An Anti-Tourism Backlash Puts Europe’s Vacation Hot Spots in a Bind
The 2024 tourist season has seen a record number of vacationers flock to the most popular leisure destinations across Europe. And in many locations, visitors have been greeted with protests against their presence, a sign of the growing backlash against the negative effects of mass tourism. The movement is creating a dilemma for local politicians and policymakers in locations that rely on the revenue and employment that tourism generates.
Technically, the anti-tourist movement in Europe is not new. In fact, it first emerged in the mid-19th century, born from romanticist concerns about the integrity of pristine heritage sites. French novelist Gustav Flaubert famously lambasted "the English imbeciles" who altered Egypt for the worse, while English writer John Ruskin bemoaned what he saw as hordes of working class people defiling the Lake District. The contemporary iteration of the movement, though, is rooted in the explosion of mass tourism that began in the 1960s, when southern Spain, in particular, saw a meteoric rise in international visitors from the rest of Europe.
The widespread backlash seen today began to take hold in the years immediately preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, as record-high levels of tourism in Europe started to provoke an anti-tourist backlash, most prominently in Spain. Far from dispelling the sentiment driving the backlash, the pandemic gave fresh legs to it, as local residents in tourist destinations got a brief taste of a more peaceful life without the negative consequences of mass tourism. The prolonged travel restrictions also created enormous pent-up demand, which meant that post-pandemic tourism across the Mediterranean swelled to unprecedented levels, reigniting the protest movement, which is now more organized and more intense than before.
The protests are principally a reaction to the strain that mass tourism places on local services, utility supplies, infrastructure and, above all, housing. In popular destinations, landlords are increasingly withdrawing properties from the long-term residential rental market in favor of short-term vacation rentals in order to maximize profits. The trend diminishes the supply of available properties for locals, in turn driving up prices.
In particular, the short-term holiday rental platform Airbnb has become a lightning rod for local anger at skyrocketing rental prices. A recent study from the Economic Policy Institute, a U.S.-based think tank, found that Airbnb's "introduction and expansion in New York City ... may have raised average rents by nearly $400 annually for city residents." And in Barcelona, rental prices have risen by a staggering 68 percent in less than a decade.
Rising anti-tourist sentiment has pressured local politicians in the most popular destinations to introduce a whole raft of measures over the past six months to ease the negative impact of tourism on local residents. Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni recently announced a total ban on short-term rentals in the city, while Rome, Vienna, Paris and other municipalities have strictly regulated the industry. To alleviate pressure on services and infrastructure, more than a dozen cities across the European Union have also introduced tourist taxes, banned cruise ships from their ports and restricted access to tourist sites. Greece, for example, recently capped visitors to the Acropolis in Athens to 20,000 people a day.
While many anti-tourism activists worry that new measures will not be effective, policymakers share the opposite fear: that a major reduction in visitors would create a revenue shortfall for regional and national authorities.
While the jury is still out on the effectiveness of many of these new measures, Berlin's Airbnb ban , which was introduced in 2016, provides a useful guide to the potential effects of regulating short-term rentals. A 2024 study for the Journal of Regional Science and Urban Economics by Tomaso Duso and three co-authors found that the ban "resulted in an increase in supply of long-term rental units." These gains were largely reversed when the ban was lifted in favor of regulation in 2018, suggesting that the Barcelona model of total prohibition is most likely to yield the desired results.
Berlin's experience also highlights the challenge of enforcement. After a big initial decrease in short-term rental listings, the psychological effect of the ban began to fade over time. After six months Airbnb saw "an incremental increase of new listings," due to the failure by city authorities to impose fines for breaking the law. Lax enforcement already looks to be a significant issue in Venice, too, where the new tourist tax "has had absolutely no impact" on numbers of visitors because very few fines have actually been levied, according to Venice City Councilor Andrea Martini.
While many anti-tourism activists worry that the measures will not be effective, politicians and policy planners share the opposite fear: that a major reduction in visitors would create a revenue shortfall for regional and national authorities. In countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, tourism already accounts for well over 10 percent of GDP. And in tourist hotspots like the Canary Islands, that figure can be as high as 35 percent. Many tourist regions around Southern Europe also suffer from undeveloped industrial bases and persistently high unemployment, both of which are at least partially ameliorated by the tourism sector.
The latest buzzword-laden proposal to get popular destinations out of the mass tourism bind is the "higher-quality tourism" strategy, which aims to attract higher-spending tourists, thus obviating the need to maximize visitor numbers in hot spot destinations. Academics, industry experts , activists and many politicians have touted the strategy as a more sustainable alternative to mass tourism, and it is already being pursued in places like Bali, Indonesia and Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands.
But this alternative model is already proving problematic. Besides the logistical and economic challenges of reorienting hotel capacity and employment practices that have long been geared toward mass tourism, the model of trying to only attract "good tourists" also raises troubling issues around ethnic, national and class-based bias. For example, a central plank of Lanzarote Regional President Maria Corujo's plan is to attract higher-spending continental visitors rather than the British tourists on which the island's tourist economy currently depends. Corujo's less than subtle digs last year at the behavior of British vacationers provoked accusations of discrimination, forcing the Spanish tourist office in the U.K. to release a statement clarifying that the country does not "discriminate by type of visitor."
The issue of class is also central to simmering tensions in tourist hot spots, as visitors with tighter budgets are more likely to compete with locals for services like public transportation and affordable restaurants, a factor that has further incentivized the search for higher-spending visitors. Indeed, the head of Barcelona's tourism consortium, Mateu Hernandes, said as much explicitly in an interview with the Financial Times, declaring, "We don't want the tourists who come to get drunk. We don't want the tourists who come here to eat cheaply."
Still, despite all the talk about how reduced costs have democratized travel, recent research from the European Trade Union Confederation found that "more than 38 million people in Europe can't afford a week's holiday despite being [employed]." That raises questions about how the shift toward a higher-quality tourism strategy would affect people's access to affordable vacations.
The problem of unsustainable mass tourism involves a varied mix of conflicting priorities, all in constant competition with one another, including local quality of life, access to services, affordability of leisure, cultural and environmental integrity, sustainability and economic imperatives. As such, it does not lend itself to easy solutions. Given this complex reality, the sight of angry local protesters storming Mediterranean beaches packed with foreign vacationers is likely to remain a feature of European life for some time to come.
John Boyce is an Irish freelance journalist with a background in international relations and Hispanic affairs. He writes for a variety of publications on Anglo-Irish, Spanish and European politics.
