Instead of giving visitors visa free access who hold strong passports, rather make them require a visa prior to entry (meaning they can’t just pack their bags and go, now having to pre-plan in advance and line up for getting a visa & paying money for it, they’re not alone since hundreds more are doing the same thing. There’s also the guarantee whether they’ll be eligible or get rejected on the spot).
It may cause strain on visa applications that’ll lead to mass rejections due to overload. If I were a country that’s suffering over tourism, just rescind visa free access for ALL nationalities (including those who have strong passports like US, UK, DE, FR, AU or CA to name a few) as in when they check visa requirements: it’ll be rewritten as “visa required” rather than “visa not required” prior to entry.
Or, they can apply for a tourist visa many times as they’d like but reject them. (Basically a real life travel “shadow ban” if that’s the right way to say it), leads to them giving up as they’ll know a visa will never be guaranteed regardless of numerous attempts. However, would this move alone reduce over tourism? Since you can’t just show up in someone else’s nation uninvited (illegal immigration).
oh yea, you can bring in a very large group of people on a single airbnb property. which was complicated under th hotel system. but that would mean less tourism dollars for a country/region though.
Overtourism kills the cities tho. Sure, you get tourism money, but people leave the cities because they can’t live on them, so shops close and get bought by multinationals to make chain stores (and pay way less in taxes than what would pay a traditional store). It also causes the city to degrade in terms of security and livability.
It’s good in the short term, but awful in the long term.
Has over tourism killed a city that wouldn’t have otherwise slowly died due to economic stagnation? Tourism obviously has negative externalities, but it also provides economic activity to places which otherwise would probably need to make other tradeoffs to prevent economic collapse.
I recommend you to visit Florence or Venice. To name a couple cities in which to see the effects of overtourism.
They are theme parks for tourists nowadays. If you see the cities some years ago and now, you see how they are a shadow of what they were. Tons of traditional shops closed to be bought by shitty chains that sell the typical stuff you see everywhere else. Restaurants closed so a mcdonald could open, traditional shops closed so a zara could open… and so on.
I did.
In regards to Venice, what would the city look like without tourism? What economy would there be for a city out in the middle of a lagoon after all industry moved out? Yeah, it is a fucking theme park. But is that worse than a ruin?
I never said I didn’t want tourism. I specifically talked about overtourism. I’m not against tourism, I’m agaisnt having BnB’s by the thousands in a city as small as Florence.
I’m talking about living in an appartment block where there is a BnB (or three). I talk about trying to rent a house to live there when nobody will rent you because they make in a week of tourist rentals more than they make in a month or two of normal rental. Tourism is fine. Overtourism kills cities.
And my response back is asking what would happen with that pullback. What happens to the economy when you kill hotels and AirBnB’s?
What generally happens is that either the local population gets pushed out anyway as a haven for the rich or the economy withers and vacancies rise.
You can keep repeating that over tourism kills cities, but so does other issues like economic stagnation.
If you read my comments, I said I’m against overtourism, because with hotels you can control the amount of tourism a city gets. I’m not against tourism nor against hotels. I’m against BnB’s.
And about what would happen? I don’t know, we’d get to see cities like they were 15 years ago? I’ve seen Florence before the BnB boom. It was a lively town, the city centre was inhabited by locals and there was tourism, but streets were lively and full of people that lived there. The city wasn’t dying, if anything, it was alive!
Now, if you go to the city centre, it’s just a theme park for tourists, barely any locals live there and the few that do, if you talk with them, they hate it. Most of their residents have moved to other places because their city is not welcoming anymore.
Overtourism only benefits rich people who end up hoarding houses and big chains who end up buying all shops to open their shitty stores. That’s it. To be fair, it doesn’t even benefit tourists because who the hell enjoys a 3 hours queue to see the Brunelleschi dome? I want to go to a city to see its shops, its restaurants, its unique attractions, not to see the uptenth McDonalds, or another FiveGuys, or the new Starbucks.
And no, stagnation only comes if you focus your city on tourism and nothing else, but if you focus on other things, like industry (and I can assure you Tuscany has a lot of that), you don’t have to see cities dying. What you’ll see is rich people not coming to screw around.