This summer throughout Europe, especially in the tourist hotspots, anti-tourism protests were organised, signs of “tourist go home” were hung everywhere. Even activists armed with water guns targeted dining tourists and purged them out. Before the start of the season, the warning for the spreading anti-tourism sentiment was on the air and the experts warned about the dangers of overtourism. Main issues of the protesters are that the tourism sector leads to the rising of the housing prices, inflation and causes a negative impact on the environment.

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This year, 4.7 billion people are expected to travel around the World. For example a popular tourist destination Barcelona is visited by 31 million visitors each year while the city’s permanent inhabitants are just 1.6 million. Over the past 10 years, increasing demand for short term accommodation led to a rise of rents by 68%, and the cost of buying a house by 38%, significantly increasing the cost-of-living. As renters are being evicted by landlords to turn properties into holiday lets, many young people began to struggle to find affordable accommodation let alone keeping the hope of acquiring their own living space with the decent salary they have. 

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The increasing number of tourists does not only put pressure on finding affordable accommodation but also reaching on health services, waste management, and water supply. Global climate change affects Europe’s southern regions and leads to increasingly more frequent drought spells. 

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This year Barcelona’s Catalonia region has seen its worst drought in 200 years. Residents were banned from washing their cars and filling up empty swimming pools to alleviate the effects of the drought. Moreover residents are asked to cut their domestic water usage by 5% from 210 litres to 200 litres per person per day. Farmers have been ordered to cut agricultural water usage by up to 80%. While locals asked to economise the precious water, tourists that come at amounts several fold of the local population negate all the effort.

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Add to that visitors outnumbering local residents, communities dissolve and disappear, the surge of prices because of the increase of demand, long queues, over crowded places, excessive noise, pollution, damage on the historical sites and nature, no wonder that locals began to attack the tourists.

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These are the drawbacks of over-tourism and it is in simple words a consequence of when too many people are in one place at any given time. The solutions can be grouped in two - solving the logistics of the tourists and educating them to be better. 

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Logistic solutions range from diverting tourists to less travelled regions to dissipating the crowd inside a city using a variety of activities. Moreover, the benefit of tourism should be spread among the communities and residents, not only expecting them to receive indirectly as it is obvious that their burden is direct and not negligible. For this the industry needs to gain the trust and the goodwill of locals which may be difficult and slow without the regulatory and controlling power of the local and governmental administration.

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At the moment neither governments nor municipalities did not develop any long term policy to tackle the problem except increasing city tax or introducing entry levies. Locals try to fight against invasion with water guns and fake signs of “dangerous jellyfish”, “falling rocks” or “seawater polluted with sewage”. Meanwhile, as the tourists who wish to have a well deserved holiday we need to learn how to be better tourists and look at less exploited regions for our destination.

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