Holiday on your own doorstep . . .

If you haven't booked a summer holiday yet, maybe it is worth considering staying in beautiful Austria.

Joanne Edwards Here in Salzburg, there seems to be two main topics of conversation: the wonderful weather that we have been experiencing for the past few weeks and, what to do with the coach loads of tourists that enter this beautiful city every single day. Last year, over 50,000 coaches brought day trippers into the city and it was absolute chaos. Drivers from all over Europe tried to find the right parking places, as near to the centre as possible, to let the people out and pick them up again – preferably without paying anything. What a cheek! This year, the city government has introduced a scheme where travel agencies can pre-book a permit to allow their drivers to park here all day. Twenty-four euro – what a joke! For the price of ten ice creams, a coach carrying fifty people from, let’s say, Vienna, paying approximately €120 per person, can drive into the city, pollute the air and cause huge traffic jams for such a small price. When I worked as a tour guide in Southern Italy, about thirty years ago, we paid about ten times that amount to park in Sorrento, Pompeii or Amalfi. Admittedly, most of this was protection money (which was often collected by a cute curly-haired, Neapolitan boy with huge brown eyes) and went to the local mafia – but it worked. Coach drivers were told exactly where they could and couldn’t park and tourists could leave their belongings in the coach, which was never locked, and nothing was ever stolen. If the people living in the Paris-Lodron-Strasse, which seems to be the worst-affected area, start protesting, the city government may have to introduce something similar here.

Of course, we are not alone with this problem. Many holidaymakers face protests, violence and social unrest as locals fight back to stop hordes of tourists descending on their cities. Overcrowding is so severe in popular destinations that many hotels are already booked out until autumn. This has been caused by low-cost flights, political instability, terrorist attacks and the booming Chinese middle-class tourism. Tourists are slowly and cautiously returning to Turkey, but Tunisia and Sharm elSheikh are still considered dangerous.

Now we can expect to pay much higher prices in Spanish resorts and overcrowding in Barcelona and Mallorca is leading to huge protests. Anti-tourism groups in Palma, Mallorca, have called for "a summer of protests" as the city has become the first in Spain to ban Airbnb-style rentals. Residents are fed up with the way some tourists behave, having sex in public or running naked through the streets, that one wrote his thoughts in graffiti at the Park Güell, which was designed by Antoni Gaudi. It read: "Why call it tourist season, if we can’t shoot them?" After all, we have the deer season and the pheasant season.

Last year, a friend of mine was sitting on an open-top bus in Barcelona, when it was ambushed by four masked men who were members of Arron, an anarchist group protesting about the amount of tourists coming to the Catalan city. She was terrified and thought that it was a terrorist attack.

The problems are even worse in Venice, where the mayor has decided to stop huge cruise ships docking near to St Mark’s Square, as thousands of tourists only leave their mess, not their money, in the City of Bridges. Last month, he set up turnstiles at key entrances to the city to divert tourists to less crowded streets.

If we are so unwelcome in other European cities, maybe it is time to start appreciating the beauty we have on our own doorstep. Peace, sunshine, lakes and mountains – everything the heart desires.