ASU tourism professor explains why protesting Europeans are saying 'enough'

Residents in several European cities took to their streets this week to protest the effects of overtourism on their communities. Protesters in Barcelona squirted tourists with water pistols, and workers at the Louvre in Paris went on strike.

The residents are upset at the throngs of tourists that have congested their cities since the surge in travel after the pandemic, raising housing costs.

The sheer volume of tourists is overwhelming, according to Nick Wise, an assistant professor of tourism in the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University.

“Barcelona has 1.6 million people, and they had 26 million tourists last year. There are 49,000 people in the island part of Venice, and they get 20 million tourists,” Wise said.

“Amsterdam is a city of a million people and they get 18 million tourists. And Rome is a city of 4.3 million with 22 million tourists. So you can see the number of people has just exploded.”

Wise answered some questions from ASU News about the issue.

Question: Why are these protests happening now?

Answer: Right before the pandemic, there were a lot of academic papers coming out about overtourism. And then all of a sudden, of course, everything went silent. From a lot of residents’ perspectives, I think without the visitors coming, it was a chance to rethink and regroup.

And then, as soon as people had the chance to be mobile again, they got right back to where they left off. So COVID made that pause, but consumption habits are back to where they were in 2019, and even higher in a lot of cases.

I think there had been a healthy balance of tourists before and a lot of economies have always relied on tourism, especially Mediterranean destinations. But people are starting to realize that overtourism is taking a toll on quality of life. And even before the pandemic, in the academic literature, “touristification” was the term that was used.

Q: What did those academic papers say about touristification?

A: A lot of the explosion was from the sharing economy. There are a lot of different debates and perspectives on that. Before overtourism or touristification came into play, tourists tended to go toward more traditional tourism zones and stay in those areas.

So in Barcelona, you have the waterfront where all the hotels and restaurants are. That's where you would hear everyone speaking English — basically your typical tourist zone. 

But the demand has changed. And young travelers and Gen Z travelers — and this is how I like to travel as well — want a different experience and to understand what it's like to live like a local, away from the traditional tourism zones.

Now people want to stay in apartment blocks and traditional areas of the city and go to local cafes and restaurants. And the local areas that are already crowded are becoming increasingly more crowded.

Q: Is there anything unique to Europe that’s causing overtourism?

A: Europe is cheaper than Asia. When people go to Europe, they tend to go for a slightly shorter trip and they're hopping from city to city so fast that it concentrates a lot of people in one place.

On top of that, especially in the Mediterranean area, you have cruise travelers, which add exponential numbers to that. Some of these towns will get up to six cruise ships a day that are piling people into historic areas like sardines. The difference with the cruise travelers is that they're not sleeping there.

Europe has many unique attractions and destinations, and people want to see living history. People want to experience UNESCO heritage sites. You can't throw a stone without hitting a historic structure in Rome.

So they started adding more flights to Europe and the more flights you have, the cheaper the costs are going to be because the airlines are competing.

Q: So how are these places trying to manage tourism?

A: Venice and Edinburgh are adding fees to enter. Once you arrive into the old town of Venice, you have to go through basically a ticket booth, and they started charging visitors to offset some of the social-environmental costs there. But that doesn't deter anybody. I mean, you can charge people 50 euros and it’s not going to stop people because they just spent a thousand dollars to fly to Europe. They're not going to say, “Oh, I'll just turn around and go home.” Because everyone wants to see Venice.

Machu Picchu, for instance, has a capacity of only so many people who can go into the historic site on a given day. You have to register in advance. Venice is an island and they could try to put a number on how many people can enter the city or have some sort of registration process. I don't think that would go over very well. Doing something like that in a place like Barcelona would be impossible because it is not only a sprawling city, it's also a dense city.

One thing that South Africa did very well when they held the World Cup (in 2010) is that they realized they would have a surge of visitors and they didn’t have enough hotels. So they docked cruise ships at the port there to use as hotels, and then when the World Cup was over, the cruise ships sailed away. That was one way of not wasting a lot of money on infrastructure.

It boils down to urban policy in terms of where visitors can stay. All of these destinations in Europe are democratic places where residents can vote for the change that they want.

Q: Would that mean limiting short-term rentals?

A: The CEO of Airbnb put a story out saying that Airbnb is an easy scapegoat. He made the point that it’s up to the cities to set policies. You see this here in Phoenix. Some neighborhoods have an HOA and there can only be a limited number of units that can be used for short-term rentals.

One of the big things about the sharing economy is rent control. If you're going to have more earning potential with short-term rentals than long term, the demand will raise monthly rents.

In Croatia, they have a big short-term rental market. You have students who live in the coastal towns and they'll only let them rent during the off season. The university's not done till early July, but they'll tell students they can only live there until May, when the rental earning potential increases during the tourism season.

Some places set percentage (rent) increases that can go up year over year based on market values. But in other places it’s basically an open economy, so if rent is $1,000 this year and there's a demand for short-term rentals, you could charge $1,500 the next year.

Q: Is there a tourism crush like this anywhere in the U.S.?

A: If you look at how cities are planned, European cities are planned toward the center, and U.S. cities are planned out from the center.

So when you go to Orlando, it has a nice downtown, a nice lake, it's pleasant. But everyone goes from the airport straight to the Disney complex, where there are like 22 or 23 theme parks. But they're all built in suburban areas and there's space to expand. So you've created this tourist area and also a capacity that can handle the amount of visitors.

New York City and Boston have so many hotels in the downtown area, and when there are big conventions, the prices go up so much that it kind of ebbs and flows the travelers.

Q: What can tourists do?

A: They can be conscious that staying in residential areas might not be the best thing. You can stay in a hotel and go out to different neighborhoods and experience the life there and walk around during the day.

Be mindful of the people who are in their living environments at night. People have to go to work the next day. People have kids that need to go to school the next day.

We have to realize these places are great to visit and people should visit these places, but they're not playgrounds. People live there day in, day out.