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It’s the world’s biggest industry – and it’s in big trouble. Travel and tourism employs some 357 million people and makes up about 10 per cent of the world economy. And it is booming. Right now, as Christmas and New Year recede, we can catch a feeling for the scale of the growth in the wave of adverts for holidays in the papers, online and on TV.
The trouble? In just about all the tourist hotspots there is resentment at the social and environmental costs of having to host too many people. There were demonstrations in the Balearics and Canaries last summer. In Barcelona residents squirted visitors with water pistols as they sat in street cafés. Paris has tried to keep accommodation for residents by tightening control over Airbnb listings, while in Edinburgh anyone offering a short-term let now has to get a licence to do so.
Many other European cities are trying to curb overtourism, and last summer there were widely-reported protests against tourists in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal.
Outside of Europe the pressure has generally been more muted, though in Korea there have been demonstrations against visitors from China, following the granting of visa-free entry to Chinese nationals. However, there is one particular form of tourism that is coming under threat: cruising. Amsterdam is considering a complete ban on visiting cruise liners by 2035, while several other popular destinations, including Venice, Santorini and Dubrovnik, have capped the number of cruise ships that can dock there.
The practical arguments against cruising are well-known. Quite aside from the environmental burden of such huge vessels, visitors arrive in large numbers, don’t observe local customs, and don’t spend much money in local restaurants because all their food and drink is supplied on board.
Yet the appetite for tourism seems set to grow. The World Travel and Tourism Council notes that spending by international visitors rose by 11.6 per cent in 2024, well ahead of inflation and above the 5.4 per cent increase in domestic tourism. The emerging world’s growing middle class seems set to spend more of its income on travelling, particularly in Asia, while older people in the developed world have more time than they did a generation ago and seem to want to use their additional spending power to travel more. They are taking what has been dubbed “their golden gap year”.
So this is a massive industry that is faced with growing demand, but also has to cope with rising environmental and social challenges which, if handled badly, will not just damage that growth but could push it into decline. This would not only be an economic disaster; it would be a social one too, for there are a lot of jobs at stake, many of them in places where alternative employment opportunities are very limited. What should the industry do?
It is an obvious response but an essential one. It should do much more of what it is already doing to make itself a better citizen. It has to look at the reasons why it has become unpopular among the communities that host a lot of tourists and do something about it.
Since the industry covers such a wide range of activities – from airlines and hotel chains at the top end of the scale to someone with a holiday home letting it out for a few weeks on Airbnb – that there is no single rule of how to do so. But if it applies that principle to everything it does it can reduce the hostility.
For example, the cruise lines can talk with the authorities in their destination ports and ask how their visits can be both less intrusive and more beneficial to local businesses. They can upgrade the energy efficiency of their vessels. They can coach their customers on appropriate dress and behaviour when ashore. At the other end of the scale, an Airbnb landlord can talk with neighbours to address concerns and minimise nuisance.
The more the industry can do to improve its image and performance the less the pressure mounts on governments and local authorities to impose restrictions. But they need to take action too. There is probably a case for a visitor tax in cities under pressure from tourism, some form of charge on accommodation that goes to the local authority to offset the additional costs that visitors impose. The most expensive city in the world for tourists is Los Angeles, which has a 15.5 per cent nightly tax, and many hotspots in Europe also have a visitor levy. Edinburgh is bringing in one in July and it looks as though London may impose one too.
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The aim here should be to use the money so that tourism is seen to benefit the whole community in a visible manner, rather than it going into a black hole alongside all the other tax revenue that the city raises.
Finally, everyone involved at every level – including ourselves when we visit somewhere – needs to be aware that we must not kill the thing we love. Overtourism destroys communities, quite aside from being horrid for the tourists themselves.
We are lucky to be able to travel reasonably freely about the world, though that freedom is always under threat. So we should cherish that, and respect the places and people we encounter on the way.
Further thoughts
Two quotations come to mind when pondering the future of travel and tourism. One obvious one was that of Oscar Wilde in The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “And all men kill the thing they love…”
The other came from the title of Evelyn Waugh’s excerpts from four travel books he had written between 1930 and 1935, published together in 1946 in When the Going Was Good. He went to hotspots around the Mediterranean, then to Ethiopia, to East Africa, Brazil and British Guiana.
His idea was that you should travel to exotic places when you could because you might not be able to do so in the future. So he didn’t spend much time in Europe because there would be plenty of opportunities in the future.
That was wrong. Travel to Europe was closed for six years from 1939 to 1945 – actually rather longer.
Now I am afraid there are parts of the world that were open a few years ago that are closed. I have become very aware of this. We went to Libya in 2004, that brief window when it opened up before Muammar Gaddafi was deposed, and visited the many ancient Roman and Greek sites there. There was a trip to Iran in 2016 to see the remains of the palaces of the Persian Empire, the Silk Road hostels, and the tomb of Cyrus the Great.
Incidentally, our American companions were particularly warmly welcomed by young people in Tehran, eager to show they didn’t support the anti-US stance of the ruling elite. There was a fascinating long weekend in Kyiv, and an equally memorable conference in St Petersburg. The place I much regret not going to when we had the opportunity was Damascus.
I mention this because it is impossible to be confident that places we can visit now will still be possible to visit in a few years’ time – and conversely, it may well be that places now effectively shut will reopen. The big point here is that we really should cherish freedom to travel, and for many people this is possible now in a way that was not so a generation ago.
So lift a glass to the travel and tourism industry, and hope it thrives. It helps bind the world together and that must be even more vital in the years ahead than it is now.
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