Traveling to Europe this summer? You may want to watch out for squirt guns.
From Spain to Italy, protests are breaking out against mass tourism.
Activists stopped tour buses, rolled suitcases down the streets to make a point about noise, and even marched the streets spraying tourists with squirt guns, which have become a symbol of frustration over too many tourists.
“There’s an idea in academia about the good tourist,” says Alexander Muir, a lecturer in digital business management at Northeastern University’s London campus.
“A good tourist is someone who has an understanding of the local culture, who appreciates the local culture and also who has a good purchasing power, which means they’ll spend when they go there.
“(Some countries) haven’t attracted good tourists, and I think it’s caused … a suspicion of tourists coming in, that they will cause noise issues or overcrowding and such. A balance needs to be had,” Muir adds.
Mass tourism is causing problems across Europe, including in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where beachfront homes are now selling for seven figures, according to Muir, who has a background in hospitality and has worked for brands like the Four Seasons.
This is partly caused by countries like the United Kingdom and Ireland pushing to get tourism levels back to pre-pandemic levels. Additionally, airfare to Europe has been lower in years past, prompting more people to travel abroad.
“If we look across, say the U.K. and Ireland, their main goal at the moment from a tourism strategy is to ensure the numbers are the same, if not more, than the pre-COVID levels,” Muir says. “There’s obviously been significant increases and I think some places are exceeding or close to those 2019 numbers.”
In 2024, a record 747 million international travelers visited Europe, mostly throughout the southern and western regions. In France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and the Netherlands, more foreign visitors filtered through in a year than there were residents.
From an economic perspective, the hospitality industry in these countries is thriving, Muir says, as more companies invest in areas where visitors flock. Hotels are opening locations in secondary cities and on islands like Majorca.
But these areas aren’t always primed to handle more people, which is why locals in Majorca, for example, have protested by stopping a tour bus, setting off flares and hanging a banner.
Muir says locations advertising themselves as a tourist destination without plans to increase their public services has caused issues with waste and traffic management, noise, and environmental protections because of an influx of tourists.
“If you build up a tourism destination where it’s at overcapacity, that’s going to have knock-on effects on local services,” Muir says.
“Spain is unique because what we’ve noticed is that overtourism has led to a downgrade in the quality of life for the local residents in those particular areas. It would seem that local council or local planning has been very poor.
“In the case of Majorca or the Balearic Islands, there seems to be a real lack of planning (and) destination management,” he adds. “I don’t have the answer in terms of how you regulate the number of tourists going to a destination, but I am sure tourism boards of a country have different mechanisms to manage it.”
These issues brought together activists from cities like Venice, Lisbon and Barcelona who led a group called the Southern Europe Network Against Touristification. This group organized the recent protest to raise awareness about “the urgent need to limit the growth of tourism.”
In addition to straining public services, locals say the tourism industry has led to more homes being bought to be used as Airbnbs, making it harder for locals to find housing, even in less visited areas like Ireland.
“That is a serious problem for anybody that would want to go back and live there,” Muir says. “The price of accommodation is high. The price of local amenities and groceries. Everything goes up far more exponentially than is affordable.”
But part of the strategy in countries like the United Kingdom and Ireland is to get tourists to stay longer (which means they spend more) and to get them to visit different locations. Muir says the vast majority of visitors to the United Kingdom come in through London, but will go on to visit more secondary cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge and parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland.
“It’s very diversified and they’ve built on the strength of other places like Bath,” Muir says. “It’s a big contribution to the economy. It’s a big employer and it is heavily invested in. There aren’t mass demonstrations about tourism.”
The frustration with tourists doesn’t just hurt the locals, Muir says, but tourists as well. If places are overcrowded, tourists might be inclined to shorten their stay and limit what they spend, which cuts back on the economic benefits.
In addition to promoting different locations for travel, Muir says some places are trying to combat these effects by regulating Airbnbs. Additionally, h/e says some places might try marketing themselves differently. For example, Edinburgh has found its niche as the city of festivals, Muir says, and has attracted a lot of large hotel groups there and that creates avenues for growth.
Written by Erin Kayata, Northeastern University.
Credit: Unsplash+.
