If you’ve ever been to Amsterdam, you might well have experienced the Dutch capital as a charming place loaded with bicycles, canals, little bridges, art galleries, small hotels, flower stalls and cafés. A great place to be a tourist.
What you may not have picked up on was the mood among the locals who increasingly resent your presence. Tourism in Amsterdam is a multi-billion-dollar industry. But in the last few years, its citizens have risen in sufficient revolt to persuade the city council — which had previously spent a lot of money promoting tourism — to pull back. A policy called “Tourism in Balance,” stemming from a petition signed by 30,000 residents, led the city to launch an ad campaign designed to discourage tourists. Young British men of a certain age were bluntly urged to stay away; Amsterdammers had had enough of them. But locals also sought to limit traffic by putting a ceiling, for example, on the total number of overnight hotel stays in a year.
Amsterdam is not alone. Venice, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, each in its own way has been struggling to put a lid on a tourism industry that is growing, and they believe is getting out of control. Between 1995 and 2020, tourism receipts around the globe grew more than three-fold from US$522 billion to US$1.8 trillion, according to the World Tourism Organization. International tourism, which excludes travel within one’s own country, clocked departures of 930 million in 1995. They more than doubled to just over two billion in 2020. A pause during the COVID-19 pandemic turned out to be just that. The numbers quickly picked up after 2022.
But all that air travel and ocean cruising exact an environmental price, and social and cultural costs range from the pressures on iconic monuments to urban neighbourhood disruption. For every person who gets a job or an economic benefit from tourism, there are fellow citizens who don’t see the money. Instead, they watch the price of their food staples go up, see wear and tear on their neighbourhoods, and simply get annoyed by the crowds. Tourism is in a constant tension between economic benefits and environmental and cultural negatives.
People are calling it “overtourism.” Too many tourists. Too annoying. Too much damage. The costs are mounting for our hosts, which raises a question for the rest of us: is it ethical to travel anymore?
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Fifty years ago, tourism was barely identified as an industry. There was an airline industry and a hotel industry, but tourism itself was not quite the commodity it is now. It is true that Thomas Cook had been running train trips to the British coast and cruises in the Mediterranean for more than a century, and Club Med had started to experiment with all-inclusive resorts. But most people travelled individually, perhaps with the help of a travel agent, and carrying travellers’ cheques. The word “mass” had not entered the lexicon, nor had the intense calculation of costs and benefits or the sense that tourism figured as a substantial line item in a nation’s gross domestic product.
Cheap air travel, the credit card and enormous corporate investment changed all that. So did the increasing appetite of people, particularly in the northern hemisphere, to use our free time and disposable income to pack our bags and go somewhere. Travel became part of our cachet, the topic of dinner party conversations as folks tried to impress and outdo one another. Trips of various sorts became staples of bucket lists. More and more, travelling to distant spots was seen as a critical part of becoming a whole person; you couldn’t really understand your culture until you’d immersed yourself in another. It all added to the sense that if you didn’t take those trips, you were really missing out.
By the 2000s, the young were doing what historically only the idle rich had done and taking off in droves for places far afield: Asia and the South Pacific. Retirees, for their part, were walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain and going on cruises to Antarctica. This all happened very quickly. In 2008, Airbnb was three guys sleeping on inflatable mattresses on the floor of an apartment in San Francisco. By 2024, it had become a US$73-billion company listed on the NASDAQ exchange with five million hosts around the world accommodating 1.4 billion guests a year.
It’s not just a single company that is racking up the money. Tourism has become a huge part of national economies. In Canada, tourists spent $113 billion in 2023 and supported more than two million jobs or 10 percent of the workforce, including in airlines, hotels and restaurants, among others. In the United Kingdom, tourism supports more than three million jobs or roughly 10 percent of the workforce, and in Greece, about 20 percent. Italy alone hosted 445 million tourists in 2023. All over the world, tourism wields enormous financial clout.
It’s started to produce negative spin-offs.
The first is environmental. More than two billion of us boarded airplanes in 2020, the most recent year for which the World Tourism Organization has statistics, and we paid more than US$1 trillion to do so. That’s a climate burden. Aviation alone has contributed about 3.5 percent of total planet warming in modern times, according to a recent analysis. And while air travel dropped off during the pandemic, it has roared back.
Cruising, for its part, has been the target of relentless criticism from organizations like Friends of the Earth, who call it “a catastrophe for the environment that dumps toxic waste and kills marine life.” While it is difficult to quantify the harm, partly because rules vary among national jurisdictions and the open ocean is unregulated, an overview study published in 2021 found that cruise tourism is a major source of pollution of air, water and land, affecting fragile habitats and species. Among the pollutants are improperly treated sewage, contaminated wastewater from toilets, bilge water containing fuel, and ballast water containing microbes, microplastics, pathogens and invasive species. The industry has responded by trying to improve waste control and fuel usage, but at the same time, the ships keep getting bigger and more numerous.
And then there are the cultural and social impacts. For centuries, tourists have been visiting Venice, one of the most picturesque places on the planet with its canals, gondolas, bridges, spectacular architecture and art. More and more have arrived in huge cruise ships that tower over St. Mark’s Basilica. But lately, Venetians have made it clear we’re no longer wanted. In 2021, the Italian government announced that all cruise ships, except small, boutique ships and river vessels, would be banned from both central Venice and the cruise port to give Venetians and their over-stressed beauty spots some breathing room. The ships were diverted to Porto Marghera farther down the coast, and Venice has added a token but symbolic charge of five euros a day to visitors being bused into the city from the ships in peak season.
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Aggravation for Barcelona’s locals boiled over last summer when 3,000 citizens marched into the tourist areas of the city and let loose on outdoor diners with water pistols, waving placards saying, “Tourists go home.” They demanded a new economic model from their city to reduce the dependence on tourism and address the high cost of living.
Rome is another iconic city where the unhappiness of residents is starting to overpower the tourism economy. Eric Reguly, a Globe and Mail journalist who lives in Rome, wrote a story about Roman concerns that the city’s historic centre was being emptied of locals in favour of mass tourism. The “real” population of Rome’s historic centre had fallen by 20,000 in three decades to 170,000, he wrote. Neighbourhoods are being transformed to cater to travellers. He cited Airbnbs as a major culprit. I, as a visiting tourist, might be delighted to land an Airbnb apartment just up the street from St. Peter’s Basilica; the Romans, on the other hand, are not so happy to see me pricing that space out of the reach of locals who need a place to live.
Many Romans see tourism making their lives more difficult and more expensive, and blame the increasing numbers of tourists for noise, crowding and a general atmosphere of disrespect. Old neighbourhood vegetable markets are being replaced by restaurants and bars that are not typically Italian. The old city is being turned into what locals call an “architectural theme park.” The coup de grâce is that Starbucks franchises have been set up in old neighbourhoods to sell drinks including frappuccinos, a drink that appalls Romans.
Anti-tourism has forcefully entered the zeitgeist. Some are thrilled. The trend “is one of the best things going in the world today as it tries to undo industrial-scale tourism at the local level,” observed Dean MacCannell on an Escaping the Tourism Trap podcast last year. A professor of human ecology, MacCannell pretty much invented the concept of tourism as a field of anthropological study with his 1976 book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Now professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, he continues to watch the travel world with fascination. In a field long dominated by the kind of writing that promotes travel, more books now cast a critical eye on tourism. The recent book Reservations: The Pleasures and Perils of Travel by Vancouver journalist Steve Burgess, for example, mingles tales of travel pleasures with questions about whether satisfying our own wanderlust is worth the trouble it causes everyone else. What should we, who have become accustomed to easy travel, do in response?
A primary impulse might be to feel guilt. In the travel section of the Globe and Mail recently, Pat Kane, a prominent photographer of beautiful spots, confessed himself to be a “self-loathing tourist.” After seven months of touring through Europe, the Balkans, Fiji, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, Kane had poked his finger into an increasingly caustic wound. To be a tourist has come to mean occupying an increasingly fraught position. It’s especially acute for someone whose life’s work encourages travel. Kane wondered: are visitors going in droves and ruining the beauty of places he has photographed? His anxiety frames the dilemma with which many thoughtful travellers are grappling: is it possible to travel without guilt?
One thing we all might consider is travelling less. Sarah Buisman, a 30-something high school teacher in Toronto, made the decision a couple of years ago to severely curtail air travel. As much as possible, she would stay on the ground. This could only be achieved with sacrifice, and not just because she’d miss out on seeing the sights. Her best friend lives in Vancouver, and she has siblings in West Africa and Paris. For a millennial, this is almost a classic squeeze: a highly developed environmental consciousness on one side and a life that connects to almost all corners of the world on the other. Buisman stuck to her position but says she feels dismayed at how alone she seems in her resolve. “When I started agonizing a few years ago, it felt like there might be the start of a bit of a movement. Not now. Among my friends, even though they are all progressive, I feel like I’m the only one ready to make this as a sacrifice.” She is also dismayed by the next generation; her Grade 11 students think it’s ridiculous not to fly.
She is, however, not alone. Donna Armstrong, a retired lawyer, likewise wrestles with discomfort about being a tourist. Having been an avid traveller to yoga retreats in India and equestrian excursions in Portugal, she is aware that it can seem precious to stop doing something after you’ve enjoyed so much of it. She’s careful to frame both her struggle and her actions as strictly personal. Yet at some point in 2018, she said to herself: “That’s it.” This was in the context of reviewing other parts of her lifestyle, including where her food comes from.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, and halfway between Buisman and Armstrong in age, is Miranda Leontowitsch, a gen-Xer. Leontowitsch, a gerontologist who lives in Hofheim, Germany, tells me she has just bought a train ticket to travel to a work-related conference in Kraków, Poland. It will take 12 hours as opposed to a 90-minute flight, but she chooses ground travel for environmental reasons. Her younger colleagues join her on train trips without batting an eye. And almost everybody in her circle of friends is starting to sniff at the idea of too much air travel. In this area, Europeans, with such short distances between countries, are far ahead of North Americans. Italy and France have started to discourage air travel between cities that are less than 300 kilometres apart. Some European countries might eventually ban short-distance air travel. High-speed trains have made the choice even easier.
If doing less — even at some sacrifice — is one way of resetting, something else we can do is more. For example, put in more effort to behave as curious visitors rather than members of entitled hordes.
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Enjoying lunch and a Guinness stout in O’Dwyer’s Pub in Waterville at the extreme end of the Ring of Kerry in rural Ireland last summer, I found myself grateful that no local deemed it necessary to spray me with water to protest my presence. What did happen, though, is that my wife and I, along with other patrons, got subtly urged to hurry it up. A funeral had taken place in the village, and a couple of hundred mourners were about to descend on O’Dwyer’s. This, I realized, is as it should be: the tourist visitors being alerted to local mores and being responsive to them.
The area attracts plenty of tourists, and our presence is felt. Dozens of buses loaded with sightseers come through the Ring of Kerry every day. They travel from Killarney in a counter-clockwise manner so they don’t meet on the all-too-narrow roads. They do, however, meet other traffic and locals, all of whom need to manoeuvre to get out of the way of the big behemoths. Periodically, the buses pull over so their passengers can take in the spectacular views, pose for a selfie or grab lunch at one of the restaurants cleared to benefit from the bus-tour traffic.
Otherwise, as our host told us, though Ireland claims to depend on tourism, the actual benefit is negligible if you are a local. Sure, the general economy registers a boost. But where does this put the local citizen who has no skin in that game and is just trying to drive someplace on the only road available, get her groceries in the local market or have a drink in the pub after Uncle Michael’s funeral?
As visitors, we did our best to engage honourably with the locals. We rented a cottage, met the host’s family and pets, purchased groceries in the village and ate suppers in the pub.
I even had a small repair done on my rental car by a local mechanic. We tried to be friendly, courteous, interested. But could I have done more?
In the end, I realized that the proper tourist stance is not to be a sightseer, but a guest. And in so doing, acknowledge the delicate, age-old business of reciprocity. It seems to me that the only sustainable future of travel and tourism, and the antidote to overtourism, is understanding that you exist — that we all exist — in relationship to one another. It is a relationship with our hosts, and with the history and culture of the place we are visiting. It is a relationship with the local environment. The demand on us is to be responsible and respectful.
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Larry Krotz is a writer and filmmaker in Toronto whose new book is Trapped by Tourism: Sustainability Questions for a World Fueled by Travelers.
This article first appeared in Broadview’s January/February 2025 issue with the title “Overrun.”
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