Exclusive: YouGov polling across Europe suggests most countries are sympathetic to protests against overtourism
A third of people in Spain say their local area now has too many international visitors, according to a continent-wide survey that has found most people across Europe are sympathetic to protests against overtourism and back steps to combat it.
The YouGov survey comes after a summer of demonstrations and urgent warnings against the impact of mass tourism from Santorini to the Canary Islands, and measures aimed at reducing it announced from the Cinque Terre to Amsterdam.
The polling in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK found Spain was the country that felt most strongly about the phenomenon, with 32% of respondents saying there were now too many foreign travellers in their area.
but would they be happy with decreased revenue from fewer tourists visiting?
also:
At 28%, Spain was also the country where respondents were most likely to have a negative view of international tourists.
so maaaaaaaaybe this isn’t just about the quantity of tourists.
I’m sure the Venn diagram of those who would be happy with decreased revenue, who have a negative view of tourists, and who think there are too many tourists has a lot of overlap but is far from a circle. Tourists do bring in money, but they also do tend to trash the places that they don’t live more than the locals, and can drive out locals.
That number rose to 48% in Catalonia, the region that includes Barcelona, whose 1.6 million residents receive about 32 million visitors annually, and of which one local columnist said last month: “My city has been stolen from me, and I’m not getting it back.”
People in Spain also felt more strongly than others about the short-term holiday rentals sector, which is widely accused of removing accommodation from the local residential market and inflating rents to a point many residents cannot afford.
Here is an opinion piece for Hawaii that echos a lot of the complaints from Spain.
In the last few years, my family made the decision to move to Big Island, for many reasons. Although it is not the primary reason, I can’t deny that being “priced out” of Oahu was a contributing factor.
There are valid reasons for people to be opposed to the volume of tourism when it reaches extreme levels.
That mentality is largely the result of overtourism though.
Spain is a country of under 50 million people which has over 70 million foreign tourists visit every year.
The US is 330 million people but only has 50ish million foreign tourists.
So imagine that the US has roughly 8x as many tourists per year (to match per capita) and imagine that a huge portion of these tourists were mostly coming from much richer countries and had the mentality of ‘let’s let loose in a cheap party spot’.
Just about everyone is in favor of some tourism, it’s just currently completely out of control in much of southern Europe. The numbers just completely dwarf just about anywhere else.
