Europe

I live in one of the cities depicted here, and I'd say tourism isn't such a big problem here. Airbnb and the holiday apartment "industry" are a big issue though, since they inflate the housing bubble.

It's a problem at least in Barcelona and in their near cities. Youth people and most of the working class can't pay the price to get a home there. A lot of housing has moved as a tourist service (airbnb... ) missing their social use.

It's really fun they let me calculate the ratios by myself. But beautiful circles, really!

I feel like the graphic would be more fair if the comparison were in terms of time spent by each category in the city

But I get that it’s a much harder stat to capture in the first place

Daaaamn, Hallstatt. 700 residence and 3 million tourists a year? What you got going on there?

I'm going to Spain this fall (though not Barcelona) and I refuse to stay in airbnbs for that exact reason. Affordable housing is a problem in the US city I live in, and a huuuuge problem in all of the ski towns where everything is a tourist rental, and I don't want to contribute to that anywhere else. To be honest, I wouldn't blame a lot of these places if they started requiring tourist visas and seriously limiting the number of them.

Remember residents live there 365 days a year. Visitors are typically 2-3 days.

London in particular has a very transient local population - a lot of people move there for a few years then move on. Wikipedia has the city at ~50% 'overseas born' at the moment - it's a very cosmopolitan place. So having about double the number of tourists as 'residents' isn't going to have the same cultural impact that it would in some of the other cities here

I'm surprised that there's as many as 250k 'locals' in Venice, it was my understanding that they mostly live inland or up the coast and commute into the city.

Would we even be able to see the dot for Vatican City compared to the visitors?

They're not all there at once.

Are those total visitors for 1 year, or total visitors at any one time?

Quality over quantity. A good start would be a ban on cruise ships and flights within the EU, which can be done with trains.

Honestly I am often shocked how many go to museums, look at old buildings and go to amazing landscapes when on a vacation in another country, but never consider the sights close to home. The great part about those is, that you do not need a hotel and there are no crowds blocking the good views. They for the most part, will not be world famous, but they are quite literally closer to home.

I'm living in a relatively small community that's blessed with a few pleasant landscape features and unfortunately located relatively close between a bunch of major metropolitan areas. This leads to hordes of day trip tourists (many more than residents) descending upon us, predominantly on weekends or during school holidays, whenever the weather permits (mostly from late Spring to early Autumn). They will park their cars everywhere, often in front of residents' driveways and garage doors, or in all the other other places where you have no business parking a car, then they will stumble through our indeed beautiful landscape for a couple hours, littering the whole place with their garbage and having a bunch of accidents that happen to people who go on a hike in rough-ish terrain without wearing the appropriate shoes, which requires quite some resources to deal with, because those accidents happen well away from easily accessible roads.

Since they are only day trip tourists, they leave very little money, because there fortunately is no admission fee for having a walk out in nature. There are only a handful of tax paying businesses that even can profit from the day trip tourists: Two small kiosks which have little to no relevance to the local population, because they sell tourist refreshments for tourist prices in tourist locations, and two to three pubs/restaurants, one of which has by now gone full tourist trap and is charging prices no local is willing to pay anymore.

There also is a slow but steady influx of wealthy city people buying houses or flats as a weekend retreat, spoiling the prices for and taking the places away from local families, and, on top of that, causing a bunch of trouble by filing a plethora of legal complaints about everything and anything that is normal life on the countryside, but is disturbing their precious peace and quiet. One resident has already been sued into getting rid of his backyard chickens, because the cock was crowing too loud for his new and temporary (weekends only) neighbour from the city. Traditional festivities that have been held for many decades, if not centuries, are getting hit by a bunch of noise complaints from weekend home dwellers, too.

So, yes, overtourism is a problem for me personally, even if it is so only on a relatively small scale. I can easily imagine overtourism being an even bigger problem in other places that are affected by it. Overtourism can easily destroy the way of life of any place.

I wonder how the numbers for US cities compare.

It was an early December when I visited Venice, locals say it snows one day a year and I just happened to be there!

During peak summer season, I imagine by the turn of August any and all locals have had it up to HERE with the dense throngs of tourists and the logistics/infrastructure overload it all involves.

But during the low season, you get to see the local inhabitants come out with their guard down, relaxed and welcoming. Then somehow or other, I ended up at a party of university students from nearby Padua, they had rented a party hall behind a bar. They made me feel like an ambassador from another corner of the world, but also like one of their own.

Plus since the water is as cold as it gets in the year, it doesn't smell, like they say it does when it's hot and humid.

Is that the total number of tourists in an entire year?

Or at a specific time?

Because that is a huge difference.

Interesting, but I feel like expressing these figures as percentages could have been more effective idk

Wow, our smallish city got 33.9m tourists during the pandemic. The only thing that really annoys me are the tourists going up the bike lanes the wrong way. There are arrows every 40 feet, guys. Move one street over, and you are on the right PBL. :P

That said...god, I'd love our city banning or severely restricting cars on most roads.

It also depends on what tourists are doing in the city and where they are staying. When they are visiting Disneyland Paris or some musical in Hamburg, they aren't really bothering the locals. That's different when they are all crowding in the old town of Dubrovnik.

Fuck AirBnB, nuke it from orbit.

I would love to see the numbers for Annecy. That place has become hell, I absolutely loathe it, but it really breaks my heart to see how fucked it has become.

I'd love to see this for the US as well.

We also need to know what proportion of the city’s economy is driven by tourism. For a tourism dominated city, it feels backward for the local population to complain about it. Unless it’s the retired folks in these cities who are complaining the loudest after benefitting from the same tourism earlier.

Woah, Venice is on fire lmao