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These record numbers in terms of tourism also pose challenges and we need to deal with those challenges also for our own population.

What we see when looking at the outlook for tourism this year is that we manage reached a one hundred million.

We are our forty nine million inhabitants country.

The sound of some of the anti tourism protests in European towns and cities in recent months and reaction from Spain's Economy Minister Carlos Corpo, what large numbers of visitors took places like Barcelona, Paris or Venice are nothing new.

The resurgence in travel after the COVID pandemic has come with more forceful opposition from residents.

In twenty twenty four, European countries hosted over seven hundred and fifty million tourists, up almost fifty million on the previous year.

In many places, that's meant a tipping point into over tourism where daily life becomes unbearable for locals.

So here's why.

Summer hotspots are turning against tourists.

Fergus O Sullivan from Bloomberg City Lab joins me now for more.

Fergus Everyone loves to complain about tourists in their city.

But how bad is the problem of over tourism in Europe.

Well, it's certainly bad enough that now people in tourists destinations across Europe are taking to the streets to protest.

It's bad enough that museum workers in Paris at the Louver have gone on strike to protest conditions because they say the young overcrowding is unmanageable.

It's also got bad enough that tourist numbers have gone up compared to previous years.

It was a forty percent jump in arrivals in Europe between twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four, So certainly people aren't just imagining this, and it's certainly true that it's become a kind of a pressure cooker.

It should be said.

That this resentment over tourism may be driven as much by exhaustion as by increases, because while tourist numbers.

Are projected to grow sharply ongoing.

Many places are actually only reaching the visitor levels they experienced before the pandemic now, so it's really as much that people can't take it anymore than suddenly they're being flooded.

Ah, that's an interesting point.

Just give us an idea of what sort of places are we talking about where we've seen the most resistance to this.

The worst place is for over tourism.

I'd say fall into three categories, So there are Mediterranean.

Beach resorts with the side order of the Canary Islands.

Alpine ski villages, and high profile historic cities, places like Barcelona, Paris.

Now, in terms of the places that are suffering most, I suppose the place with the highest number of visitors to residents is the Greek island of Zacinthos in the Ionian Islands, and that last year got one hundred and fifty visitors for every individual resident, which is a huge number.

However, it could be skewed because of course holiday islands tend to have low year round populations because people who were born there often go to the mainland to get work.

You could argue that places like Paris maybe have it even worse because the just the sheer concentrations they have there.

So in twenty twenty four, Paris got four hundred thousand tourists per square kinometer, which is places it far far ahead of other cities that have had similar problem concentrations, such as Athens and Copenhagen.

So I suppose those are the places that are the worst.

So places that are seeing these issues.

What are authorities doing about us?

Well, there are a lots of things that cities and local governments are doing that might help to bring the situation under control.

They're various things.

One big one is airbnb bands.

In Barcelona there will be no single legal Airbnb from twenty twenty eight, that's when the last legal license runs out, and there are also many other cities.

There've been caps on rentable nights, which means you can't rent out a flat on Airbnb or window or verbo for more than the fixed number of nights.

That's supposed to stop those flats disappearing from the long term rental market, which is a big problem.

So that's been happening.

There's also been things like cruise chip bands.

Cruise ships are particularly resented in many cities because not only do they disgorge a very large number of visitors all in one go.

They do so for people that have already been fed and have somewhere to sleep for the night.

So actually, in terms of congestion versus hassle, they are particularly strong offenders.

So Amsterdam is moving its cruise terminal out of town.

Venice has banned them from coming into the canals, so that's another one.

Finally, you'd say there were fees and taxes, so Venice now actually charges on over one hundred and fifty days a year for day trippers to come into the city as a way of maybe managing that flow.

Amsterdam is one of the other places that charges a nightly tax on accommodation that's twelve point five percent on top of your hotel bill, so that's another thing.

Finally, there's a more of a promotional approach, which is just to spread visitors away from hotspots, to encourage them to go to less obvious places.

Amsterdam again, for example, if you go onto their main tourist website, I Amsterdam Now, then their top ten sites they'll recommend would include places that you haven't necessarily heard of.

Breweries that don't brew Heineken, a castle in the suburbs, various places that they're trying to get people to go that aren't you know, flower Market or around Frank's house, So.

Providing inspiration perhaps rather than persuasion from some of those authorities.

I mean, the big question here is, of course, a lot of these places benefit massively economically from having a lot of tourists.

So where does the.

Balance lie between the money that you make from having people come and visit where you live and the sort of problems that we've talked about that that sort of tourism can create.

Well, that's a very good question.

I'm not sure anyone has yet been able to answer that fully.

For a start, most of these measures that are supposed to control tourism, they may have some positive benefits, but they don't reduce visitor numbers, and they aren't reducing the growth of tourism.

So it's difficult to say if anyone's going too far, if anyone's not going far enough.

Because this whole area is kind of in its infancy.

It is a course true on the most basic level, most of us, if we can afford to go on holiday, we love going on holiday.

There is a potential for mutually beneficial cultural exchange between people who host some people who visit.

This is also vital income for many many places, especially places along them in Southern Europe, for example, where governments may be quite heavily indebted and they need the extra tax income.

A lot of people rely on places such as the Greek Islands, which are suffering under strain, for their livelihood and to just pump stuff generally into the economy.

So of course there is value for this.

There is value to tourism, and there is people appreciate the income.

Finding that balance, I'm not sure where they're with a fixed formula it.

So we've talked about the problem, we've talked about some of the solutions or the steps that authorities are taking.

Do we have or is there a place that has a good recipe for how to manage tourism.

I have to say that having a researched this myself, I could not yet find anywhere that has truly managed to create the right balance, partly because the demand for tourism is so high and the income to be gained from tourism is so high that most of the measures designed to control it a really piecemeal.

So, for example, capping nights on Airbnb, that's very, very hard to police again.

In Barcelona, they're actually banning airbnb.

That only is really going to come into effect in twenty twenty eight.

There isn't yet evidence that it's necessarily easing the housing crisis in the city, which of course has many many causes, and tourism might be just one of them, And actually just getting rid of tourism isn't necessarily going to sort that.

So entry fees into places like Venice, tourist taxes they are maybe helping in that they allow governments to get extra income to manage the effects of tourism, but they don't necessarily do anything to reduce the volume of people coming.

There's an estimate from some research actually, I think Amsterdam commissioned itself that for their overnight hotel tax to genuine be a deterrent, it would need to be three times higher.

So there are problems with that.

I know I'm finding like I'm really bashing hard on these people at the moment, But spreading visitors away from hotspots, there is evidence that if you promote places that are less obvious destinations, numbers will rise in those destinations, which could be a good thing.

What doesn't happen is that numbers then fall in the places that are oversubscribed, So spreading people simply allows space for more tourists to come and fill their place.

AH A tricky recipe indeed.

Fergus O Sullivan from Bloomberg City Lab thank you very much.

For more explanations like this from our team of three thousand journalists and analysts around the world, go to Bloomberg dot com slash explainers.

I'm Stephen Carroll.

This is here's why.

I'll be back next week with more.

Thanks for listening.