The tourism industry is booming, and 2024 is set to be the biggest year on record. But how much is too much?
In this episode, we'll explore the phenomenon of overtourism, and learn what some cities are doing to fight it.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about overtourism, the phenomenon of having too many tourists converging on a single destination, and negatively affecting both their experience of a place and the experience of locals who call that place home.
[00:00:40] We’ll see why people are talking about overtourism now when they weren’t 50 years ago, we’ll take a look at a few examples, both well-known and lesser-known, and ask ourselves how much is too much, when it comes to tourism.
[00:00:55] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:01] I’m writing this episode from an Italian city called Trieste, or Trieste as we call it in English.
[00:01:09] In case you don’t know it, it is in northeast Italy, just a few kilometres from the border with Slovenia.
[00:01:17] Outside of Italy, the city wasn’t particularly well-known or visited by tourists until relatively recently.
[00:01:26] I first started coming here in 2012, after meeting a girl from the city who is now my wife.
[00:01:34] And then, just over a decade ago, there were hardly any tourists.
[00:01:40] You’d see some Austrian number plates, and overhear some French or German being spoken, and not much else.
Huge cruise ships pull up just opposite the main square, casting a large shadow.
[00:01:49] But, over the past few years, Trieste has been experiencing a boom in tourism.
[00:01:56] [00:02:04] You can see tour groups traipsing through the streets, guides speaking into microphones and holding up flags to make sure people don’t get lost.
[00:02:14] Many restaurants now have menus with English translations, which was certainly not a common sight when I first came here.
[00:02:22] Now, Trieste is not Venice or Florence or Rome, it is still very much a second or even third-tier city for tourists, but it was recently named as a city that is at “high risk” of something called “overtourism”.
[00:02:41] I imagine you might have heard of this word before, or at least the concept.
[00:02:46] It’s a relatively new word, first appearing in the English dictionary in 2018.
[00:02:54] If you look it up in the dictionary, you will be met with a definition like “the phenomenon whereby certain places of interest are visited by excessive numbers of tourists, causing undesirable effects for the places visited.”
[00:03:10] The key word there is “excessive”. In English, as you will probably know, we use the prefix “over” in front of a word to indicate that something is done too much.
[00:03:24] Overeating is eating too much. Overpriced means too expensive. Overcooking means cooking something for far too long.
[00:03:34] And overtourism means “too much tourism”.
[00:03:40] Of course, this raises the important question of how much is too much?
[00:03:46] Who decides how many tourists is “the right” amount of tourists, and what are cities and countries doing to try to achieve this?
[00:03:56] Now, the example of the city of Trieste is one I wanted to start with because it probably isn’t a city you would first think of when it comes to “overtourism”, but it is one at risk of overtourism partly because of a city you probably would think of when you think of the word “overtourism”.
[00:04:17] The cruise ships that now tower over the main square of Trieste didn’t always use to come here; they used to go to a different city just along the coast, Venice.
[00:04:31] Venice, as I imagine you will know and many of you will have experienced firsthand, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
[00:04:42] 20 million people visit Venice every year, which might not sound like that much - it’s less than half the number of Paris - but Venice is a tiny city built on a series of canals and waterways.
[00:04:57] The non-tourist population of the island of Venice is only 50,000, and the sheer number of tourists at any point of the year makes the residents of the city severely outnumbered by its visitors, turning it into an almost Disneyland-type experience.
[00:05:17] Now, Venice is an extreme example. It has been an incredibly popular tourist destination for hundreds of years, going back even to the Grand Tour, where young English aristocrats used to tour Europe when they came of age.
[00:05:33] By the way, as a quick side note, we have an episode on The Grand Tour, it’s number 156 if you’re interested.
[00:05:42] Now, moving back to overtourism.
[00:05:45] What is more interesting to talk about than the very clear problem of overtourism in Venice is the problem, or at least phenomenon, of overtourism in other areas, to look into what the key drivers of this are, how it is changing these areas and how locals and governments are reacting to this.
[00:06:06] So, why are we talking about overtourism?
[00:06:10] Well, on one level it’s simple.
[00:06:14] The cost of travel has decreased significantly over the past 30 years or so, and people around the world have more disposable income.
[00:06:24] The result is that there are far more tourists than ever, and the tourism industry is booming.
[00:06:32] Worldwide there were 25 million tourist arrivals in 1950, but in 2019, the year before COVID hit and the tourism industry was decimated, there were 1.5 billion.
[00:06:49] And approximately half of these tourism arrivals were in Europe, with cities such as Venice, Paris, Rome, and Barcelona being particularly popular tourist destinations.
[00:07:02] So, why is this a problem?
[00:07:05] Well, first and foremost it is a question of space.
[00:07:09] Tourists come to see things or experience new places.
[00:07:14] Whether this is a museum or a beach or a village or a national park or a city in general, there is a point at which there simply isn’t enough space to accommodate everyone who wants to visit it.
[00:07:28] To take a famous but extreme example, The Mona Lisa is less than half a metre squared, and 10 million people visit the Louvre every year to see it.
[00:07:40] The result is huge queues and most people only being able to see it from a distance past other tourists’ smartphones and being shoved along by security guards who need to get a certain number of people through every hour.
[00:07:55] There are so many people that everyone has a worse experience.
[00:08:00] And the problem of overtourism is not restricted to museums or monuments.
[00:08:06] Increasingly people are seeking beautiful Instagrammable locations to snap a photo from, whether that’s the Norwegian fjords or the Amalfi coast.
[00:08:16] People have seen photos of idyllic beaches or landscapes on social media, they book a ticket to the same place to get a similar photo only to find that there are hundreds of other people lined up to try to take the same photo as them.
[00:08:31] This clearly leads to an inferior tourist experience, but it often also is a serious negative for local residents.
[00:08:41] The area becomes more crowded, the price of housing is pushed up, tourists can be loud and disrespectful of their surroundings, they wear down the natural environment, they leave waste behind, they put pressure on public services.
[00:08:57] And as residents grow outnumbered by tourists, the very nature of a town or city changes.
[00:09:05] Local grocery shops are replaced by souvenir shops, local libraries by spaces for tourists.
[00:09:12] The place changes to cater primarily for tourists, and locals play second fiddle, their needs come second.
[00:09:22] After all, to take a very transactional view, tourism is an economic arrangement between a country or city and people who do not live there.
[00:09:34] The city encourages people to come and visit it on the implicit condition that they spend money, that they inject money into the local economy.
[00:09:43] They eat at restaurants, they buy souvenirs, they stay at hotels, all of which provide jobs and generate tax receipts, which go into providing services for the local residents.
[00:09:57] And sometimes people underestimate just how much of a contribution tourism makes to a local economy.
[00:10:05] In France it’s 9.5%, in Italy, it’s around 13%, and in Spain it is even higher at 14.3%.
[00:10:16] Even in the UK, which people might not necessarily think of as a tourist destination, tourism makes up just over 10% of the economy.
[00:10:27] And in a country like Malta, which is heavily reliant on tourism, it makes up almost 30% of the economy.
[00:10:37] But, despite the large part that tourism plays in many countries’ economies, some destinations are saying that the number of tourist arrivals has reached such high levels that this trade-off, this economic arrangement, needs to be rethought.
[00:10:56] In other words, yes tourists bring in money but they don’t bring in enough money to make up for the disruption and inconvenience they cause to the lives of residents.
[00:11:08] The most common tool that cities have been using to combat this is implementing or increasing taxes on tourists.
[00:11:18] In some cases, it’s a per-night fee, which is 12.5% of the cost of accommodation in the case of Amsterdam.
[00:11:27] In some cases, it’s a fee simply to enter the city. Venice trialled a €5 entrance fee this year, and Amsterdam already charges €14 to cruise passengers to disembark in the city.
[00:11:44] The logic behind this is two-fold: firstly, to raise money to invest in services that benefit local residents and secondly to discourage low-spending tourists from coming in the first place.
[00:11:59] And this brings us nicely on to talking about the problem of budget travel, at least from the perspective of local residents.
[00:12:09] Now, budget travel is great for tourists in many ways.
[00:12:13] Low-cost flights have meant that people can travel to destinations that might have previously been prohibitively expensive, and they can experience new cities and cultures with ease and without breaking the bank.
[00:12:27] But what it has led to is a situation in which tourists visit a town or city and don’t spend very much money. They use all of the services of that place, they walk on the roads, they use the buses or metro, they lie on the beaches, but their contribution to the local economy is minimal.
[00:12:49] Malta, the tiny Mediterranean island I used to call home, is constantly talking about this phenomenon, and what can be done to address it.
[00:13:00] The average tourist in Malta spends just under €110 a day, including accommodation. It might sound like quite a lot, but it is actually pretty low by global standards.
[00:13:15] As a point of comparison, the average Chinese tourist in Switzerland spends €400 a day, and although costs are higher in Switzerland than in Malta, they aren’t anywhere near four times higher.
[00:13:30] The point is that not all tourists are created equal, there are huge discrepancies between how much tourists spend and therefore contribute to a local economy.
[00:13:42] So destinations like Malta are doing everything they can to attract higher-spending tourists, more older tourists who will eat at expensive restaurants and stay at hotels and fewer budget-conscious tourists who want to stay in Airbnbs and buy beers and sandwiches from supermarkets.
[00:14:03] And on the supply side, many cities are restricting the availability of holiday rentals, imposing limits on the number of Airbnbs or the number of nights that a property can be rented out every year.
[00:14:17] And in some cities, residents furious about how tourists have taken over their city have taken matters into their own hands.
[00:14:26] You might have read about how a group of protestors sprayed tourists with water pistols in Barcelona in July of this year, or how there have been demonstrations in cities like Malaga in Spain and Oaxaca in Mexico about how tourism has been adversely affecting everything from the availability and affordability of housing to access to local services.
[00:14:50] Now, I want to end this episode with a personal example of the real-life effects of tourism.
[00:14:57] My wife has a close friend who runs a restaurant in Trieste, which, remember, is a relatively small city in northeast Italy.
[00:15:06] It is a nice restaurant, not super fancy, but it serves high-quality Italian fare.
[00:15:14] Over the years it has developed a good reputation and has lots of glowing reviews on Google. Although it was never previously a tourist restaurant, it has become very popular with tourists.
[00:15:27] I always enjoy talking to her about her business, and the other evening we got to speaking about the different types of tourists that she has started to see at her restaurant and their different characteristics.
[00:15:41] She told me that they hardly have any customers from the cruise ships, because cruise passengers go back to the ship for dinner, because it will typically be included in their ticket.
[00:15:54] Austrian tourists are her favourite because they have several courses, they order wine, they leave generous tips, and tend to always be very appreciative of the food and service.
[00:16:08] They spend lots of money, they leave good reviews, and they tell their friends.
[00:16:13] She always says that if she could fill up the restaurant with Austrian tourists every evening, well that would be a dream situation, financially at least, but it would mean becoming purely a tourist destination.
[00:16:28] And if you were wondering about what the opposite of an Austrian would be, it's actually domestic tourists, tourists from Italy.
[00:16:37] In her experience at least, Italian tourists tend to order less, they either order the house wine or no wine at all, and many are more critical of the food because they are familiar with the dishes and feel more comfortable criticising the use of particular ingredients.
[00:16:57] By the way, she says this as an Italian born and bred, from Trieste.
[00:17:03] And when we talked more about it, she told me that before the tourists started to come in their masses, her restaurant, like many restaurants, was always struggling. Some nights would be great, others awful.
[00:17:19] And this micro-example is an imperfect example of the at times problematic relationship that many cities have with tourism.
[00:17:29] You heard that she doesn’t like the cruise ships, because cruise passengers clog up the streets and don’t spend any money at the restaurants. This is a sentiment that appears to be felt in practically every city that hosts cruise ships and why Amsterdam, for example, has started charging them a hefty per-passenger fee.
[00:17:51] My wife’s friend also doesn’t want to only cater to tourists, because then her restaurant would lose much of its charm and authenticity.
[00:18:01] But at the same time, her restaurant is a business. She has cooks and waiters to pay, and she has razor-thin margins.
[00:18:10] Like a town or city, there is limited space in her restaurant, and she doesn’t want to fill up that limited space with guests who will not spend much money.
[00:18:20] She doesn’t want to increase the prices to such an extent that it becomes unaffordable to local people, or turn it into a restaurant that only caters to tourists.
[00:18:30] But at the same time, her landlord comes knocking every month with ever-increasing rent bills, the cost of everything has gone up, and her restaurant is full almost every evening.
[00:18:42] To state the obvious, this is a nice problem to have, to have too many people who want to come to your restaurant or your town or your city.
[00:18:51] But the benefits are not evenly distributed. This lady runs a restaurant that’s popular with tourists, so of course she will be happier to tolerate a higher number of tourists than someone who works for a local school, let’s say, and is facing increasing housing costs.
[00:19:11] So, to wrap things up, for all of the measures that cities are putting in place to discourage mass tourism, there seems to be no end in sight to the unstoppable growth of the tourism industry.
[00:19:24] 2024 is set to be the biggest year on record for the tourism and travel industry, with tourists spending a whopping 11 trillion dollars, which is 1 out of every 10 dollars spent worldwide.
[00:19:42] For people who work in the tourism industry, either directly or indirectly, the global boom, and news that this is set to continue, has most probably been excellent news.
[00:19:54] But for everyone else, from the young people who cannot afford rent to Dutch pensioners who have to sleep with the sounds of people partying outside, the benefits are not so easy to see.
[00:20:09] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the contentious issue of overtourism.
[00:20:15] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new. If nothing else, perhaps you’ve learned something about Trieste, which is a wonderful city that I would certainly recommend visiting if you ever have the chance.
[00:20:28] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:20:31] Do you live in a town or city where overtourism is a problem? What do you think about the issue, and what is your town or city doing about it?
[00:20:40] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:44] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:52] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:57] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about overtourism, the phenomenon of having too many tourists converging on a single destination, and negatively affecting both their experience of a place and the experience of locals who call that place home.
[00:00:40] We’ll see why people are talking about overtourism now when they weren’t 50 years ago, we’ll take a look at a few examples, both well-known and lesser-known, and ask ourselves how much is too much, when it comes to tourism.
[00:00:55] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:01] I’m writing this episode from an Italian city called Trieste, or Trieste as we call it in English.
[00:01:09] In case you don’t know it, it is in northeast Italy, just a few kilometres from the border with Slovenia.
[00:01:17] Outside of Italy, the city wasn’t particularly well-known or visited by tourists until relatively recently.
[00:01:26] I first started coming here in 2012, after meeting a girl from the city who is now my wife.
[00:01:34] And then, just over a decade ago, there were hardly any tourists.
[00:01:40] You’d see some Austrian number plates, and overhear some French or German being spoken, and not much else.
Huge cruise ships pull up just opposite the main square, casting a large shadow.
[00:01:49] But, over the past few years, Trieste has been experiencing a boom in tourism.
[00:01:56] [00:02:04] You can see tour groups traipsing through the streets, guides speaking into microphones and holding up flags to make sure people don’t get lost.
[00:02:14] Many restaurants now have menus with English translations, which was certainly not a common sight when I first came here.
[00:02:22] Now, Trieste is not Venice or Florence or Rome, it is still very much a second or even third-tier city for tourists, but it was recently named as a city that is at “high risk” of something called “overtourism”.
[00:02:41] I imagine you might have heard of this word before, or at least the concept.
[00:02:46] It’s a relatively new word, first appearing in the English dictionary in 2018.
[00:02:54] If you look it up in the dictionary, you will be met with a definition like “the phenomenon whereby certain places of interest are visited by excessive numbers of tourists, causing undesirable effects for the places visited.”
[00:03:10] The key word there is “excessive”. In English, as you will probably know, we use the prefix “over” in front of a word to indicate that something is done too much.
[00:03:24] Overeating is eating too much. Overpriced means too expensive. Overcooking means cooking something for far too long.
[00:03:34] And overtourism means “too much tourism”.
[00:03:40] Of course, this raises the important question of how much is too much?
[00:03:46] Who decides how many tourists is “the right” amount of tourists, and what are cities and countries doing to try to achieve this?
[00:03:56] Now, the example of the city of Trieste is one I wanted to start with because it probably isn’t a city you would first think of when it comes to “overtourism”, but it is one at risk of overtourism partly because of a city you probably would think of when you think of the word “overtourism”.
[00:04:17] The cruise ships that now tower over the main square of Trieste didn’t always use to come here; they used to go to a different city just along the coast, Venice.
[00:04:31] Venice, as I imagine you will know and many of you will have experienced firsthand, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
[00:04:42] 20 million people visit Venice every year, which might not sound like that much - it’s less than half the number of Paris - but Venice is a tiny city built on a series of canals and waterways.
[00:04:57] The non-tourist population of the island of Venice is only 50,000, and the sheer number of tourists at any point of the year makes the residents of the city severely outnumbered by its visitors, turning it into an almost Disneyland-type experience.
[00:05:17] Now, Venice is an extreme example. It has been an incredibly popular tourist destination for hundreds of years, going back even to the Grand Tour, where young English aristocrats used to tour Europe when they came of age.
[00:05:33] By the way, as a quick side note, we have an episode on The Grand Tour, it’s number 156 if you’re interested.
[00:05:42] Now, moving back to overtourism.
[00:05:45] What is more interesting to talk about than the very clear problem of overtourism in Venice is the problem, or at least phenomenon, of overtourism in other areas, to look into what the key drivers of this are, how it is changing these areas and how locals and governments are reacting to this.
[00:06:06] So, why are we talking about overtourism?
[00:06:10] Well, on one level it’s simple.
[00:06:14] The cost of travel has decreased significantly over the past 30 years or so, and people around the world have more disposable income.
[00:06:24] The result is that there are far more tourists than ever, and the tourism industry is booming.
[00:06:32] Worldwide there were 25 million tourist arrivals in 1950, but in 2019, the year before COVID hit and the tourism industry was decimated, there were 1.5 billion.
[00:06:49] And approximately half of these tourism arrivals were in Europe, with cities such as Venice, Paris, Rome, and Barcelona being particularly popular tourist destinations.
[00:07:02] So, why is this a problem?
[00:07:05] Well, first and foremost it is a question of space.
[00:07:09] Tourists come to see things or experience new places.
[00:07:14] Whether this is a museum or a beach or a village or a national park or a city in general, there is a point at which there simply isn’t enough space to accommodate everyone who wants to visit it.
[00:07:28] To take a famous but extreme example, The Mona Lisa is less than half a metre squared, and 10 million people visit the Louvre every year to see it.
[00:07:40] The result is huge queues and most people only being able to see it from a distance past other tourists’ smartphones and being shoved along by security guards who need to get a certain number of people through every hour.
[00:07:55] There are so many people that everyone has a worse experience.
[00:08:00] And the problem of overtourism is not restricted to museums or monuments.
[00:08:06] Increasingly people are seeking beautiful Instagrammable locations to snap a photo from, whether that’s the Norwegian fjords or the Amalfi coast.
[00:08:16] People have seen photos of idyllic beaches or landscapes on social media, they book a ticket to the same place to get a similar photo only to find that there are hundreds of other people lined up to try to take the same photo as them.
[00:08:31] This clearly leads to an inferior tourist experience, but it often also is a serious negative for local residents.
[00:08:41] The area becomes more crowded, the price of housing is pushed up, tourists can be loud and disrespectful of their surroundings, they wear down the natural environment, they leave waste behind, they put pressure on public services.
[00:08:57] And as residents grow outnumbered by tourists, the very nature of a town or city changes.
[00:09:05] Local grocery shops are replaced by souvenir shops, local libraries by spaces for tourists.
[00:09:12] The place changes to cater primarily for tourists, and locals play second fiddle, their needs come second.
[00:09:22] After all, to take a very transactional view, tourism is an economic arrangement between a country or city and people who do not live there.
[00:09:34] The city encourages people to come and visit it on the implicit condition that they spend money, that they inject money into the local economy.
[00:09:43] They eat at restaurants, they buy souvenirs, they stay at hotels, all of which provide jobs and generate tax receipts, which go into providing services for the local residents.
[00:09:57] And sometimes people underestimate just how much of a contribution tourism makes to a local economy.
[00:10:05] In France it’s 9.5%, in Italy, it’s around 13%, and in Spain it is even higher at 14.3%.
[00:10:16] Even in the UK, which people might not necessarily think of as a tourist destination, tourism makes up just over 10% of the economy.
[00:10:27] And in a country like Malta, which is heavily reliant on tourism, it makes up almost 30% of the economy.
[00:10:37] But, despite the large part that tourism plays in many countries’ economies, some destinations are saying that the number of tourist arrivals has reached such high levels that this trade-off, this economic arrangement, needs to be rethought.
[00:10:56] In other words, yes tourists bring in money but they don’t bring in enough money to make up for the disruption and inconvenience they cause to the lives of residents.
[00:11:08] The most common tool that cities have been using to combat this is implementing or increasing taxes on tourists.
[00:11:18] In some cases, it’s a per-night fee, which is 12.5% of the cost of accommodation in the case of Amsterdam.
[00:11:27] In some cases, it’s a fee simply to enter the city. Venice trialled a €5 entrance fee this year, and Amsterdam already charges €14 to cruise passengers to disembark in the city.
[00:11:44] The logic behind this is two-fold: firstly, to raise money to invest in services that benefit local residents and secondly to discourage low-spending tourists from coming in the first place.
[00:11:59] And this brings us nicely on to talking about the problem of budget travel, at least from the perspective of local residents.
[00:12:09] Now, budget travel is great for tourists in many ways.
[00:12:13] Low-cost flights have meant that people can travel to destinations that might have previously been prohibitively expensive, and they can experience new cities and cultures with ease and without breaking the bank.
[00:12:27] But what it has led to is a situation in which tourists visit a town or city and don’t spend very much money. They use all of the services of that place, they walk on the roads, they use the buses or metro, they lie on the beaches, but their contribution to the local economy is minimal.
[00:12:49] Malta, the tiny Mediterranean island I used to call home, is constantly talking about this phenomenon, and what can be done to address it.
[00:13:00] The average tourist in Malta spends just under €110 a day, including accommodation. It might sound like quite a lot, but it is actually pretty low by global standards.
[00:13:15] As a point of comparison, the average Chinese tourist in Switzerland spends €400 a day, and although costs are higher in Switzerland than in Malta, they aren’t anywhere near four times higher.
[00:13:30] The point is that not all tourists are created equal, there are huge discrepancies between how much tourists spend and therefore contribute to a local economy.
[00:13:42] So destinations like Malta are doing everything they can to attract higher-spending tourists, more older tourists who will eat at expensive restaurants and stay at hotels and fewer budget-conscious tourists who want to stay in Airbnbs and buy beers and sandwiches from supermarkets.
[00:14:03] And on the supply side, many cities are restricting the availability of holiday rentals, imposing limits on the number of Airbnbs or the number of nights that a property can be rented out every year.
[00:14:17] And in some cities, residents furious about how tourists have taken over their city have taken matters into their own hands.
[00:14:26] You might have read about how a group of protestors sprayed tourists with water pistols in Barcelona in July of this year, or how there have been demonstrations in cities like Malaga in Spain and Oaxaca in Mexico about how tourism has been adversely affecting everything from the availability and affordability of housing to access to local services.
[00:14:50] Now, I want to end this episode with a personal example of the real-life effects of tourism.
[00:14:57] My wife has a close friend who runs a restaurant in Trieste, which, remember, is a relatively small city in northeast Italy.
[00:15:06] It is a nice restaurant, not super fancy, but it serves high-quality Italian fare.
[00:15:14] Over the years it has developed a good reputation and has lots of glowing reviews on Google. Although it was never previously a tourist restaurant, it has become very popular with tourists.
[00:15:27] I always enjoy talking to her about her business, and the other evening we got to speaking about the different types of tourists that she has started to see at her restaurant and their different characteristics.
[00:15:41] She told me that they hardly have any customers from the cruise ships, because cruise passengers go back to the ship for dinner, because it will typically be included in their ticket.
[00:15:54] Austrian tourists are her favourite because they have several courses, they order wine, they leave generous tips, and tend to always be very appreciative of the food and service.
[00:16:08] They spend lots of money, they leave good reviews, and they tell their friends.
[00:16:13] She always says that if she could fill up the restaurant with Austrian tourists every evening, well that would be a dream situation, financially at least, but it would mean becoming purely a tourist destination.
[00:16:28] And if you were wondering about what the opposite of an Austrian would be, it's actually domestic tourists, tourists from Italy.
[00:16:37] In her experience at least, Italian tourists tend to order less, they either order the house wine or no wine at all, and many are more critical of the food because they are familiar with the dishes and feel more comfortable criticising the use of particular ingredients.
[00:16:57] By the way, she says this as an Italian born and bred, from Trieste.
[00:17:03] And when we talked more about it, she told me that before the tourists started to come in their masses, her restaurant, like many restaurants, was always struggling. Some nights would be great, others awful.
[00:17:19] And this micro-example is an imperfect example of the at times problematic relationship that many cities have with tourism.
[00:17:29] You heard that she doesn’t like the cruise ships, because cruise passengers clog up the streets and don’t spend any money at the restaurants. This is a sentiment that appears to be felt in practically every city that hosts cruise ships and why Amsterdam, for example, has started charging them a hefty per-passenger fee.
[00:17:51] My wife’s friend also doesn’t want to only cater to tourists, because then her restaurant would lose much of its charm and authenticity.
[00:18:01] But at the same time, her restaurant is a business. She has cooks and waiters to pay, and she has razor-thin margins.
[00:18:10] Like a town or city, there is limited space in her restaurant, and she doesn’t want to fill up that limited space with guests who will not spend much money.
[00:18:20] She doesn’t want to increase the prices to such an extent that it becomes unaffordable to local people, or turn it into a restaurant that only caters to tourists.
[00:18:30] But at the same time, her landlord comes knocking every month with ever-increasing rent bills, the cost of everything has gone up, and her restaurant is full almost every evening.
[00:18:42] To state the obvious, this is a nice problem to have, to have too many people who want to come to your restaurant or your town or your city.
[00:18:51] But the benefits are not evenly distributed. This lady runs a restaurant that’s popular with tourists, so of course she will be happier to tolerate a higher number of tourists than someone who works for a local school, let’s say, and is facing increasing housing costs.
[00:19:11] So, to wrap things up, for all of the measures that cities are putting in place to discourage mass tourism, there seems to be no end in sight to the unstoppable growth of the tourism industry.
[00:19:24] 2024 is set to be the biggest year on record for the tourism and travel industry, with tourists spending a whopping 11 trillion dollars, which is 1 out of every 10 dollars spent worldwide.
[00:19:42] For people who work in the tourism industry, either directly or indirectly, the global boom, and news that this is set to continue, has most probably been excellent news.
[00:19:54] But for everyone else, from the young people who cannot afford rent to Dutch pensioners who have to sleep with the sounds of people partying outside, the benefits are not so easy to see.
[00:20:09] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the contentious issue of overtourism.
[00:20:15] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new. If nothing else, perhaps you’ve learned something about Trieste, which is a wonderful city that I would certainly recommend visiting if you ever have the chance.
[00:20:28] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:20:31] Do you live in a town or city where overtourism is a problem? What do you think about the issue, and what is your town or city doing about it?
[00:20:40] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:44] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:52] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:57] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about overtourism, the phenomenon of having too many tourists converging on a single destination, and negatively affecting both their experience of a place and the experience of locals who call that place home.
[00:00:40] We’ll see why people are talking about overtourism now when they weren’t 50 years ago, we’ll take a look at a few examples, both well-known and lesser-known, and ask ourselves how much is too much, when it comes to tourism.
[00:00:55] OK then, let’s not waste a minute, and get right into it.
[00:01:01] I’m writing this episode from an Italian city called Trieste, or Trieste as we call it in English.
[00:01:09] In case you don’t know it, it is in northeast Italy, just a few kilometres from the border with Slovenia.
[00:01:17] Outside of Italy, the city wasn’t particularly well-known or visited by tourists until relatively recently.
[00:01:26] I first started coming here in 2012, after meeting a girl from the city who is now my wife.
[00:01:34] And then, just over a decade ago, there were hardly any tourists.
[00:01:40] You’d see some Austrian number plates, and overhear some French or German being spoken, and not much else.
Huge cruise ships pull up just opposite the main square, casting a large shadow.
[00:01:49] But, over the past few years, Trieste has been experiencing a boom in tourism.
[00:01:56] [00:02:04] You can see tour groups traipsing through the streets, guides speaking into microphones and holding up flags to make sure people don’t get lost.
[00:02:14] Many restaurants now have menus with English translations, which was certainly not a common sight when I first came here.
[00:02:22] Now, Trieste is not Venice or Florence or Rome, it is still very much a second or even third-tier city for tourists, but it was recently named as a city that is at “high risk” of something called “overtourism”.
[00:02:41] I imagine you might have heard of this word before, or at least the concept.
[00:02:46] It’s a relatively new word, first appearing in the English dictionary in 2018.
[00:02:54] If you look it up in the dictionary, you will be met with a definition like “the phenomenon whereby certain places of interest are visited by excessive numbers of tourists, causing undesirable effects for the places visited.”
[00:03:10] The key word there is “excessive”. In English, as you will probably know, we use the prefix “over” in front of a word to indicate that something is done too much.
[00:03:24] Overeating is eating too much. Overpriced means too expensive. Overcooking means cooking something for far too long.
[00:03:34] And overtourism means “too much tourism”.
[00:03:40] Of course, this raises the important question of how much is too much?
[00:03:46] Who decides how many tourists is “the right” amount of tourists, and what are cities and countries doing to try to achieve this?
[00:03:56] Now, the example of the city of Trieste is one I wanted to start with because it probably isn’t a city you would first think of when it comes to “overtourism”, but it is one at risk of overtourism partly because of a city you probably would think of when you think of the word “overtourism”.
[00:04:17] The cruise ships that now tower over the main square of Trieste didn’t always use to come here; they used to go to a different city just along the coast, Venice.
[00:04:31] Venice, as I imagine you will know and many of you will have experienced firsthand, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
[00:04:42] 20 million people visit Venice every year, which might not sound like that much - it’s less than half the number of Paris - but Venice is a tiny city built on a series of canals and waterways.
[00:04:57] The non-tourist population of the island of Venice is only 50,000, and the sheer number of tourists at any point of the year makes the residents of the city severely outnumbered by its visitors, turning it into an almost Disneyland-type experience.
[00:05:17] Now, Venice is an extreme example. It has been an incredibly popular tourist destination for hundreds of years, going back even to the Grand Tour, where young English aristocrats used to tour Europe when they came of age.
[00:05:33] By the way, as a quick side note, we have an episode on The Grand Tour, it’s number 156 if you’re interested.
[00:05:42] Now, moving back to overtourism.
[00:05:45] What is more interesting to talk about than the very clear problem of overtourism in Venice is the problem, or at least phenomenon, of overtourism in other areas, to look into what the key drivers of this are, how it is changing these areas and how locals and governments are reacting to this.
[00:06:06] So, why are we talking about overtourism?
[00:06:10] Well, on one level it’s simple.
[00:06:14] The cost of travel has decreased significantly over the past 30 years or so, and people around the world have more disposable income.
[00:06:24] The result is that there are far more tourists than ever, and the tourism industry is booming.
[00:06:32] Worldwide there were 25 million tourist arrivals in 1950, but in 2019, the year before COVID hit and the tourism industry was decimated, there were 1.5 billion.
[00:06:49] And approximately half of these tourism arrivals were in Europe, with cities such as Venice, Paris, Rome, and Barcelona being particularly popular tourist destinations.
[00:07:02] So, why is this a problem?
[00:07:05] Well, first and foremost it is a question of space.
[00:07:09] Tourists come to see things or experience new places.
[00:07:14] Whether this is a museum or a beach or a village or a national park or a city in general, there is a point at which there simply isn’t enough space to accommodate everyone who wants to visit it.
[00:07:28] To take a famous but extreme example, The Mona Lisa is less than half a metre squared, and 10 million people visit the Louvre every year to see it.
[00:07:40] The result is huge queues and most people only being able to see it from a distance past other tourists’ smartphones and being shoved along by security guards who need to get a certain number of people through every hour.
[00:07:55] There are so many people that everyone has a worse experience.
[00:08:00] And the problem of overtourism is not restricted to museums or monuments.
[00:08:06] Increasingly people are seeking beautiful Instagrammable locations to snap a photo from, whether that’s the Norwegian fjords or the Amalfi coast.
[00:08:16] People have seen photos of idyllic beaches or landscapes on social media, they book a ticket to the same place to get a similar photo only to find that there are hundreds of other people lined up to try to take the same photo as them.
[00:08:31] This clearly leads to an inferior tourist experience, but it often also is a serious negative for local residents.
[00:08:41] The area becomes more crowded, the price of housing is pushed up, tourists can be loud and disrespectful of their surroundings, they wear down the natural environment, they leave waste behind, they put pressure on public services.
[00:08:57] And as residents grow outnumbered by tourists, the very nature of a town or city changes.
[00:09:05] Local grocery shops are replaced by souvenir shops, local libraries by spaces for tourists.
[00:09:12] The place changes to cater primarily for tourists, and locals play second fiddle, their needs come second.
[00:09:22] After all, to take a very transactional view, tourism is an economic arrangement between a country or city and people who do not live there.
[00:09:34] The city encourages people to come and visit it on the implicit condition that they spend money, that they inject money into the local economy.
[00:09:43] They eat at restaurants, they buy souvenirs, they stay at hotels, all of which provide jobs and generate tax receipts, which go into providing services for the local residents.
[00:09:57] And sometimes people underestimate just how much of a contribution tourism makes to a local economy.
[00:10:05] In France it’s 9.5%, in Italy, it’s around 13%, and in Spain it is even higher at 14.3%.
[00:10:16] Even in the UK, which people might not necessarily think of as a tourist destination, tourism makes up just over 10% of the economy.
[00:10:27] And in a country like Malta, which is heavily reliant on tourism, it makes up almost 30% of the economy.
[00:10:37] But, despite the large part that tourism plays in many countries’ economies, some destinations are saying that the number of tourist arrivals has reached such high levels that this trade-off, this economic arrangement, needs to be rethought.
[00:10:56] In other words, yes tourists bring in money but they don’t bring in enough money to make up for the disruption and inconvenience they cause to the lives of residents.
[00:11:08] The most common tool that cities have been using to combat this is implementing or increasing taxes on tourists.
[00:11:18] In some cases, it’s a per-night fee, which is 12.5% of the cost of accommodation in the case of Amsterdam.
[00:11:27] In some cases, it’s a fee simply to enter the city. Venice trialled a €5 entrance fee this year, and Amsterdam already charges €14 to cruise passengers to disembark in the city.
[00:11:44] The logic behind this is two-fold: firstly, to raise money to invest in services that benefit local residents and secondly to discourage low-spending tourists from coming in the first place.
[00:11:59] And this brings us nicely on to talking about the problem of budget travel, at least from the perspective of local residents.
[00:12:09] Now, budget travel is great for tourists in many ways.
[00:12:13] Low-cost flights have meant that people can travel to destinations that might have previously been prohibitively expensive, and they can experience new cities and cultures with ease and without breaking the bank.
[00:12:27] But what it has led to is a situation in which tourists visit a town or city and don’t spend very much money. They use all of the services of that place, they walk on the roads, they use the buses or metro, they lie on the beaches, but their contribution to the local economy is minimal.
[00:12:49] Malta, the tiny Mediterranean island I used to call home, is constantly talking about this phenomenon, and what can be done to address it.
[00:13:00] The average tourist in Malta spends just under €110 a day, including accommodation. It might sound like quite a lot, but it is actually pretty low by global standards.
[00:13:15] As a point of comparison, the average Chinese tourist in Switzerland spends €400 a day, and although costs are higher in Switzerland than in Malta, they aren’t anywhere near four times higher.
[00:13:30] The point is that not all tourists are created equal, there are huge discrepancies between how much tourists spend and therefore contribute to a local economy.
[00:13:42] So destinations like Malta are doing everything they can to attract higher-spending tourists, more older tourists who will eat at expensive restaurants and stay at hotels and fewer budget-conscious tourists who want to stay in Airbnbs and buy beers and sandwiches from supermarkets.
[00:14:03] And on the supply side, many cities are restricting the availability of holiday rentals, imposing limits on the number of Airbnbs or the number of nights that a property can be rented out every year.
[00:14:17] And in some cities, residents furious about how tourists have taken over their city have taken matters into their own hands.
[00:14:26] You might have read about how a group of protestors sprayed tourists with water pistols in Barcelona in July of this year, or how there have been demonstrations in cities like Malaga in Spain and Oaxaca in Mexico about how tourism has been adversely affecting everything from the availability and affordability of housing to access to local services.
[00:14:50] Now, I want to end this episode with a personal example of the real-life effects of tourism.
[00:14:57] My wife has a close friend who runs a restaurant in Trieste, which, remember, is a relatively small city in northeast Italy.
[00:15:06] It is a nice restaurant, not super fancy, but it serves high-quality Italian fare.
[00:15:14] Over the years it has developed a good reputation and has lots of glowing reviews on Google. Although it was never previously a tourist restaurant, it has become very popular with tourists.
[00:15:27] I always enjoy talking to her about her business, and the other evening we got to speaking about the different types of tourists that she has started to see at her restaurant and their different characteristics.
[00:15:41] She told me that they hardly have any customers from the cruise ships, because cruise passengers go back to the ship for dinner, because it will typically be included in their ticket.
[00:15:54] Austrian tourists are her favourite because they have several courses, they order wine, they leave generous tips, and tend to always be very appreciative of the food and service.
[00:16:08] They spend lots of money, they leave good reviews, and they tell their friends.
[00:16:13] She always says that if she could fill up the restaurant with Austrian tourists every evening, well that would be a dream situation, financially at least, but it would mean becoming purely a tourist destination.
[00:16:28] And if you were wondering about what the opposite of an Austrian would be, it's actually domestic tourists, tourists from Italy.
[00:16:37] In her experience at least, Italian tourists tend to order less, they either order the house wine or no wine at all, and many are more critical of the food because they are familiar with the dishes and feel more comfortable criticising the use of particular ingredients.
[00:16:57] By the way, she says this as an Italian born and bred, from Trieste.
[00:17:03] And when we talked more about it, she told me that before the tourists started to come in their masses, her restaurant, like many restaurants, was always struggling. Some nights would be great, others awful.
[00:17:19] And this micro-example is an imperfect example of the at times problematic relationship that many cities have with tourism.
[00:17:29] You heard that she doesn’t like the cruise ships, because cruise passengers clog up the streets and don’t spend any money at the restaurants. This is a sentiment that appears to be felt in practically every city that hosts cruise ships and why Amsterdam, for example, has started charging them a hefty per-passenger fee.
[00:17:51] My wife’s friend also doesn’t want to only cater to tourists, because then her restaurant would lose much of its charm and authenticity.
[00:18:01] But at the same time, her restaurant is a business. She has cooks and waiters to pay, and she has razor-thin margins.
[00:18:10] Like a town or city, there is limited space in her restaurant, and she doesn’t want to fill up that limited space with guests who will not spend much money.
[00:18:20] She doesn’t want to increase the prices to such an extent that it becomes unaffordable to local people, or turn it into a restaurant that only caters to tourists.
[00:18:30] But at the same time, her landlord comes knocking every month with ever-increasing rent bills, the cost of everything has gone up, and her restaurant is full almost every evening.
[00:18:42] To state the obvious, this is a nice problem to have, to have too many people who want to come to your restaurant or your town or your city.
[00:18:51] But the benefits are not evenly distributed. This lady runs a restaurant that’s popular with tourists, so of course she will be happier to tolerate a higher number of tourists than someone who works for a local school, let’s say, and is facing increasing housing costs.
[00:19:11] So, to wrap things up, for all of the measures that cities are putting in place to discourage mass tourism, there seems to be no end in sight to the unstoppable growth of the tourism industry.
[00:19:24] 2024 is set to be the biggest year on record for the tourism and travel industry, with tourists spending a whopping 11 trillion dollars, which is 1 out of every 10 dollars spent worldwide.
[00:19:42] For people who work in the tourism industry, either directly or indirectly, the global boom, and news that this is set to continue, has most probably been excellent news.
[00:19:54] But for everyone else, from the young people who cannot afford rent to Dutch pensioners who have to sleep with the sounds of people partying outside, the benefits are not so easy to see.
[00:20:09] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the contentious issue of overtourism.
[00:20:15] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new. If nothing else, perhaps you’ve learned something about Trieste, which is a wonderful city that I would certainly recommend visiting if you ever have the chance.
[00:20:28] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:20:31] Do you live in a town or city where overtourism is a problem? What do you think about the issue, and what is your town or city doing about it?
[00:20:40] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:44] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:52] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:57] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
