Yeah tourism has to cool down. Spain, Italy and france are bursting.
Isn’t it everywhere? I think this is another strong indicator of how we need new cities that are fostered a little less to generating profit and instead to generating quality value for the people living there. If so, tourism would change automatically.
But building new cities is expensive and takes a long time. You can reduce tourism faster.
Oh absolutely and probably also not a hot take. Ban AirBnb and vacation flats in cities. The Prague city centre during covid was a ghost town, because of all the AirBnbs in the city. Regular citizens get priced out and the vacancy rate is high.
I’m not even sure if AirBnb per se is a problem. Depends on the time frame, we’re talking about. If they are used for below two weeks they are just better hotels, but as a multiple months accommodation for nomads interested in being part of the city and making meaningful connections - why not?
Oh please, rents were increasing higher than wages for decades now, taking even bigger chunk of the pay of regular people. And Airbnb and Booking in tourist/business hotspots are to blame to a large extent for that.
That’s at least an easy explanation, but it totally fails at answering the question as to why it became so much more beneficial to just own money instead of selling work for it in the recent decades. AirBnB has nothing to do with that.
Here’s why not: Because too much vacancies/transient inhabitants destroys communities.
A lot of shops etc depend on local customers. If there is too small a consumer base, these shops disappear starting a cycle that is detrimental to the neighborhood.
This separated from the assholes that drag their airport suitcases with hard plastic wheels across the pavement at all hours. Have weekday keg parties and all sorts of other shenanigans. Neighborhoods are for living, hotels and other accomodations are permitted for a reason.
The way it all started was people with a spare bedroom, which is fine. Then the residents will make sure that people behave and that the airBnB’ers behave.
Here’s why not: Because too much vacancies/transient inhabitants destroys communities.
But that’s precisely what I meant? If they are rented out for at least a couple of months, so that you can grow into a community. Why not?
I get the anger, protests and other pressure on politicians might change something but those stickers won´t help.
Strongly regulating the housing market would help. And these stickers could help pressing some politicians in the right direction.
Touristi ite domum
Tourist town depending on tourists is pissed at too many tourists.
What do these towns expect to happen if the traffic goes away?
Tourism often doesn’t benefit the people living in these towns. The hotels and Airbnbs are usually owned by outsiders and big companies. The people living and working in a tourist town often don’t see much benefits, besides that their town is now very expensive, regular people are forced to move out, making it harder to have a regular store, because all your customers are now tourists. If too much of a town serves tourism it’s typically bad for the regular inhabitants.
I wish more tourists would understand this, as it also improves the experience as a tourist to not have too many tourists in a town, but somehow they still flock to these tourist traps.
So then how do you decide which tourist gets to go to keep it at an “acceptable” level? That’s the part that everyone always leaves out when they say “we’ll reduce tourism but not eliminate it”. What happens then ultimately is only the rich get to tour places and everyone else is restricted to what, their home town that they can’t leave?
You limit the hotel licenses. You then go hard on hotel inspections and revoke licenses or don’t renew it from hotels that aren’t up to code/standard. That way the available hotel rooms will go down. The number of licenses is limited by hotel category. That way you ensure a healthy mix of available room types and can still have all kinds of tourists in town. There won’t be an issue with “big chains snatching up all the licenses”.
Then for a time only people with a valid reservation are allowed to enter. You place checkpoints at the most common points of entry. That way you limit the number of potential tourists by limiting the available hotel rooms. It would also fix the issue of unregistered AirBnBs. It won’t be perfect but you don’t want to kill tourism just reduce it.
Locals and family of locals would be exempted from the limit. You just put some system in place to apply for that exemption for family. Since the checkpoints are only temporary (maybe around 6 months) the impact on locals and their family isn’t too bad before it goes back to normal.
There will be a lot of media coverage about the closure and fewer tourists will come. The lifting of the checkpoints will barely make the news so things won’t go back to how it was before. And the limit on hotel licenses is still in place, so the available rooms are limited anyhow. Naturally reducing tourism because fewer peope can book a room.
