What would you do about tourism?

[Ozgirl75]

Reading an article this morning about how Venice is charging day trippers a fee to visit, how Barcelona is protesting about cruise ships and also the “overrated places” thread elsewhere, what can be done to stop mass tourism ruining lovely places (both for the people who live there now, and for the future), whilst still allowing people to explore and see the world?

Is it something draconian like dramatically raising air fares (which seems unfair as then it’s like “travel but only for the rich”). Or are there other options? What about spreading out when people visit somehow? Moving summer holidays? Changing school timetables to have shorter breaks through the year?

Encouraging development and exploration of new places? I mean, it’s not like there are loads of new people around in the summer - it’s the same population, it’s just that too many of us are going to the same place at the same time.

It's a difficult one. I live in Edinburgh and the festivals have just ended.
I think they are a great money spinner for the city. However, we don't see all the money going to improve local services and infrastructure, it makes living and working in the city quite frustrating during the summer, and the costs are often such that it makes actually seeing shows prohibitive for locals.
There are lots of areas of real deprivation in Edinburgh and I don't think tourism helps them.
However, we're a tourist city and we have to deal with that.

I live in London. We stay away from the touristy sites. It's just mental sometimes. The National Gallery and NPG are rammed, and it's difficult to stand and look at the paintings. I feel excluded from the Cultural Highlights even though they are literally a bus ride away. As for Buckingham Palace, Westminster, Leicester Square...eugh. Steer clear.

I think compulsory ticketing for popular attractions are essential, and should only be sold online.

Ban coach tours. Bloody coaches clog up the roads especially in the West End where the roads are tiny...the red buses are constantly fighting them for space.

I think London should bring in a tourist rax, definitely, maybe £5 pppn, for all non-domestic visitors.

A fast and slow lane around all major tourist sites. The fast lane being for locals.

Interesting I was thinking of starting a similarish thread.

It's at least partially bogus to say airfares shouldn't be raised because that's "travel for the rich," as 50 percent of people in the UK don't fly in any given year, and we are comparatively big users of air travel globally. Many people can't afford it, but many wealthy people take multiple flights every year.

Aviation fuel is not taxed and it should be. At the very least airlines which benefit from hugely subsidised fuel should not be allowed to run frequent flyer programs or reward points of any kind. This is just funneling more money to those people who have already benefited from cheap, taxpayer subsidised air fares in the first place, and encourages unnecessary travel.

Cruise is another area where cheap fuel and tax free environments mean wealthy people get slightly cheaper travel and large conglomerates make enormous profits, while the local communities they impose upon get far too little benefit/too much harm.

Venice has a natural capacity. Yet developers are building big hotels on the mainland and driving the day tripper market.

Italy is a very capitalist driven private business economy so I can't see anything changing there. They add the tourist tax which varies from place to place. I just hope it makes it to the right people and is spent effectively.

Population grows, wealth grows, so more people will go to tourist destinations.

Governments encourage tourists & tourism growth.

It's a cultural change that is required & I don't see that happening while so much of the world's economy demands growth to survive.

If you raise taxes & create financial barriers that may effectively exclude more of the poorest from the tourist experience - creating more fiscal inequality seems a very wrong way to address this problem.

My impression is that people don’t mind tourists - I mean, most people are tourists at some point themselves. But it’s more about controlling the flow and encouraging tourism throughout the year rather than having everyone bunching together? Cruise ships are a particular issue there as they are HUGE and as I understand it, people often don’t spend when they get off as they’re already paying for meals on board.

I live in Sydney and the cruise ships are no drama there, so maybe it’s that only ships up to a certain size can visit places with a certain population?

Tax air BnB properties.

I wonder if climate change will have an influence over the time of year when people choose to visit popular city destinations.
I don’t think you could pay me to go to Rome/Venice/Madrid/New York during the months of June -September but I would happily go to these places in the autumn or Spring.

Im sure I’ve read somewhere that Norway is going to start banning the big cruise ships from
entering some of the fjords. I think maybe over the next 10-20 years that these sort of restrictions will come in forcing people to choose alternative means of visiting some very overrun destinations.

With cruise ships I think it is scale vs local population. There was an image online last week of a cruise ship mooring in a Cornish? Village where the ship capacity was half the population of the village. That just isn't feasible on local infrastructure. A big port like Sydney or Rottadam can cope with it.

I live near a zoo. We get a lot of traffic in summer. But they do stuff to help the local community... sponsor local charities, they are paying for road improvements, discounted tickets etc.

With the increasingly common summer heatwaves people are going to naturally start avoiding the "hotspots" in the summer in the northern hemisphere.

I dunno, it's a tough one. My local fruit and veg market attracts 15.5 million visitors a year (Borough Market). I used to walk to work along the Thames and cross at the Millennium Bridge about 10 years ago but the sheer number of tourists makes that hard except the n very rainy days. I fancied popping into the Sainsbury wing of the NG a few months ago and found you had to queue! People rent out their flats as Airbnbs in my block and we end up with rowdy parties that the concierge has to break up.

I like living in Central London but honestly it was bliss during covid. Quiet, clean air, clean streets, locals greeting each other and twatting on with their lives.

Taxing Airbnb sounds like a start. I would also welcome a few days a year or hours a day when the attractions were bookable by locals!

I absolutely agree that tourist taxes are essential. Scotland has brought in a licensing scheme for holiday lets and that might well be a good thing.

Encouraging the use of public transport by investing in services that benefit locals year round would be ideal.

More than anything we need to try to move away from this idea that there is a must-see list of destinations that everyone has the right to visit. We need to accept no-one can see everything and nor should we try.

It's a difficult one. I would love to visit every country and every beautiful island. I have to tell myself I can't. We kind of accept we can't buy every car or live every dream but at some level a lot of tourists are acting like we can see the entire world and anything less is a failure/injustice

If you get restrictions / limits on numbers then it will become more expensive and the rich will always manage - the capitalist model of letting the market sort the problems

Alternatives

it's managed eg via a ballot (don't they do that in sone American national parks)?)

Making people feel happy at home , making lives less stressed so you don't "need" that break away in the same way

Only allowing one flight per person / one "hotspot" every two years - rationing

Using immersive technology to let people see things without going there - for example with Edinburgh using technology to bring the shows to the smaller towns so communities can have the festival locally - spreading the load

I think people should have a personal allowance for air travel. It would stop a lot of unnecessary business travel as people wouldn't want to lose their allowance for their own holidays. You could also save it for a big trip if you didn't need to fly every year. For example two short haul flights a year. There could be exceptions for travel to see sick relatives.

And yes to a tourist tax (maybe two levels - a small one for UK residents and a bigger one for overseas tourists - people in the UK should be able to visit their respective capital city without being overcharged - something like £2.50 a head for domestic and £5 a head per night for overseas visitors).

Tourist tax. Ban cruises from docking in cities, they do not benefit the local economy. Encourage visiting alternative cities/countries. Limiting Airbnbs as it means local people can't find rentals or buy property to live in.

We often take our main holiday over Easter. It really works for us - I don't want to go places when it's super hot. I prefer to be at home during the summer.

But as long as the Dc are in school we are restricted. It will be great when they are out of school & I can holiday outside of those times when everyone else is on holiday.

I live in a seaside town and I want the local businesses to do well, but I’m not seeing any benefit to residents from the money the council gets, other than wanky, short term stuff that they think makes them look good.

We enjoy walking along the seafront, but not in the school holidays, because it’s rammed. It was pleasant last weekend, when most holidaymakers had gone home.

There must be a price elasticity point for holidays at some point - but people really LOVE their holidays and I don’t think the whole €5 a day will make that much difference. Flights from Australia have increased 30-40% and yet there is still huge demand.

I think maybe the PP above is right where people will start avoiding southern Europe in the summer soon as it’s just too hot. I visited Barcelona in the winter and it was lovely - cool and sunny and not busy at all. Still all the same lovely things to see!

I think although it’s easy to talk about limiting flights and things, no government will ever actually do this so there needs to be more attainable goals.

@midgemadgemodge i like the idea of ballots for popular things or places and also using technology to spread things out.

I also think maybe using technology to advertise that places have more than the obvious things. Some of the museums in London are chockas but we went to the Museum of London Docklands in the school holidays and it was both fantastic and not busy at all.

Basically anything that can be done to spread people out a bit!

Agreed that daily charging/taxing isn't much of a deterrent. I don't think it should be. It should be so tourists are paying their way in a fair manner.

I think ballot type systems might have a place for really unique monuments but most places don't really need this. They just need resources to be used more effectively. For example, it would be far better if people didn't bring their cars to eg Cornwall, the Lake District, the New Forest, most seaside towns, etc. These places would be transformed. Parking charges and road pricing should be used to achieve this. You could also incentivise off season visiting this way. Mont Saint Michel has been much improved by requiring people to park further away and providing a dedicated bus service.

Overwhelming, though, tourism is induced demand by large businesses. They push people to low tax modes (airline, cruise) and aim to Hoover up all the tourist income using all inclusive models and excursion packages. So it's there we need to concentrate tax regimes so they can't cream off local assets into private hands. Strict regulations are also needed to prevent things like private beaches or enclosure of public parkland, at the expense of locals.

A tourist tax and restrictions on air bnb would be a start. Also restrictions on renting campervans or an additional road tax for these rentals. I live rurally in Scotland and tourism here just can't be sustained, there literally are not enough locals or seasonal workers to support the tourism industry.
If it's not regulated it will just increase until the whole of the highlands is just a Disneyland with no one able to afford to live or work here except retirees and second home owners.
Maybe restrictions will favour rich people but there are so many tourists now ( many coming from the US and Asia ) who have a bucket list agenda, start in Edinburgh, do Skye and Glencoe and see the Harry Potter train on a tour bus then back to Edinburgh all in a day. They aren't adding anything to the rural economy, in fact locals need to pay for road maintenance and litter.
It needs to stop.

We tried to use the bus in snowdonia

We missed the last bus back and had to hitch

We used a bus in the lakes
We walked back - the cost was horrific

Carbon rationing gets my vote

In my opinion, I think what would really work would be if the travel marketing people stopped flogging the same destinations all the time. There are so many incredible amazing places in the world that tourists never see because they don't know about them. Instead everything is all about the same ones.

What was amazing about travel bloggers 10 years ago was that they were showing sides of the world that people had never seen before, but now it has all gone so commercial that they all just go to the big names now and find "off the beaten track" things to do in those big name destinations, which doesn't help people expand their repertoire of where to go.

Cruises should start being more responsible/egalitarian and include some more "off the beaten track" destinations along with the "big names" so people can see new places and actually broaden their horizons instead of just booking a holiday because Brenda in Accounts went there last year.

Places that do package holidays (Tui? IDK who does them these days) should also offer city breaks in places that are less "big name" (they could also get more customers in as these would be cheaper). This would revolutionise travel the way the package holiday did back in the 70s and take the burden off the big destinations.

As an example, there are BOATLOADS of amazing and incredible things to see and do in Northern Ireland and Donegal, and yet there are almost no tourists compared to places like York, Edinburgh or the West Highlands. The big coaches drive straight up from Dublin for day trips to Giant's Causeway and that's basically it, giving people the idea that's all that's worth seeing in the North.

The other thing I've noticed from extensive travel abroad is that in China, and some other East Asian countries, the tour operators/guides tell you about local destinations/attractions/points of interest that aren't part of the tour, so you know what to research for your next trip. Travel reps elsewhere should do more of this to disperse people. No one needs to go to somewhere like Venice more than once and yet I bet some people go every year.

If tour operators do what they've always done, people will go where they've always gone.

Yep the service isn't good enough to get tourists out of their cars. But it should be. And good enough to reduce car dependency for locals too

It needs a massive change of mindset.

When I was younger I travelled abroad quite a bit. Now I am older I realise that it matters not one jot if I go to Venice or not. The world will keep turning (and will be marginally better) if I do not go to Peru or Australia.