Fully agree with this, I set out on a 20 minute journey to my son yesterday, each way took me 1 hour 20 minutes just because of sheer volume of traffic! I was aghast and thought I'd woken up in mid August! Its May half term, and we are rammed, the queues of traffic to get into Hayle and St Ives were incredible.
Something needs to be done about the numbers, we just can't sustain it and no one is happy.
We don't have the road infrastructure, or the public transport to cope with the numbers.
I'm pretty sure there have been Cornish people who have sold to the highest bidder in greed, but the tides are turning. There are many people selling nowadays who are telling the estate agents that their property can only be marketed and sold to local people. There's also the new rules being brought in for long term rentals causing landlords to evict long term tenants and you can bet they are selling to the highest bidder! The reality with these properties is that they need gutting, full re wires etc etc as they've just had the bare minimum done to them for years whilst being a tenanted property. The locals and people living here full time can't afford these properties if they work in tourism, the money is minimum wage and seasonal so that rules them out as being able to renovate a property. Other locals who don't work in tourism - the majority of locals, are still earning wages well below the national average so they can't afford to renovate anything either. Bit of a catch 22 position.
None of my friends and family work in tourism, I've only ever done short term stints in tourism and I sure as hell would never do customer facing ever again. I worked in a cafe throughout summer weekends when my children were little and it was a hard slog where you took abuse and moans from 50% of the tourists. A lot were lovely, but the other half who were not, are the ones that ensure the locals who are in a stop gap job desperate for any income at that moment in time, find another job asap, any job!
I'm not sure I have any different feelings to regional tourists, tourists are tourists wherever they come from, although I wonder if the anti London feeling with some come from the snapping fingers brigade I encountered in the cafe. We did a famous Roast Dinner, it wasn't fast food and we had signs up to reflect that. But people did expect to walk in, be seated and be eating five minutes later. I was held up more with people complaining at me that they'd been waiting ten or fifteen minutes in a dining room and garden of fifty people with two waitresses and two chefs running around than I could spend time preparing orders (we did coffee and cake, cream teas and sandwiches too). The kitchen area was tiny and we couldn't fit any more staff in if we tried. Patience is what was needed, we were not KFC or McDonalds (we didn't have either of those in the local area at that time either lol) and we were not advertising fast food. We encouraged a glass of wine or a coffee and relaxing whilst waiting for your food, appreciating the beautiful surroundings you were sat in! Instead we got tutted at, fingers snapped at us and generally really short tempered people telling us we'd never survive as a business up country. Yet that business had survived in Cornwall years prior and is still going now.
If you are coming to Cornwall you need to understand we live a different lifestyle, we sit back and relax and we live life at a slower pace. That doesn't mean you have to wait an hour for your food, but it may well take fifteen to twenty minutes. Its where we have our saying we'll do it dreckly, meaning later on, no rush.
I wash, dry and iron for a relative's holiday cottage, oversee the cleaner and generally organise and help out with refurbishments etc. There's never been a huge profit, its ensured that site fees are covered - holiday park based unit, so therefore not taking a home away from a local - and we ensure there's enough money to keep things up to date and replace damaged items each season. We have people who re-book us each year as we are cheaper than a lot of others in the area. We ourselves are aghast at how much some holiday home owners are charging, it's shocking!
All that said, bookings are down, not just with us but with other people we know in the industry in all local areas. I think the tourists are fed up with queues of traffic and the over tourism of Cornwall alongside the shocking nightly rates.
Our reservoirs are depleted, we as locals pay the most money for our water rates here to cover the high costs of the summer usage, we pay more money for our fuel and the food in our supermarkets is more expensive.
Just this morning I've witnessed a chelsea tractor spend twenty minutes trying to parallel park in a space I could fit two cars in, she bounced off the car in front and the van parked behind. I very nearly offered to go and park it for her. She got the man of the house to come out and have a try too, but he couldn't manage it either, then he went in cursing her for choosing a holiday home with no parking and her shouting at him she didn't realise lol Do they not read the advertising details!
The other major problem this area has is if its raining there's not a lot to go and do. The queues to the beaches are replaced by queues to the towns as that's all there is to do. We don't have large leisure centres, or an abundance of indoor play areas for people to retreat to on bad weather days to entertain the children in.
For a lot of the Cornish the bad weather days are the best days to be on the beach for a walk.