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 makes life in Palma uninhabitable for locals. “We live off tourism, but tourism doesn’t let us live,” said one poster.
But why does there suddenly seem to be such a strong feeling of discontent in places where, for decades, large numbers of people tourists Was it the norm?
The answer, perhaps, is complicated.
The “Covid headache” is certainly a factor, says the BBC’s Rajan Datar. But the same happens, and globally, many more people have the money to travel. This raises big questions about the future of tourism.
2024 is predicted to be a record year for tourism, surpassing the previous high of 2019. It appears that the travel and tourism industry has recovered strongly after the pandemic, with any doubts about the safety of travel now ostracized.
In Spain’s Balearic Islands – which includes Mallorca – pent-up post-pandemic demand contributed to increase in rents to the point that locals say they can’t live in their own cities. Nurses, doctors and police officers would be struggling to pay local rents. It’s not hard to understand why locals can end up feeling like extras “in their own movie.”
Travel at all costs?
Despite the pressures of the recession, more and more people in the West feel they can travel abroad regularly – in fact, some consider it a necessary purchase and an essential human right.
The climate is similar to about 2,400 kilometers away in the Canary Islands. It is a popular tourist spot and tourism has become a vital part of the economy. Today it represents 35% of the archipelago’s GDP and 40% of jobs. O cost of living it is also a problem for locals.
But in the Canary Islands, accessibility is not the only problem. The environmental impact of tourism it is also seen by some as increasingly unsustainable. In a demonstration attended by 20,000 people at the end of April, a representative of the collective Canárias Já Had Enough said that the situation had reached a critical phase: “We have reached the point where the balance between the use of resources and the good -being the well-being of the population has collapsed, especially in the last year”.
In the Italian city of Venice, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, professor Marta Sottoriva used to board a small boat to block the huge cruise ships that regularly entered the city center and disembarked thousands of travelers. That battle has been won – cruise ships are now confined to the city’s industrial port.
But today less than 50,000 people live in Venice, compared to more than 150,000 in the 1970s. Despite the cruise ban, Ms. Sottoriva is not satisfied. “I know a lot of people who, even though they have money, they have income, they can’t find a house,” she says. “We are at the level they are at more beds for tourists than beds for locals.”
The great danger of tourism
The great danger of tourism is that an area without a vibrant and thriving mixed community with schools, local amenities and regular shops and is being transformed into a historic theme park. “Disneyfied” is the description used by many protesters.
Which meters are therefore taken to deal with overpopulation to popular destinations?
One approach is to try to regulate the flow of visitors during peak times. This can be done by charging entry fees for day trip visitors and providing information to potential visitors about when busy times should be avoided. Venice has just introduced a €5 fee for day visitors on a trial basis at popular times, and many other famous historic sites are increasing their fees for tourists.
“High value, low volume” – The proposed solutions
O new slogan for tourist offices It’s “high value, low volume.” This means that travelers who spend a lot of money and are aware of their presence in a sensitive environment should be catered for.
Another solution is to encourage people to avoid traveling in high season and to come in “low season”. Staggered school holidays could also prevent so many families from traveling to the same resort during a busy six-week period.
Many in the travel industry are also talking about “dispersal”. This means that tourists must be persuaded to go to alternative destinations – similar but less crowded.
Restricting parking is becoming a favored approach to reducing the feasibility of just coming for day trips. But that doesn’t stop tourist buses from leaving in large groups. And it’s hard to imagine how a tourist from, say, South Korea wouldn’t want to visit the Eiffel Tower and Venice on their first two-week trip to Europe.
Locals don’t just feel overwhelmed in places that have been on the tourist trail for years. Hallstatt, Austria, is a small alpine lakeside village that is undeniably picturesque, with a stunning panorama that could seem straight out of a storybook. A common urban legend is that the city is the base of Arendelle, the village in the popular Disney film Frozen. There are around 800 residents in Hallstatt, who are simply overshadowed by the approximately 10,000 daily visitors – many of whom disembark from large tour buses and stroll, sometimes through residents’ gardens, in search of the perfect selfie. Some residents are fed up and last year a demonstration blocked the tunnel that carries road traffic into the city. Last year there was a short-lived plan to end congestion at a famous “selfie” spot by the local council, which put up a fence to block that particular angle. They were forced to remove it when many residents complained that it was blocking their view of their beautiful lake.