The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The war on British tourists is starting to feel personal
In 2023, holiday destinations turned the UK holidaymaker into a pantomime villain, says Greg Dickinson
Five years ago, during the summer of 2018, I travelled to Venice, Dubrovnik and the Isle of Skye to present a series of videos about a new buzzword: “overtourism”.
The issues in these three destinations were varied, but there were shared themes. Environmental damage. The pricing out of locals. Pollution. Overcrowding at bottleneck sites. Tourism, it seemed, wasn’t working properly.
But across all of these destinations, there was an overarching respect towards the tourist. I remember talking to a man called Tommaso on the Venetian island of Sacca Fisola. His mission was to save Venice from overtourism, and yet he didn’t have a bad word to say about the tourists themselves.
“It’s not a problem of respect if a young person doesn’t have much money and eats a sandwich on the steps. This,” he said, pointing towards a giant incoming cruise ship, “this is a lack of respect for the city.” It was their problem, not the tourists’, to solve.
But in 2023, in some destinations, the finger of blame has turned away from tourism and towards the tourist. And it isn’t pointing towards any old tourist, it’s pointing smack bang into the freckled nose of the Great British holidaymaker.
In Amsterdam, the “Stay Away” campaign, launched earlier this year, dripped videos onto the screens of British lads at the very moment they were browsing for debauched trips to the city. They showed young, inebriated men getting arrested and fined. It was a blunt, transparent message from a blunt, transparent nation. Stay away. A two-word instruction which felt like a slightly less polite two-word instruction. Recent figures suggest it hasn’t worked quite as planned.
Meanwhile, Lanzarote’s president, María Dolores Corujo, said in March that the island must reduce its dependence on the British market and seek “higher quality holidaymakers who spend more when they’re here”. Germans, for example. The new Right-wing Balearics government has also unveiled plans to fine holidaymakers €36,000 (£31,000) if they are found guilty of the highly dangerous act of balconing ( jumping off a balcony into a pool), and will throw out and possibly even ban British tourists if they behave poorly next summer.
Are these targeted messages justified? I suppose if a guest came to my house and leered through the window before urinating on my front door, I would probably ask them to “stay away” too. But the point is that I don’t have a sex worker dancing around in my front window, nor a big sign outside my front door offering a free shot of absinthe with every portion of baked beans that you order, nor entire strips which cater for the very British holidaymaker who these places are now, apparently, trying to keep away. I know the British tourist isn’t always the classiest, nor the best behaved, but it does feel like the scrutiny should fall on the product as much as the customer.
And any conversation about Britons abroad is incomplete without a word on the seismic economic impact of our outbound holidaymakers. Last year, UK residents made 71 million trips abroad (approximately one per head) and spent more than £58 billion on their jollies. We travel, particularly to the Med, we spend, and a tiny but very loud minority of us cause trouble while away.
I have seen first-hand the impact that mass tourism can have on destinations, and I do understand why some tourist boards are tempted to take the “stay away” line. But doing so misses the nub of the problem. It’s like planting a few cheap flowers in your garden, and becoming so enraged by the bees that come to pollinate them each year that you end up dedicating your days to swatting them away. If you want hummingbirds and butterflies, I’m afraid you’ll need to overhaul the entire flowerbed and sow the relevant seeds.