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Global tourism is booming. People wish it wasn’t.
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The message was scrawled in block letters in black marker pen on a makeshift wooden placard: “Everywhere you look, everyone is a foreigner,” it read.
Police said 10,000 protesters took to the streets of Palma, Mallorca, on the last weekend of May, at the start of the summer holiday season. Their message was that tourism was making life unlivable for Palma residents.
But why is there suddenly so much discontent in a place where throngs of tourists have been the norm for decades?
The answer seems complicated. The impact of COVID-19 is certainly a factor. But so is the fact that more people around the world now have the money to travel. This raises big questions about the future of tourism.
2024 is shaping up to be a record-breaking year for tourism, surpassing the all-time high of 2019. The travel and tourism industry is coming back with a vengeance after the pandemic, and doubts about the safety of travel seem to have been erased.
It’s not hard to understand why locals end up feeling like extras in their own movie.
Despite the pressures of the recession, an increasing number of people in the West feel they can afford to travel abroad regularly, and indeed some consider it a necessity and a virtual human right.
Image credit: Getty Images
Image caption: This sign reads, “Everywhere you look, everyone is a foreigner”
Similar sentiments prevail in the Canary Islands, some 1,500 miles away, which have been a favourite destination for Brits for decades and where tourism is a key part of the economy: Today, tourism accounts for 35 percent of the islands’ GDP and 40 percent of employment.
The cost of living for local residents is also an issue here.
Chris Elkington is editor of The Canarian Weekly, a local English-speaking newspaper. He first settled in Tenerife in 1991 as a travel agent catering to 18-30 year olds and has seen tourism flourish over the years.
But the unchecked growth has a downside: rents are too high for many locals, the Canaries have the lowest average income in Spain, and many hotel workers have been forcibly relocated.
Mr Elkington said the continued growth of tourist accommodation came at a cost.
“Many landlords are now being very cautious and are no longer renting out their properties long-term, instead turning to holiday rentals via online platforms,” he says. “The number of properties available has dropped significantly, prices have risen sharply and, unfortunately, it’s become very expensive to find somewhere to live.”
But economic issues are not the only problem in the Canaries: some also believe that tourism’s environmental impact is increasingly unsustainable.
At a demonstration attended by 20,000 people at the end of April, a spokesman for the group Enough Is Enough for the Canary Islands said the situation had reached a critical point: “We have reached a point, especially over the past year, where the balance between the use of resources and the well-being of the population has become out of whack.”
Elkington points out that tourist destinations with lots of hotels and pools can use up to six times more water than residential areas.
“They’re building more and more hotels and expanding the tourist area,” he said, “and unfortunately the resources we have here can’t really accommodate that.”
The travel industry is booming, with millions of people taking international trips every year. How can we stop overtourism and protect the planet from its environmental impacts?
In the Italian city of Venice, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, schoolteacher Marta Sottoliva was in a small boat trying to stop the giant cruise ships that regularly docked in the city center and unloaded thousands of day-trippers. The battle has been won, and cruise ships are now restricted to Venice’s industrial port.
However, today fewer than 50,000 people actually live in Venice, down from over 150,000 in the 1970s.
Despite the cruise ship ban, Sottoliva is not satisfied: “I know many people who have money, who have an income, but who can’t find housing,” she says.
“We have more beds for tourists than for locals.”
A major danger of tourism is that vibrant, diverse communities with their schools, local amenities and normal shops are lost and replaced by historic theme parks — “Disneyfication” is the term used by many protesters.
So what measures are being taken to prevent overcrowding at popular tourist destinations?
One way is to regulate tourist flows at peak times. This can be done by charging day-trippers an entrance fee and providing potential tourists with data on when to avoid the busiest times. Venice has just introduced a pilot scheme that charges day-trippers a €5 entrance fee during its busiest times, and many other famous historical attractions have also increased their entrance fees for tourists.
The tourism board’s new slogan is “high value, low crowds,” which means catering to the needs of travelers who are willing to spend big money and be sensitive about being in a vulnerable environment.
Another solution is to encourage people to avoid peak season travel and come in the “off season”. Staggering school holidays can also prevent too many families flocking to the same resorts in the same concentrated six-week period.
Many in the tourism industry also talk about “dispersal,” which means sending tourists to alternative, similar but less crowded destinations. Limiting parking spaces is becoming a favored approach to reduce the feasibility of day trips.
But that doesn’t stop tour buses from dropping off large groups, and it’s no wonder tourists from, say, South Korea don’t want to visit the Eiffel Tower or Venice during their first two weeks of hard-earned European travel.
Image credit: Getty Images
Image caption: Some tourists now have to pay €5 (£4.25) to get into central Venice.
It’s not just places that have been tourist destinations for years where locals are feeling overwhelmed.
Hallstatt, Austria, is an undeniably picturesque lakeside alpine village with breathtaking panoramic views straight out of a fairytale – and it’s a popular urban legend that the town was the inspiration for the village of Arendelle in the wildly popular Disney film, Frozen.
I met a Korean mother who brought her two young daughters dressed up as princesses for this very reason.
Hallstatt is home to around 800 residents, but their numbers are dwarfed by the roughly 10,000 tourists who visit every day, many of whom hop off tour buses and wander around the area, sometimes passing through residents’ gardens, in search of the perfect selfie.
Some locals have grown fed up, with protesters last year blocking a tunnel connecting the roads into the town.
Long-time resident and urban architect Dr. Friedrich Idam is one of them. He lives in a house on a hill overlooking the lake and told me that day-trippers are not welcome. They spend very little money, he says, and make life intolerable for him. “There is no public space for me and my housemates anymore,” Dr. Idam says.
“In the churchyard, tourists take selfies and pose in front of the graves. The problem with Hallstatt is that it’s so Instagrammable. I think people who come by car and only stay for an hour are not welcome here.”
Mayor Alexander Schütz sympathizes, but also feels powerless: “Everyone knows this is going too far, but we can’t close the street and prohibit traffic because it’s a public road. People pass through Hallstatt to get to other towns, so it’s not a dead end.”
Last year, in an attempt to decongest the popular ‘selfie’ spot, the local council erected a fence blocking that particular view, but it only lasted for a short time – after too many residents complained it blocked their beautiful views of the lake, they were forced to remove the fence.
Image credit: Getty Images
Image caption: Protesters in Mallorca held up a banner reading “Stop illegal rentals”
And a new tourism market is emerging, with disposable income and a desire to explore the world in ways they never could before.
Chinese tourists first emerged as a major growth factor in the world’s travel population early this century, and even larger sources of international tourism are gradually replacing them in terms of influence.
India is the world’s fastest-growing major economy and currently the world’s most populous, and the country’s 1.4 billion people have a burgeoning affluent middle class who are spending big bucks on dream trips to far-flung places.
Last year, 27 million Indian tourists traveled abroad, and that number is expected to surge to 70 million by 2030. Indian airlines have ordered almost 1,000 new aircraft in anticipation of a big increase in demand.
Deepti Bhatnagar, who launched India’s first travel show in 2000, says social media has played a big role in stimulating travel demand among Indians. “Indians want to go to certain places to take selfies, or they feel compelled to go there because they think, ‘This is one of the most photographed places,'” she says.
The vast majority of Indians cannot afford to travel, but with such a large population, even a small percentage of the wealthy and ultra-wealthy entering the travel market can quickly and significantly increase the global figure. India has around 500 billionaires and 1 million millionaires, many of whom are luxury-minded.
Image credit: Getty Images
Image caption: This sign at a protest in Palma reads: “We make a living from tourism, but tourism doesn’t allow us to make a living.”
It’s amazing that while most things in life are becoming more and more expensive, short-haul flights are still very cheap, sometimes cheaper than a pint at the pub. Orders for new commercial aircraft are soaring around the world. It’s estimated that 3% to 4% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the aviation industry, a figure that’s expected to rise as other industries go greener faster.
However, there is an ethical quandary to consider here, and along with it accusations of hypocrisy. Many in the West, myself included, have benefited from the post-war travel boom and explored far-flung parts of the world without thinking about the undesirable consequences of mass tourism. So why should we now preach to a younger generation for whom gap years and backpacking are almost a rite of passage and a life-enhancing experience?
And who are we to preach to people in developing countries who can only now afford to do the same?
There appear to be no easy answers to the question of who should be where and when, as another placard in Parma suggests.
It read: “We depend on tourism for our livelihood, but tourism does not provide us with a livelihood.”
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