There’s no Such Thing as Overtourism
A post by Michael Sweeney on Bluesky asking which cities have overtourism got me thinking about the concept. People in the thread named tourist hotspots like Venice or New Orleans or Las Vegas; the normally excellent Max Dubler said, “Venice is certainly too far gone (it’s basically a theme park these days).” In truth, people are thinking about the concept exactly backward. The biggest global tourist draws are also cities with plenty of other economic activity, like London and Paris. If a region has only tourism then it often has social problems associated with being too reliant on one low-wage industry, but then the comparison should be to regions that also don’t have tourism at all, and then it looks less bad.
Which places have the most tourism?
The most consistent on tourism count international travelers. Euromonitor periodically publishes rankings; the latest has Bangkok at #1 in the world, with 30 million arrivals in 2025. The rest of the top 10 are Hong Kong, London, Macau, Istanbul, Dubai, Mecca, Antalya, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur. Of the top 10, seven are large cities in their own right, one is a religious pilgrimage site, and only two have a tourism-dominant economy (Macau, Antalya).
In general, those dominant cities also outshine smaller places within the same country. France is #1 globally, with 102 million international arrivals; Ile-de-France is about even with its share of the national population. But then the UK only has 42 million, of which 23 million are to London. Antalya essentially splits Turkey’s tourism visits with Istanbul: Turkey has 61 million visits, with Istanbul taking 20 million of those and Antalya 19 million. Domestic tourism is harder to measure but follows the same pattern, with very large volumes to major cities like New York (not in the global top 10 by international arrivals because crossing a European border is counted but not crossing a US state line). San Francisco long had tourism as its largest industry, before tech overtook it this century.
Going down the list of cities by size, we start seeing ones like Barcelona, mentioned by Max in the same thread. But Barcelona, too, is not a purely tourist region, but also an industrial hub and one of the larger metropolitan areas in Europe; Catalonia has a partnership with Lombardy, Rhône-Alpes, and Baden-Württemberg, Four Motors for Europe, as these regions have extensive car manufacturing. Its industry is less famous than London and Paris’s in-your-face capital city wealth and (like all heavy manufacturing) does not agglomerate in city center, so tourists who visit Barcelona are less likely to see it than tourists who visit cities dominated by professional services, but it’s there and overall Catalonia remains an economic co-capital of Spain with the Community of Madrid.
It’s not a coincidence that tourism trips to cities usually involve cities with large non-tourist economies. The high-end shopping, the museums, the cultural attractions, and the famous squares of London, Paris, and New York were all built by local civil society, with the wealth that those cities generated from their broad economies, the first two due to their roles as dominant capitals, the last due to its industrial and professional services wealth. Going a few rungs down the wealth rankings, even countercultural centers are first built for locals, before tourists hear about them; Berghain and Kitkat exist because Berlin has had a large exhibitionist counterculture.
And in no case is there any real displacement. Places that develop tourism because their internal institutions are successful with foreigners – like the cultural attractions in every large city, or the historic and modern vistas, or the shopping – are still large cities with internal economies. Berghain and Kitkat are swarming with tourists, but beyond local disdain that something has become cringe, this isn’t displacing Berliners, who have plenty of clubs to go to with equally dodgy consent practices. At higher levels of prestige, museums are hardly displacing locals – New Yorkers go to the Met for regular outings if they want, and the place is crowded but not so crowded that city residents can’t get in.
What about places with only tourism?
There is still the issue of the truly tourism-dominated economies, the ones that aren’t just large cities that became famous among tourists. Antalya is the biggest one, globally; others are Orlando, Las Vegas, Hawaii, much of the Caribbean, Cancún, Phuket, various Greek islands, and Alicante. Venice and Nice are both very touristy, and can be put into this category as well, but caution is advised as both have industrial economies in their metropolitan areas away from the visited historic or coastal cores.
In some cases, this represents a transition from another economic activity. Venice was a shipbuilding and trading city that just never participated in the modern Industrial Revolution; people visit the Renaissance core. Phuket produced tin and rubber before it became a tourist economy. In other cases, the place owes its entire economic existence to tourism, like the Riviera, Las Vegas, or Florida, with various attempts to diversify not always succeeding.
Usually complaints about overtourism boil down to finding such places tacky. But economically, the locals aren’t necessarily hurting. Phuket had the highest human development index in Thailand earlier this century (it no longer does, which I think is corona-related), and is still one of the wealthiest provinces per capita. Florida is not the highest-opportunity part of the US, but other parts of the South without the same volume of tourism are worse.
Michael compares this situation with resource curse, the theory that natural resource wealth is negative for overall development. But the usual indicator for the resource curse, natural resources as a percentage of GDP, bakes in not just resource abundance but also poverty of the rest of the economy. After all, the US has plenty of resource wealth, which let it develop with lower land and energy prices and attract immigrants until it became a large industrial and tech economy, not really dependent on its farmland or oil wealth. It just isn’t seen as a high share of GDP because the rest of the economy has caught up. It’s the same with tourism: the regions that look bad because they’re dominated by tourism don’t have an overtourism problem but a problem with not enough economy in general.
Pedestrian Observations 
You got a hot topic… Coming from one of the cities you mention, I get a strong feeling that blaming the tourists is just the left-wing version of blaming the immigrants: point at somebody else like he’s a circumstance and not a person like you, just to avoid being honest with yourself.
This is not to say that tourism doesn’t have an impact, like any economic activity it does, so you have to manage it. I remember, 20 years ago, telling visiting friends “welcome to Barcelona theme park” when going to the very center, because I had observed, compared to my childhood, how La Rambla had moved from being the bohemian hotspot to a parody of itself with tourist-trap bar terraces. But this means we have new bohemian hotspots now, with the added advantage of not being endogamic. In my understanding, cities are dynamic and don’t have only a residential use (I feel that’s the main point of denial of a lot of people). If anything, tourism is a better industry than car-making, because it is not lobbying against having the nicer city and better public transportation that we need (where’s that supply-demand market turning a car factory into a train factory when you need it?).
A very common argument that I hear is the “resource” one, they use housing, they use public transport, they use public services… Well, that’s a population of between 35k to 70k with the peak nicely coordinated with the same time when the local population tends to go out on vacation, so all you need to do is to tax them like the high-spenders they are and you’ve got a net benefit (and we have a tourist tax already). So much accusation of gentrification and regretting success, we’ll end up like the wise men of Schilda.
Great perspective, Jodi.
What’s your take on your compatriots’ plight on Mallorca? There the infrastructure really seems to be overwhelmed in summer – water in particular, housing but also roads – part a consequence of being an island, right?
Ask them if they want it to be like 2020?
I feel confident talking about the dynamics on the big cities where I’ve lived or spent time with work/family/friends. But it would be reckless of me to assume the same framework applies to every situation, especially if the resource constraints are different.
Spicey but incomplete. “Overtourism” confuses a bunch of narratives, with common denominator being “I hate these bloody outsiders coming in here”. Some are more legitimate than others.
Another thing about 1., sometimes its because the way the local government tax/revenue/expenditure system is set up screws tourism specialists. The most extreme case of this is the UK where the state actively punishes areas that specialise in tourism by stealing the tax revenue from VAT/Income tax while offloading a toxic combo of welfare (elderly care) and local infrastracture onto a property/residents tax (Council tax) and stealing a chunk of the local business tax (rates).
Couldn’t some tourism-dominated economies (particularly those on small islands, such as in the Caribbean or the Pacific Ocean) arguably be seen as unsustainable if climate change concerns force a dramatic shrinking of global air travel?
In the fevered dreams of masochistic puritans who ignore that bio-jet-fuel or fully synthetic jet-fuel exists. We don’t do it because boiling ooze we get from underground is cheaper.
Back in 2020 our host made a post looking into what tourism would look like in a future without oil-based transportation.
Where I pointed out there are alternatives to boiling underground ooze. The usual numbers bandied about are that the alternatives cost twice as much. Airfare has many costs in it. If half the fare is fuel cost and the price of fuel doubles the fare goes up a quarter. It will discourage the low end but it’s not going to stop. Just like it hasn’t stopped it in the past when the price of ooze doubled.
The electric cars have more range, can charge faster and are cheaper than they were in 2020. The puritanism in suggesting automobile trips will be unaffordable is obsolete. YouTube is fairly lousy with Europeans driving across the continent. And fairly lousy with North Americans doing it in winter to demonstrate you won’t freeze. And Australians.
The fable that we will all be taking the trolley car to the amusement park at the end of the line for our vacations are the hallucinations of masochistic puritans. And as I pointed out in 2020 they will be more than welcome to sit at home for their staycation in the future.
Yes good point. I am sure if Cornwall had the local roads of Oxfordshire for example that there would be fewer objections to the tourism.
Nah, just let them sit in traffic for the few weekends a year when the traffic gets bad. Because they don’t want to pay a toll – only on the weekends they want to use it – high enough to have the capacity sit there, grossly underutilized, most of the year. …. don’t want to get stuck in Sunday night traffic, leave on Monday afternoon.
I mean Cornwall and Devon have certainly been trying this.
I like how people say “it’s basically a theme park these days” like that’s gonna stop me from going. First of all, a few minutes of research, or even better, a friendly conversation with a local gets you destinations outside of tourist meccas in popular cities. Second, theme parks are awesome. Not all the time and not for every vacation, of course, but theme parks are popular for a reason.
I have the impression that over-tourism is somehow related to capacity of a city to spread the touristic load, cities like London or Paris have both many attractions and the ability to transport visitors to them, we just were to Milan, and despite the Olympic Games, the Leonardo da Vinci museum we visited, did not feel strained by the load, the majority of visitors spoke Italian.
Over-tourism happens when everyone wants to go to the “instagram place” and there is not much else, and no infrastructure to spread the touristic load. Santorini is for me the typical example.
I agree with your rationale. But, as I have put forward before on these pages, the somewhat special attribute of Paris is that it absorbs its huge visitor numbers without the sweat and stress you see elsewhere, at least in a relative sense. London doesn’t and it is not entirely clear why. A fundamental is that Paris has always been extraordinarily dense whereas the equivalent area of central London has less than 500,000 residents, 4 to 5 fold lower; plus those London residents are elites (no matter what Alon says it is not comparable in Paris). The tourists in Paris represent a much lower fraction of the residents, and of course in summer the Parisian exodus works to make the city much more pleasant in those months (and a lot fewer vehicles). Tourism seems to enrich Paris and its residents but seems to impoverish those of many other cities.
Everything is designed for these high numbers and high densities of residents whereas London is not (and if done at all it is after a painful few decades of inaction; they were talking about pedestrianising Oxford street when I first arrived 46 years ago … and they still are) and it shows–on the trains, buses, on the streets. A lot of the time Oxford street is simply unbearable. Paris also distributes things more evenly with the Haussmann shopping district well separate from the Champs Élysées, and museums and others (Eiffel tour, Montmartre, Montparnasse, Marais, Latin Q etc). Of course with relentless upswing in visitors the Louvre has reached that insufferable point but they are reacting to it with the sequestration of the Mona Lisa crowd (this is brilliant because overnight it will make the Louvre much more accessible/inviting for others).
Alon and Parisophobes will disagree but I’d say another fundamental is that Paris looks after its residents/citizens in a way that many of these other cities don’t. It goes without saying not London–maybe in Chelsea they look after themselves (and the likes of Stanley Tucci) but it is mostly subjects not citizens. Rome, Florence, Venice etc are intolerable, especially in summer and I always got the distinct feeling the rulers don’t give a damn. My first visit to Florence, there wasn’t any public seating anywhere (and special police chased you off sitting on lawn) whereas Jardin du Luxembourg has exported its famous green Senat chairs to the world (eg. Bryant Park NYC).
This isn’t just my usual rant on Paris, well it goes beyond that. The city is a model for other heavily touristed areas. Forget Italy for the foreseeable future (massive cruise ships were ostensibly banned from the Venice lagoon in 2021 but they still dock there … quelle surprise). Cruise ships, AirBnB, Limebikes, tourist behaviour, walkability, green-ness, fewer cars & parking; affordable housing & facilities (Ecole Maternelle etc) for actual workers who make the city run. Barcelona and Amsterdam (Berlin? Lisbon?) are slowly adapting to their tourist problems as their residents demand more sway, as they should.
C’est tout. (in the tone of la Streep/Miranda Priestly).
….so.. nobody goes there anymore, it’s too busy?
If you mean Oxford street, then kinda … Since Covid the big department stores are in trouble: Debenhams has closed, ditto House of Fraser, John Lewis is in continuous ructions, dunno about Selfridges. Then there is the totally weird American Sweet Stores phenomenon, some kind of tax scam, there were 30 stores in this small section (Adam Hug is the leader of Westminster council):
But this decline into seediness has supercharged the attempt to pedestrianise it though this last began in 2017, picked up into actual plans by 2021 but yet more talk:
Private cars have been banned since 50 years but the press of buses and taxis is horrendous. And it has always been hard to know what to do with them. The LU is under the street …
So you agree it’s so crowded nobody goes there anymore.
It’s not the tourists’ fault the government leaders sit around and bemoan toxic tax policies they created are toxic tax policies. And mot the tourists’ fault the voters tolerate the inaction.
I looked up the tourist/population ratio of European cities, at the top, you find small, highly touristic places:
Dubrovnik: ~27 : 1
Kotor: ~ 22 : 1
Rhodes: ~21 : 1
Venice: ~21 : 1
Bruges: ~21 : 1
Heraklion: ~18 : 1
Paris: ~18 : 1
Amsterdam: ~ 12 : 1
London: ~10 : 1
Porto: ~10 : 1
Zürich: ~9 : 1
Rome: ~8 : 1
Madrid: ~6 : 1
Ljubljana: ~5.5 : 1
Berlin: ~3 : 1
Belgrade: ~1.8 : 1
So indeed, Paris and London are not in the same class, Paris absorbs the same ratio as a touristic spot on the sea (Heraklion). London is in the same ratio class as smaller cities like Porto or Zürich. It also seems the 20 : 1 ratio appears when cruise ships arrive (Bruges is close to the Zeebrugge).
Wow I am shocked that Ozzy Xenophobe has found a reason to hate London by imposing double standards and disliking how many people don’t hate England as much as he does.
I’m only a xenophobe when it comes to Brits and then only in the general (some of my best friends…). They do bring the tone down wherever they travel, though funny enough the exception might be France:-) I am sure Borners doesn’t do that … hmm but then he has been known to bring down the tone of Alon’s blog from time to time …
One wonders if Andrew’s shenanigans will impact on those tourist numbers since a lot come for the royal pomp etc. the fools! Probably not. After all the royals have been doing that forever. I keep telling them that a dead royal (family) is a much bigger tourist draw as one can see in Versailles and the Louvre etc. The only point of interest for me is the possibility it has raised that passing a referendum on becoming a republic here should be a bit higher. However, still not easy because … you guessed it, too many bloody pommie immigrants. (Heck, two of our recent PMs were born in Blighty: Gillard & Abbott (but Gillard was Welsh)). Once I thought it would be a cert as we fulfilled our destiny of becoming Eurasian but it turns out quite a few of the ten million whatever Asian migrants are also not as enthusiastic as they should be.
Interesting.
However that London figure will probably use the population of Greater London (approx. 9m) while they are probably using intramuros-Paris (2.2m) rather than Greater Paris (about 12m)? If London has 21m visitors it is not clear how they got that ratio of 10?
I have a 2024 report that claims Paris had 44m visitors and Ile de France had 50m. So the 18 fits with using intramuros-Paris.
This was a quick AI query after breakfast, standard disclaimers apply.
I asked AI about domestic flight numbers to Edinburgh from the London airports. It just hallucinated the Gatwick/luton data off the Heathrow data.
I’m sorry but I don’t engage in assuming inherent racial inferiority of other nations by reading Racist Transphobe Imperialist rags like the Guardian. And its not like the UK isn’t “Eurasian” either, given our previous PM’s background.
London is bigger than Ile De France once you add the home counties. G.Brown deliberate gerrymandered UK statistics into NUTS1 regions that quarantined London from its hinterland for the purposes of fiscal and increasingly electoral gerrymandering (Tories stayed above 100 mps because constituencies are apportioned on NUTS1 region basis).
The problem with both Australian Republicans and the Land Acknowledgement crowd* is you want the sex without the relationship, a porn addict’s vision of marriage. You have actually have to build something if you want to replace inherited structures of the Commonwealth of Australia. Exporting blame your own incompetence onto the former mother country only keeps you there. That’s why both the Voice and Republic referendums failed. You’ve got nothing but hate and resentments. No wonder Guardian did well there.
Reading Australian histories (Manning Clarke, Stuart McIntyre) during my recent trip was shocking in what an insular, resentful field it was. “Agricultural settler come and marginalise the natives” is literally the story of 99% of humanity. Pretty much the same shit as Tony Abbott’s recent venture, just with vague left wing rhetoric and the US-UK connections the white version of Yellow Peril. Goodies and baddies, glorious potential golden age ruined by the evil cabal of foreign influenced quislings.
Which is unfortunately given otherwise Australia is a rather nice country, whether morally as a social democracy or as an economic prospect. Its imperfections remarkable in their mildness so far. It would be nice if it could not borrow bad urbanism ideas from the UK, but alas the haters like you are as committed to the relationship as the King & Country faction of the Liberal Party.
Having been to Paris recently, the news about the Mona Lisa sequestration is welcome and easily twenty years overdue: the experience was basically the only sour note of an otherwise wonderful trip.
Firstly London is a decent base for visiting a bunch of places in the UK, certainly Canterbury, Oxford, Cambridge, Bicester Village, the Cotswolds, Harry Potter Studios and Bath are all sensibly doable on a day trip from London.
Also the “London” airports do effectively serve London, the South East and East regions – which between them have around half the population.
This is also why the UK doesn’t like its Tourism industry and is locations, its another industry centred on Southern England rather the morally and racially superior communities of Outer Britain. Ideologically suspect.
There’s lots of tourism in the south west, wales and Scotland too – especially domestic tourism.
West Country is de-facto part of Southern England for analysis (look at the property values) in that is has non-rentier economy hampered by the UK’s confiscation of revenue, electoral power and infrastructure capability.
Scotland is a bit different since Edinburgh and to some extent the Highland have their own tourism industry.
I mean Tourism is everywhere. But Wales/Scotland thanks to Barnett get paid more for it, and do less because of racial exclusion policies e.g. Welsh language planning laws, and attempts at racial contro- I mean “rent control”.
I think when most people say “overtouristed” they mean exactly that the tourism industry dominates the local economy to such an extent that it harms the locals. And usually that means that the cost of housing and services becomes too high relative to income because tourists pay more. I agree these places should develop alternative industries, but that doesn’t necessarily solve the problem that too many outsiders want to visit < insert Greek island, Barcelona, Venice, Bali, etc. > relative to the region’s ability to serve both tourists and locals. That’s why London, New York and Paris aren’t “overtouristed” like Venice.
What would the locals be doing for a living if wasn’t for the tourists? Without the tourists it would look like the next, uninhabited, island or valley, over. Where the main activity is hoping to find some ripe berries while you are searching for edible roots.
It is more small places which seriously suffer on overtourism. Just so, two places in the Bernese Oberland come to my mind: Iseltwald and Oeschinensee.
Iseltwald was the place for filming some Korean drama/telenovela, and since then, that particular spot gets flooded with busloads of tourists taking their selfies, and leave. Of course, the tour buses just park wherever they can. Measure is that they now have a turnstile charging (I think) 5 franks for accessing. The local businesses only have the noise and dirt, but nothing else.
Oeschinensee: a small, very beautiful lake near Frutigen. Tourists just stomp everywhere, in private places, dump their cars wherever possible, again for just a selfie. Measures: Restricted access to the parking lots.
FWIW, we lived for 8 years in a rather touristy area in Southern France… “Nous, on aime les touristes… braisé, bouill, grillé…”
This is really a perfect encapsulation of a lot of my frustration with “overtouristing” discourse. These are two examples where the solution to both is “build a parking lot and run a shuttle bus.” If the local government cannot be arsed to do that, I’m not sure why anyone should feel any sympathy for the complainers?
And in both cases, I am highly dubious that the tourists just drive up, stomp around, take a selfie and leave having done nothing else. I rather suspect that if they stopped coming tomorrow, the immediate consequence would be a large number of restaurants closing up shop.
Agra does that (at least did when I last went). The Taj and gardens have the river to the north and the village to the south, with access roads east and west. Buses unload some distance away and you get shuttled to the east and west forecourt entrance gates. Now there’s a subway station at the west gate, one of the unload points. Haven’t been back in a while (and not since the subway was built) but I’m guessing that helps tremendously too.
And to your second point – agree. If you book a tour package in India, which is popular for international and domestic sightseers hitting the big spots like Taj and the forts, restaurant meals are typically included with transport and guides. There are a ton of restaurants which specifically cater to the tourist crowd. Add in the trinkets and baubles vendors, and you have a significant source of income for the locals.
Yes, the situation is that bad. You might familiarise yourself with the places.
There might dozens or perhaps even scores of them worldwide. The fad fades and things go back to normal.
The situation in those two places is nowhere near as bad as where people typically see overtourism. No part of Switzerland gets anywhere near overtourism—probably because it’s way too expensive for that. The Swiss public is just extremely sensitive to change. They apply the word “Dichtestress” (density stress) to the pleasant town of Zurich. 😆
And even those minor problems they manage extremely well, as Max explained. Iseltwald has a paid turnstile not just for the “Crash Landing on You” jetty but also for the public restroom, ensuring the village gets some revenue. They also reorganized the bus stop to better deal with the increased demand. As adirondacker writes, the fad will fade.
This post makes the mistake of trying to understand overtourism on the city and regional scale. Overtourism is a problem on the neighborhood scale. Most of Venice receives approximately no tourists, but the historic city center is approximately a theme park.
What people mean when they say their city has an overtourism problem is one or more neighborhoods they care about as a local caters heavily to tourists in a way that is heavily detrimental to their use, potential use, or imagined use of it as a local.
For example, a noticeable chunk of housing in the city center of Barcelona is short term housing for visitors. As it is not practical to produce more city center housing in Barcelona, that effectively reduces the number of locals who can live there, and it happens that locals care a lot about that.
City centers are generally used for commercial purposes. The thing that makes them pleasant to live in for certain classes of people is the very commercialism – the easy availability of a variety of retail and cultural centers, which only exist at such density because they serve a broader metro areas as well as visitors. The increase in both tourism and commercial CBD formation is city center working as it’s supposed to.
I’m sure if Barcelonans wanted to pay equally high rents the landlord would gladly rent to a tenant who does their own cleaning. It’s just awful the way free-ish markets work, isn’t it?
There’s no way locals can compete in spending with people who are doing their biggest spending of the year for the one week they’re visiting the city. The question is that stats say that short term rentals represent 10.000 homes., in a continuous urban area of 2,5 million people, that’s a drop in the water. The theme park Ciutat Vella district has a residential population density of 80k people per km2. The “rental price” argument is wrong because it expects the city to have only a residential use, when actually a city also needs economic activity, in which tourism belongs. Offices take far more space than Airbnb’s.
I’m not going to delve into building definitions in Spain. I’m sure they are similar to the rest of the developed world. I can not, legally, sleep every night in an office. Or a retail space. Or a parking garage. The market is places people can regularly sleep, legally. And again, I’m not going to delve into building definitions in Spain. I’m sure there are ways residential can be converted into commercial and vice versa.
It’s easy to blame people who aren’t Real Barcelonans(tm) for high rent. If they all disappeared rent would likely go down. Because all of the people who make a living grifting tourists wouldn’t be able to pay rent anymore. And the 100,000 people who are fantasizing they would snag one of the 10,000 apartments, cheap, 90,000 of them would still be priced out of the market.
Some of what you write may well be correct but you’ve ruined it with poor arguments or incorrect data.
It has 107,426 residents on 4.37km2 for a density of 24,600/km2 which is pretty high but not quite Paris (over an area 20x bigger).
I don’t know if the 10k is correct but the main thing is that it is not over the whole city but concentrated in the most central parts. That could be displacing about 25,000 residents in a small region so it is not trivial(easily 25% of residents in that zone). At one point in Paris it was 95,000 AirBnB so very serious. In any case it is the long-term residents who should have some say over this kind of thing in their environment, not for-profit entities who aren’t even present (mostly) to deal with the problems.
But the main issue with AirBnB and their ilk is that they were always illegal rentals. That is, for at least a century in most advanced nations, the use of apartments in a residential block has been highly regulated. For good reason to avoid turning them into hotels or brothels or dog kennels or zoos etc. Worse than standard hotels because there is no concierge or other staff and long-established mechanisms to keep an eye on things. There are usually regulations on individual SF homes too (some city zones won’t allow it etc) but the logic behind such controls on multi-unit buildings should really go without argument.
I took the data from this official page, but it’s true that it says “net density” and I didn’t see that the total figure for the city is very high, so I guess it doesn’t count mountains, ports, beaches, big parks, etc, so my fault here: https://portaldades.ajuntament.barcelona.cat/ca/estad%C3%ADstiques/nvvoxmekby
Anyway, not trying to compete with Paris, the point stands that the “theme park” areas of Ciutat Vella are still packed with people permanently living there (because the beach is not expected to be livable, we already did the experiment), while l’Eixample has a lot of old residential apartments that over time got converted into… Offices! But offices are an integral part of what makes a city be a city, so nobody complains. For some reason (outsider hate?) visitor infrastructure isn’t considered so integral, even though we build huge airports for the sake of those visitors, and we also travel to other places and become tourists.
A study made some years ago, when there were less restrictive anti-Airbnb rules, marked the areas with more apartments at “over 10% of homes”: https://mon.uvic.cat/fec/un-estudi-de-la-uvic-ucc-analitza-la-massificacio-dallotjaments-airbnb-a-barcelona/
And in the “hardest hit areas” there’s still more residential lost to offices than to short-term rentals. I’m so hard on the anti-tourism stance, because in my eyes it’s clearly a distraction from the very real problem of housing scarcity, which happens at a totally different order of magnitude, for totally unrelated reasons. I can get the argument of “changing the neighborhood character” (though in a city, which has always been changing and thrives on globalized contact, I’m not buying much of it either), but I cannot accept the “pressure on rentals”, or “pressure on transit infrastructure”. So some pushback was due on the “tourism brings money but is obviously pernicious” argument.
There’s externalities to manage? Yes, as you point there’s a good reason why you don’t allow hotels mixed inside a regular residential unit. They destroy a city? No, they bring new things. Some shops changed? That’s evolution, it has always happened. Moreover, in Spain most people live in a home they own, so higher prices because of tourist flood is actually “yay, retirement plan completed”. The people hit by gentrification aren’t the people owning there, it’s the next generation who cannot afford a home anywhere else, because we aren’t building much anywhere else either. And come on, I love taking my kids to the playgrounds next to Sagrada Familia, that “tourist infested” place is perfectly playable and full of life. It doesn’t fit in my head why anyone would consider that “bad”.
100% agree on this, and furthermore, being an IT person, I find it annoying how much talk there is about “disrupting high tech” companies whose product is basically a regulation-dodging scheme (looking also at Uber, bitcoin, etc…)
I think this analysis is overly narrowly focussed on economic output and misses most of the points that those arguing for overtourism (I am not necessarily one myself) would actually make.
In Amsterdam for example, the transport network focuses on the Binnenstad, an understandable circumstance given the historic growth and geometry of the city. But that area is now (or at least when I was very familiar with it… maybe things have changed since, but I doubt it) half given over to tourist tat (cheese shops, spectator brothels, neon-lit shops where you can buy cannabis leaf shaped keyrings, etc) that no local would ever consider visiting. The network therefore is materially less useful for residents than if there were fewer tourists occupying that prime real estate and those connected locations – and other locations which the city-centre activity is displaced to aren’t as easy to get to. You could change the transport network to mitigate against this (and the shifting of more intercity services to Station Zuid is part of this), but that takes a lot of time/money and does nothing for people in the present. That’s one plank of the argument of those who consider Amsterdam to experience overtourism.
Similarly, the set of people who can’t afford to live in Venice due to tourism but otherwise would be able to would also have pretty good grounds to consider Venice to be subject to overtourism – in that their life is made materially worse by the amount of tourism.
And to pre-empt arguments that we could just build taller – that would destroy all the amenity value that people (local and tourist alike) get out of those cities.
There are lots of places you wouldn’t consider visiting. Other people find them .. intriguing. Like all the locals that work in the tourist traps selling trikets, baubles and knickknacks. I’m sure the women in the shop windows make a very comfortable wage. It’s too bad it’s not to your epicurean tastes. Just too too bad. No one is stopping you from moving to Rotterdam.
Other people like tall buildings. Unless you think the Upper East Side of Manhattan is some dystopian hellhole of … of some the richest census tracts in the country. Or Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Brickell in Miami, that has better weather. Except during hurricanes. Or the six months of the year when it’s like Sumatra.
The people who can’t afford to live in Venice due to tourism are the ones who have jobs due to tourism. Tourism has made their life better – otherwise they’d have to compete for a scarcer pool of industrial jobs.
I imagine a lot of people in these locations (like any location) have fixed incomes – retired, or else in fields like education and medicine where salaries are set by the government and do not fluctuate based on cost of living. Such people can genuinely be worse off financially due to tourism.
In addition to what Eric says, there are definitely people who work in Mestre (or surrounding areas) who would live on the islands of Venice if there was less demand for space from tourists. And Veneto has near full employment so it’s not like fewer tourism jobs would cause some kind of crisis.
If the apartment had a parking garage and they could drive to work, supermarket etc.
Alon, (off topic)
CAHSR just published its Draft 2026 Business Plan. I would like your cost
analysis, especially the $231.3 billion Phase 1, present dollars estimate. Thanks.
How many km?
Phase 1 is Los Angeles to San Francisco, 380 miles/610 km.
No. 610 km is the driving distance between LA and SF but, unfortunately in my opinion, CAHSR will not follow the I-5 corridor. That is why CAHSR was initially presented as a 520 mile or 832 km project through Palmdale and Central Valley towns.
Phase 1 refers to the easier part of CAHSR, about 500 km of HSR tracks between Palmdale and Gilroy plus a branch to Merced. The high speed trains would use the current 129 km Gilroy-SF right of way and bypass part of the Palmdale-LA Antelope Valley line thanks to a tunnel. The 2026 draft, citing Japanese and Italian experience, makes optimistic assumptions about the earning potentials of its stations but, like its predecessors, is mute about the main attractions of high speed rail. We are told how many trains per day would be running but there is no mention of travel time or ticket prices, the main drivers of ticket sales. This is a reversal from French LGV planning where low ticket prices are a given and ridership was successfully predicted by looking at existing figures and expected TGV travel times.
I suspect CAHSR’s obfuscation is due to the fact that they don’t have a realistic plan to attain competitive travel times on the crucial LA-Bay Area market. Caltrain’s electrification between SF and San Jose faced NIMBY opposition. The San Jose-Gilroy trains going through multiple level crossings and old settlements need more than catenaries to go from their current 60 km/h potential to a competitive average speed.
Easier for the Europeans and East Asians to estimate ridership when they had a reasonable train ridership before of course.
OK also if that’s the route $250m/km is pretty bad and it should probably be more like $75m/km or something.
It doesn’t have to be the screamingly fastest trip possible. That’s what HyyyyyyyyyppppperLooooppp! !! !!! is for. It has to be faster than flying. When it is complete in 2247, it will be.
I still reckon you probably need 4.5 hours like London Edinburgh did before the timetable change.
And Acela reliability.
Matthew, CAHSR 2026 Phase 1 Business Plan predicts 23.6 to 30.6 million annual passengers resulting in a $2 billion profit, as much as SNCF Voyageurs expects to earn carrying 6 times as many on true high speed operations. I do not think it is possible with travel times comparable to the ones seen a few years ago between London and Edinburgh. At the time, the airlines had for good reasons 2/3 of this air-train market. But even this is an optimistic take. The Gilroy-San Jose Union Pacific line is no East Cost Main Line or NEC. It is a 51 km mixed use line going through communities and 27 level crossings. Turning it into a higher speed and busy passenger line is asking for another Brightline Florida bloodbath and strong local opposition. In summary, the 2026 CAHSR Draft Business Plan is the kind of fairy tales one expects from highly paid consultants.
A reminder: Caltrain electrified ONLY between San Francisco and San Jose (48 miles/77 km). San Jose to Gilroy (32 miles/51 km) is still diesel. So, SF to Gilroy requires changing trains.
@dralaindumas
You would think given the American inclination toward outsourcing, we’d have outsourced high speed rail planning and execution to countries that knew what they were doing! (Or, in a favorable immigration environment, imported the talent and put them to work.)
Or…devoted the monies to reduction of vehicle miles traveled/time saved in more efficient ways. Regional rail, non-high-speed intercity, grade separation, a laundry list of projects. Reading these plans no longer makes me angry, it makes me sad.
@J.G. American outsourcing doesn’t consider expertise or experience. Just low bids, and low bidders are experts at figuring out how to add cost overruns that you have to pay for by the contract. (Some overruns are reasonable, but many shouldn’t happen)
Henry, I don’t know about the financial arrangements but HSR projects in CA, FL and TX actively looked for and advertised their associations with French, German, Japanese or Spanish HSR operators. However, these partnerships are often short-lived. SNCF’s advice did not suit California. Having been warned that I was marrying the wrong persons, after two divorces I know that California is not exceptional in that regard.
SNCF knows it too. In the late 1990’s it worked on the LGV Mediterranee, an ambitious extension of the Paris-Lyon-Valence LGV towards Marseille, Montpellier and the Côte d’Azur. The latter branch would improve the TGV’s position against the shuttles linking the three busiest French airports, CDG, Orly and Nice. It followed the natural corridor used by the Romans, the Route Nationale 7 and the A8 highway. With a Return on Investment of 8.4%, it could be financed without subsidies but Marseille and Toulon politicians argued that their cities should not be bypassed. The Aix ones preferred a TGV station a little further away on the Marseille branch to high-speed tracks nearby. In order to save the Rhone Valley trunk and the Marseille branch which faced their own NIMBY issues, SNCF had to fold.
The Marseille LGV opened in 2001 and was successful. The Marseille real estate market went from cheap to hot. The Avignon and Nimes airports lost their connections to Paris. Low cost carriers gave up on the Paris-Marseille market. However, with a 4% drop in patronage, the Rhone Valley highway was barely affected. Most people who drive when they could fly do it because for some reason they need a car along the way. HSR is not going to change that. On short distances, HSR may gain some commuters but generally these services, as seen around London and Lille, need to be subsidized.
Campaigning in the region for the 2007 election, N Sarkozy also supported the “Metropoles du Sud” HSR through Marseille and Toulon. Once elected he had consultants report that this was indeed the best choice but the mountains separating Marseille and Toulon did not move. Understanding that this was an empty promise, Sarkozy instead launched the Bordeaux, Rennes and Strasbourg LGVs, the postponed Montpellier branch of the LGV Med, and the Grand Paris Express.
With a rare exception (less than 2500 passengers flew between Merced and Hawthorne in 2005), commercial airlines ceased to fly between the Central Valley towns and LA or the Bay Area. The Central Valley towns are car centric places devoid of strong downtown or public transit. The distances are such that people just drive there and HSR won’t change that. In summary, the chosen CA HSR route gave up on an easy target, the about 130 daily flights between LA and the Bay Area, to concentrate on a difficult one. With political imperatives placed above commercial ones, CA HSR will be rewarded with commercial failure and political backlash.
Don’t know about France in detail but there is a big problem in the UK that you can’t rent a car at e.g Lancaster railway station or e.g Bodmin parkway after 5 to 5:30pm. I do believe Limoges railway station in France was more flexible and you could pick it up from a hotel.
On topic: I visited Lisbon in 2024. The locals were adamant that there was too much tourism. The issue was that tourists need a place to stay, and existing housing was turning into more lucrative AirBnB’s. Tourists were blamed for the rapid increase in housing costs. [P.S. the existing Lisbon airport (Delgado) is not able to deal with the traffic (both people and vehicles) it is faced with. The planned spending of $9 billion to build a new airport (Camoes) isn’t popular with the less affluent locals.]
They can build more houses, but given the reaction to the airport, I’m sure they’ll be unhappy with that too. So the only remaining course of action is to become less attractive a destination: tax, price, and ration visitors out. Are they willing to do that?
I visited Nashville a couple of years ago. The high-rise apartment building I stayed in was so new the most recent image on google street view was of a construction site. I had to get a key from a lockbox attached to a baluster in the stairwell. Every baluster had a lockbox. I’d guess there were less than a dozen permanent residents in the building. Broadway was a teeming mass of people. Every honkytonk, bar, restaurant, club – all packed to the gills.
And yet they keep building. That’s what they’ve chosen.