The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Europe doesn’t want tourists – but without their money, most economies would collapse
Overtourism upsets local residents and worries governments, but if overseas travel stopped tomorrow there would be widespread panic and poverty, says Chris Moss
Before the pandemic, “green” travel was mainly directed towards so-called “ecotourism” initiatives and requests for hotel guests not to chuck their barely used hotel towels on the bathroom floor. But the clear skies of 2020 and 2021 invited blue-planet thinking. Suddenly different questions were raised. What if we all flew less or stopped flying altogether? What if we took our main holidays at home? What if we all agreed that no-frill flights and cruise ships – and the crowds they generate – are as environmentally wrongheaded as taking a helicopter when you can take a train?
Overtourism has recently become the key point of contention, prompting governments and local councils to take measures to deter visitors or limit numbers. Countries including France and Croatia have launched campaigns to entice tourists to less popular areas. Scotland and Iceland are encouraging “slow tourism”. Some cities, including Valencia, Venice and Manchester, have created new tourist taxes to raise money for infrastructure and bus services, or to support affordable housing. Some city councils, encouraged by the European Commission, are clamping down on short-term lets.
There are also grass-roots campaigns. Anti-tourist graffiti can be seen in many European capitals. “This isn’t tourism, it’s an invasion,” screamed banners in Barcelona during one march. One graffiti artist declared: “Tourist, you are the terrorist.” On Marbella’s Golden Mile, cars with UK number plates were daubed with offensive messages and tyres slashed. Athenians plastered a building full of short-term lets with fake posters warning of a bed-bug infestation.
There is overtourism all over the world. But Europe has a particularly acute problem, because it possesses a large, dense population and a middleclass with the wherewithal to take foreign holidays. Some cities – including Amsterdam, Barcelona and Dubrovnik – have become flashpoints for tension between visitors and local residents. But even regions used to tourism are under pressure. According to the UN World Tourism Organization (WTO), the Mediterranean region expects to receive 626 million visitors next year, making this the most visited coastline on the planet.
Overtourism can make towns unliveable for locals, pollute beaches and seas, and destroy the things tourism is intended to promote: authenticity, peace, security and fun. But take tourism away from Europe and the economic impacts would be huge.
According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), the sector contributed £1.6 trillion to Europe’s economy in 2022, just 7 per cent below 2019’s pre-pandemic level. Some 34.7 million people across Europe were employed in the sector, a number that’s expected to rise. Around 15 per cent of GDP in Mediterranean regions is generated by tourism.
Tourists spend money on flights, hotels, eating, drinking, entertainment, local transport and a host of other services. European countries, in moving away from industry, have become reliant on the income from international visitors. But, says Dr Neil Robinson of Edge Hill University’s Business School, they have failed to support local communities adapting to the influx.
“In the absence of traditional economies, tourism is a good stop-gap, but revenues created from tourism are rarely, if ever, invested back in the location to reduce negative tourism impacts. When tourism is allowed to run unchecked and not planned it can become the goose that laid the golden egg,” he says.
Post-pandemic, there has been a global surge in travel, as people spend their savings and re-appraise their life-goals following lockdowns and personal losses. UK residents made 71 million visits abroad last year. More than three out of four residents of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Finland, France and Austria went on holiday in 2022. We all complain about overtourism, even while we contribute to it.
Who complains most? Professor Xavier Font, a sustainable tourism expert at the University of Surrey’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, points to the residents of our larger metropolises: “Have you noticed how we never spoke about overtourism before city tourism became so prominent? Curiously, we are all happy to travel elsewhere and behave as tourists, but we don’t like it when someone else comes to our home and does it to us.
“People used to holiday in places that were purpose-built for tourism and no one cared about what locals felt. It’s only when people started to visit cities that they complained about overtourism. This is a symptom that the tourism model is broken.”
The causes of overtourism are myriad, from city residents hoping for some extra income by renting out spare rooms, to social media influencers plugging the same “iconic” places, to a lack of regulation by local and national governments. Traditional travel agents and tour firms have lost market share to digital platforms, such as Airbnb and Booking.com.
“Of course the destinations are beginning to call the shots. Local people can’t stop the airlines and so they have to create regulations and taxes to deter travellers or to target a different kind of tourist. This is not how tourism should be. You want visitors to a place to feel welcome. As a tour operator I despair,” says Noel Josephides, chairman of the Sunvil Travel Group.
The EU is worried about overtourism. The UN is worried about overtourism. Many ordinary travellers are just confused. Europe’s most popular countries and cities face a dilemma. Do they reduce numbers to make the experience better for all? Do they focus on local needs and domestic tourism, in keeping with their climate goals? Or is it already too late, as civic discontent morphs into what the World Tourism Organisation calls “tourism-phobia”? If travellers keep hearing the “over” word, will they end up staying at home?
The pandemic gave many countries a taste of what happens to their national and regional economies when tourism is curtailed for months at a time. If the overtourism prophets of doom and radical localists got their way, and overseas tourism suddenly came to an end – yes, it’s only a hypothesis – which economies would pull through and which ones would collapse?
One graffiti artist declared ‘Tourist, you are the terrorist’
Spain
Back to unemployment
Spain is a tourism superpower. A whopping 15.1 million British people visited in 2022 (as compared with the two million Spaniards who came here in the same year). It’s likely the country will soon be back to its 2019 high of 83.7 million visitors a year.
The tourism industry in Spain has a divisive political history. With the slogan “Spain is Different”, the
Franco dictatorship used hospitality to turn round the economy and normalise international relations.
The Costa Brava became the world’s first mass tourism destination; other Mediterranean countries soon copied the Spanish model.
Spain has a very active tourist board and is actually seeking to widen its market; the current promotional campaign, “Spain for All”, aims at greater social inclusivity.
There has been push-back against tourism. On a Mallorcan beach, a sign, in English, warned about dangerous jellyfish; another, in Catalan, announced “No jellyfish nor guiris” – local slang for yobbish tourists, particularly English-speaking ones. The anti-overtourism, anti-capitalism group responsible for the signs, Caterva – based in Manacor – claims that “the coves of the Balearic Islands have been expropriated by tourism”. They are as angry with hotel developers trying to profit as they are with foreign visitors.
But Font, who is from the city, thinks Barcelonans’ main gripe may not be with tourists.
“In cities like Lisbon and Barcelona, it’s still common to earn €1,000
(£866) a month and to still live with your parents when you’re aged 30.
It’s easy to blame tourists for this state of affairs, because you see them behaving in a certain way in your city. But the cause is not tourism. Saying there’s overtourism is really a sense of feeling powerless, that you lack dignity, or that there’s too much change taking place around you.”
Without tourism, what would
Spain sell to the world? It’s the world’s largest producer of olive oil and the world’s third-largest producer of wine, but agriculture contributes around less than 3 per cent of GDP. Arguably, the foodstuffs make more money as advertisements than as exports.
Spain’s unemployment rate of
11.5 per cent is the highest in the EU. Almost three million Spaniards currently work in tourism, more than in 2019. Without tourism there would be mass employment, much of it concentrated in the regions with the least resources. Supply chains would crumble. Local economies would cease to function.
“In the Balearics and Canaries, tourism has been the key driver of economic growth for decades and there are few alternatives,” says Adam Blake, Professor of Economics in Bournemouth University’s Business School.
“The Balearic economy was mainly dependent on fishing before the arrival of mass tourism in the 1960s and 70s. There isn’t really an alternative activity that would provide many jobs at comparable salaries.”
Italy
Ditch the dolce vita?
Thirty years ago, Italy was a premiership destination. Amalfi,
Capri and Venice were classy and costly, the sort of places you saw in James Bond films. Ryanair changed all that, opening up second-tier airports like Treviso for Venice and Bergamo for Milan. Airbnb made rooms on the cliffside in Positano or on Lake Garda affordable.
Venice has become ground-zero for overtourism’s excesses. St Mark’s Square and the Rialto Bridge are jam-packed “Instagram sites”, drawing millions of tourists each season who come on short stays to the island city, to merely tick off a handful of famous locations.
On peak weekends, “La Serenissima” is anything but.
Following lobbying from Unesco, a ban on large cruise ships entering the city came into effect in 2021.
Now, the organisation is saying Venice could be added to a list of World Heritage Sites at risk of “irreversible” damage due to overtourism. Next year, the city will trial run a scheme to charge a €5 (£4.30) fee for daytrippers to enter the city – though it won’t affect the millions of people who spend the night there.
Is Italy dependent on tourism?
Not entirely, but its national health budget is roughly equivalent to its income from international tourism.
Away from the cities and smarter beach towns, Italy still has seriously poor areas. “In Italy, tourism has been very important to development in some parts of the country where there are few economic alternatives,” says Blake.
Tuscany and Puglia are often linked to overtourism, but in Apulia, Campania, and Calabria, more than 20 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line. No one complains about tourism there.
Portugal
Europe’s poor man
No-frills flights made little Portugal a bit bigger. While the Algarve has been a holiday fixture since the 1970s, affordable UK flights have seen Lisbon rise as weekend break destination and opened up Porto and the nearby Douro Valley.
According to the WTTC, Portuguese tourism grew a whopping 61.6 per cent in 2022, to reach nearly £33 billion, equivalent to 15.8 per cent of GDP – making it one of Europe’s most tourism-reliant countries, providing now 921,000 jobs nationally.
There have been muted calls to control this surge. A tourist tax of €1-2 has been added on some cities’ tourist lodgings to support street-cleaning. Beachgoers can be fined for playing loud music; individual fines start at £173, while groups fetch up to £31,000.
In Lisbon, where there is a severe housing crunch and lampposts carry anti-tourism slogans, city mayor Carlos Moedas celebrated the fact that there were more visitors in 2023 than in 2019. He declared it “an extraordinary recovery,” pointing out that “tourism is 20 per cent of Lisbon’s economy – and employment”.
He added there was still room for growth: “We’re very far from overtourism. We’re not Venice or Barcelona-levels.”
Tourism powers the Portuguese economy and without it, the country could slip back to being the “sick man of Europe” as it was in the 1970s and as recently as 2007. In 2020, Portugal’s tourism revenues fell by 49 per cent, leading to a major contraction of GDP. According to the IMF, tourism significantly contributed to Portugal’s recovery from the global financial crisis and the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis of 2009-10. Lisbon’s centre might be congested with tourists, but it still has slum areas at its edges. And the whole of the Algarve would become a seaside slum without tourism.
Greece
Exile and migration
Tourism is the lifeblood of the Greek economy, accounting for about a fifth of GDP. Around 800,000 people (from a population of 10.3 million) work in the sector, which is expected to generate £34 billion this year, close to the pre-pandemic peak. The main overtourism issue for some islands is the environment. Santorini has 15,000 residents but receives up to two million visitors annually; 90 per cent of its GDP derives from the travel trade. George Sarelakos, president of environmental charity Aegean Rebreath, blames high numbers for “extremely polluted reefs and harbours in popular islands”.
“Greece has developed an unsustainable model,” says Sarlakos, “that promotes land and marine degradation, uncontrolled anchoring of boats, overbuilding, massive cruise ships stationed in small islands, over consumption of single-use plastics”. As tourism dried up in Lebanon, Tunisia, Syria, Libya and, for a time, Morocco and Turkey, visitors to Greece further boomed. Without any improvements in infrastructure, 10 million tourists in 2010 rocketed to more than 30 million visitors by 2019.
Dr Nikolaos Pappas, a professor of tourism development and crisis management at the University of Sunderland, says the hostility to tourists is in part a response to the migrant crisis. “What we actually witness from 2010 onwards, in all the Mediterranean European countries, is a dramatic increase of nationalism and the far-right – connected with immigration and the refugee crisis – which also affects the behavioural aspects of locals against tourists.”
Without tourism, many Greek islanders would migrate to the mainland for work. But Greece’s unemployment rate of 10.9 per cent means only a tiny number would find work. “Without being able to repurpose the infrastructure the economy of Greece would collapse.
France
An existential crisis
With a GDP of approximately £2.2 trillion in 2022, France is the world’s seventh-largest economy. It’s also a major tourism player, with Paris firmly established as the most-visited city in the world. In 2022, the official tourism body Atout France reported tourists spent a record £50 billion.
In June, French tourism minister Olivia Grégoire announced plans to regulate overtourism, saying it threatened “the environment, the locals’ quality of life, and visitors’ experiences”. So far, the plan has been about mainly gathering data – which the government admits is limited; Alliance France Tourisme, which represents companies in the sector, lamented France’s “belated awareness” when it comes to overtourism.
France is promoting train travel, tied to its recent ban on short-haul domestic flights, and says it will “encourage” visits to less obvious destinations, partly through social media influencers.
Pictures have been posted of queuing tourists at Mont Saint-Michel, which was was “overwhelmed”. The beach of Étretat on the Normandy coast received up to 10,000 visitors daily in the high season after it featured in the Netflix’s series Lupin. Normandy’s tourist board is promoting out of season visits.
France’s tourism sector reported 193,000 job losses in 2019 due to the pandemic and, in the following year, a financial hole of £90 billion; even in a multi-faceted £2.3 trillion economy, tourism is important to France.
Writing in Le Monde, the French sociologist Jean Viard observed: “The Great Pandemic… showed us that if we stop going out for leisure activities, dining out, taking vacations, then the city becomes empty, culture sleeps, and citizenship doesn’t exist.” Tourism, he argued, is the engine of civilisation and Paris is a “huge leisure centre” shared by residents and tourists. France without visitors would give the French no one to ignore or impress.