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Angry stickers telling tourists to ‘go home’ appear on buildings in Malaga
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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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?
It would already help a lot if they would spread out more. Malaga is not the only town in southern Spain, nor does it have any unique sights you should not miss. But that would require tourists to make an effort to seek out the less well known places and not just hop on a plane because there is a cheap flight offer.
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.
Well we learned from covid that musea and other tourist destinations can easily limit access.. so make more destination Limited entry with reserved cards. The cards can be free, and person bound. To avoid scalping.
I'm not saying this is THE solution, but there are a lot of smart people out there, if we express a desire to fix this, a solution will be though up that works.
That's a different problem though. Addressable via tax and ownership laws.
These folks are just pissed at the volume. If you limit volume the only easy way to maintain the tax base is to move upscale. Pricing residents out of local shops. End up with a Monaco type situation.
It also heavily depends on the type of tourism.
Amsterdam had cruise ships come there, dump tourists that would swarm the city and return to the ship for lunch/dinner. The tourists added almost nothing to the cities economy, while the city did have to deal with them.
Off course other towns and cities benefit, but the question is should a city accomodate it all, should there be a limit and how to enforce the limit.
But I can see that with the industrialization of everything, industrialised tourism is annoying.
The stated purpose of the cruise lines is to capture as much of the tourist dollars as possible by compelling the passengers to spend nearly all their money onboard. When port calls are made the sailing times are engineered to prevent the passengers from going off and doing their own thing.
One thing I think they should do is follow Svalbard and limit the number of passengers allowed on a ship. Svalbard put it at 200 because it is a very remote archipelago with limited rescue facilities, but even in more populated areas it should be many fewer than the largest cruise ships currently carry. Had Costa Condordia sunk in deeper waters the death toll would have been massive because there was no way thousands of people could have gotten off before it rolled over and sank.
Specifically I think one thing Amsterdam and other port cities could do is require minimum lengths of a calling in port. For instance the ship has to be in port for at least 24 hours and the passengers must be able to disembark and reembark at any time. This would ensure that the passangers don't feel pressure to stay near the ship or all bum-rush the city by hoarding off and back on again all at once.
Of course the cruise lines would start howling if these kinds of regulations started coming down as they would ruin their business model of cramming thousands passengers into floating hotels, keeping them there, and draining all their money.
That is indeed what they did. They Limited the amount of cruise ships and the arrival and departure times.
That makes quite a bit of sense.