It’s peak summer holiday season across Europe and North America, and amid a series of climate change-fuelled heatwaves, people are hitting the beaches and crowding into city centres in ever-increasing numbers. They’re part of a huge industry: last year, travel and tourism’s share of the global economy stood at US$10.9 trillion, making up around 10 per cent of the world’s GDP. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the travel business has bounced back stronger than ever.

But residents in tourist destinations are keenly aware of the downsides: overwhelming visitor numbers, permanent changes in their neighbourhoods, antisocial behaviour, strained local services, environmental impacts including litter and pollution, and soaring housing costs.

Overtourism occurs when the industry systematically impacts on residents’ quality of life. It’s a growing problem, reflected in recent protests in several countries, with grassroots civil society groups demanding more sustainable approaches.

Residents’ protests

June brought coordinated protests across Europe. In Barcelona, a city of 1.6 million people that receives 32 million visitors a year, the Neighbourhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth organised a protest in which people taped off hotel entrances, set off smoke bombs and fired water pistols. In Genoa, protesters dragged a replica cruise ship through the medieval centre’s maze of alleys to highlight the impacts of cruise tourism. Actions had been coordinated at a meeting in April between representatives from France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, who formed the Southern European Network Against Touristification.

These weren’t the first protests. Thousands took to the streets in Spain’s Canary Islands in May, while last year people protested in several European cities. Most recently, residents of Montmartre in Paris hung banners outside their houses to point out how overtourism is changing their neighbourhood.

Civil society groups are also taking action beyond protests. In the Netherlands, Amsterdam Has a Choice, a residents’ group, is threatening legal action against the city council. In 2021, following a civil society-led petition that received over 30,000 signatures, the council set a limit of 20 million overnight tourist stays a year. But research shows this limit has consistently been exceeded. Now the group could take the city to court to enforce it.

People are protesting across multiple countries because they face the same problem: overtourism is changing their communities and, increasingly, driving them away.

Environmental and social impacts

Tourism may create jobs, but these are often low-paid or seasonal jobs with few labour rights. In places with intensive tourism, everyday businesses that residents rely on are often replaced by those oriented towards tourists, with established firms squeezed out by high rents.

Environmental impacts may hit residents while tourists are protected from them: campaigners in Ibiza complain that water shortages mean they’re subject to restrictions, but hotels face no such limitations. Common areas residents once relied on, such as beaches and parks, can become overcrowded and degraded. Ultimately, communities can be turned into stage sets and sites of extraction, impacting on intangible but important matters of identity and belonging. That’s why one movement in Spain calls itself ‘Less Tourism, More Life’.

It isn’t just the number of tourists; it’s the type of tourism that’s having an impact. There’s rising concern about the growing impacts of cruise ship tourism. Once the preserve of older generations, people of all ages are now taking to the seas. The sector is booming.

People living in Caribbean small island nations have long been aware of the impacts of intensive cruise tourism, including high greenhouse gas emissions and waste dumped into seas, seafront developments that harm coastal ecosystems, foreign ownership of prime sites and limited economic opportunities for local people and businesses.

Cruise tourists typically descend on cities in huge numbers for short periods, causing disruption but contributing little to local businesses, since they spend their money mostly on activities controlled by cruise companies. The problem is literally growing: the ships are getting bigger. Today’s cruise ships are floating cities, the biggest carrying thousands of people. When they dock, they dominate city seafronts in an unmissable symbol of overtourism.

Housing concerns

Housing costs are a major concern in overtourism protests. In many countries, the costs of buying or renting somewhere to live are soaring, far outstripping wages. Young people are particularly hard hit, forced to hand over ever-higher proportions of their income in rent, with many forced into precarious and poorly maintained housing and facing the prospect of never being able to buy a home. This is an issue of rising political importance, and partly what’s driving young voters’ search for political novelty, benefiting nationalist and populist politicians.

The housing crisis has many causes, including turbo-capitalist ideologies that view housing as an asset and investment vehicle rather than a public need, leading to deeply unequal cities where a wealthy minority can live well off the rents paid by those less fortunate. Growing urban populations, high construction costs and shortages in housing stock are other drivers.

But tourism also has an impact, as it drives the increasing use of properties for short-term holiday rentals instead of permanent residences. Most holidaymakers used to stay in hotels, but now many use Airbnb and similar services to stay in privately managed apartments. People who live in tourist hotspots have seen many once-viable homes bought as investments for lucrative short-term lets, causing a loss of available housing and driving up the price of what’s left.

People who live in apartment blocks that have largely been converted into short-term rentals complain of their communities being hollowed out: they lack neighbours but frequently have to put up with antisocial behaviour from visitors intent on partying the night away. The sector is often less regulated than formal hotels, and landlords may find regulations easy to ignore and taxes easy to avoid. Spain alone has an estimated 66,000 illegal tourist apartments.

In Mexico City, there’s been recent anger at the burgeoning numbers of digital nomads – people who hop from country to country while working remotely – and their impacts on housing. Since the pandemic, the city has become temporary home to many digital nomads, mostly from the USA and other global north countries, who take advantage of its relatively low living costs. This has fuelled a growth in Airbnb use and in businesses set up specifically to cater to US digital nomads. In July, people marched through the city centre in protest, with some vandalising businesses and spraying graffiti.

There are now some estimated 40 million digital nomads worldwide, with high concentrations in some of the cities where civil society is demanding action on overtourism, such as Amsterdam, Barcelona and Lisbon. In 2022, Portugal introduced a digital nomad scheme, offering low tax rates for foreign workers, having previously relaxed its rules to attract foreign investment by granting residence permits in return for property purchases. Now it has a housing crisis, with many locals paying almost all of what they earn in rent.

Action needed

Overtourism protests hit the headlines last year when a group sprayed water at tourists in Barcelona. But in the main, protesters are making clear they don’t want to target tourists and aren’t motivated by xenophobia. They want a fair balance between tourists enjoying their holidays and locals being able to live their lives. They want those who reap tourism’s profits to pay their fair share to address overtourism problems.

Protests are having an impact, with authorities taking steps to rein in holiday rentals. Last year a Spanish court ordered the removal of almost 5,000 Airbnb listings following a complaint that they breached tourism regulations. The mayor of Barcelona has announced plans to eliminate short-term tourist rentals within five years by refusing to renew any of the 10,000-plus licences as they expire. Authorities in Lisbon have paused the issuing of short-term rental licences, and those in Athens have introduced a one-year ban on new registrations. New York authorities brought in tough new regulations to limit Airbnb use in 2023.

That still leaves plenty of regulatory gaps across many countries, and national and local governments should engage with campaigners to further develop regulations, particularly for short-term rentals.

Many local authorities have also implemented tourist taxes, while Venice has started to charge a peak-season fee for non-residents to access the centre and Athens now assigns time slots as a way of managing numbers at the Parthenon. It’s important that taxes and charges aren’t used simply to extract more cash from tourists or dampen demand; the money must be used to directly help affected communities and mitigate the harm caused by overtourism.

Authorities also need to be more careful about the marketing choices they make and consider whether they’re promoting tourism too widely. Attempts to work with social media influencers to develop more targeted tourism approaches have been tried but have sometimes backfired, with multitudes flocking to destinations promoted by influencers to try to replicate the perfect photo. Marketing campaigns should try to sensitise visitors about the impacts they can have, and to make choices that minimise them.

Movements campaigning against overtourism are sure to grow further, connecting groups concerned about environmental, housing and labour issues as the problem grows, and as climate change places even greater strain on scarce resources. Overtourism concerns are ultimately an expression of frustration with a bigger problem – that economies don’t work for the benefit of most people. States and the international community must urgently grapple with the question of how to make economies fairer, more sustainable and less extractive – and they must listen to the movements against overtourism that are helping sound the alarm.

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