market vacation spot. Authorities determined to push it upmarket, and succeeded.

“You can recover, but it takes time,” he says. “It’s much easier for a destination to control its growth rather than repair it afterwards.”

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