Is summer travel to Europe coming to an end?

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This week, protesters marched through Barcelona, shouting “Tourists go home”, and striking them with water squirt guns, pressurized (shaken) cans of soda, and objects through at them, and in some cases, forced tourists to stay in hotels. They want an end to tourism in Barcelona – which generates 15% of Spain’s GDP.

  • Venice has begun charging a fee for each visitor to the city.
  • Amsterdam is restricting the construction of new hotels and plans to ban cruise ships in the city center. The city has also increased hotel taxes and has begun to restrict the total number of flights to/from Schipol Airport.
  • Dubrovnik is the most “over visited” city in Europe and now limits tourists to 8,000 per day, with plans to reduce that to 4,000 per day.
  • Paris has begun to limit the number of visitors to some attractions.
  • New Zealand has added a environmentl fee to all incoming tourists.
  • Australia imposes carbon taxes.
  • Hawaii is planning to charge a fee to out of state visitors (not clear this is constitutional but one proposal is to charge a high fee to non-residents for access to state parks and that might be constitutional).
  • And then there is Greece: Mayor of Athens says tourism in Greece isn’t ‘viable’ anymore as each visitor only adds €0.40 to the economy. Tourism contributes up to 30% of the GDP of Greece. Athens no limits visitors to the Acropolis to 2,000 per hour.

More countries and cities listed here: The countries that would survive if Europe’s tourists vanished (msn.com)

Some of the tourism issues have arisen as “post pandemic” travel resurged. (In 2019, the WHO said that travel restrictions, except for the initial few weeks of a pandemic, are not effective and cause more harm than benefits – so public health “experts” closed off travel for up to 2 years. Many people now realize that their lives can be upended by nameless and incompetent bureaucrats – and are now in a rush to complete travel they have wanted to do and expected to do in the future. This may be putting more pressure on popular tourist destinations.)