Do entrance fees help combat mass tourism?

Recently, the mayor of Seville announced plans to charge tourists for visiting the central square Plaza de España. In media reports, the Greek government again called for entry fees for cruise ship passengers to visit all islands from next year.

But is money the solution to the problems? Will it appease the exasperated locals who this year, for example in the Canary Islands and Mallorca, which are also very popular, have taken to the streets in their tens of thousands to protest against mass tourism?

It could at least be part of the solution, as long as it benefits the local people. This is the argument of tourism researcher Christian Laesser. In an interview, the professor at the University of St. Gallen explains how the flow of tourists could be better controlled and why, in his opinion, the protests against overtourism are also based on a distribution problem.

Christian Laesser: That certainly depends on the amount of the fee and also on whether access is limited at all. These are actually two different things.

The fee can be justified in this respect: overnight guests pay taxes and fees. Day tourists are mostly exempt from these and this is actually a bit distorting because day tourists benefit from the infrastructure and sights in exactly the same way as overnight guests – just without paying anything for them. This is the idea in Zermatt, for example, but the same argument could be made in Venice.

I don’t think that the entrance fee is used as a control instrument. If I were to use prices to control who gets in and who doesn’t, that would raise questions.

Laesser: With demand management through quotas coupled with, for example, a reservation system. Even if I say, for example, I will only allow a maximum of 30,000 people into Venice per day. But so that no one is simply standing in front of the closed city gates and you can plan your visit, you could of course introduce a reservation system, as many tourist attractions already have.

It’s not just that the locals suffer when there are too many tourists in one place at the same time. It’s also a different experience for the tourists when things are somewhat relaxed and not overcrowded.

Laesser: I think so. It doesn’t have to be turnstiles that the man puts at the entrances. You can also do it indirectly and that is already happening in some cases.

Laesser: About parking fees, for example. If I have a pricing system here that rewards a short stay, holidaymakers tend to stay for a shorter period of time and leave sooner. That means I have a large flow of people who come in but only stay for a short time. I can also control that by limiting normal parking spaces and bus parking spaces or berths for cruise ships. All of that is already done in many places.

Laesser: I would like to take a step back. It is simply important to understand why this phenomenon is occurring. Low-cost airlines in particular have opened up completely new markets. People who have never flown are increasingly flying. Then there is the sharing economy, which I don’t really want to call that here because nothing is shared: instead, resident living space is being converted into overnight accommodation, fuelled by platforms such as Airbnb. Public space is also becoming scarce, and supermarkets are giving way to souvenir shops.

And then of course in certain port cities I have the cruise ships from which thousands of tourists stream ashore at the same time. In a city like Dubrovnik this is even more noticeable than in big cities like Barcelona or Melbourne – even there it can be challenging.

Laesser: We’ve had discussions about overtourism before, but then the corona pandemic came along and the problems surrounding mass tourism were no longer an issue. But now they’re back. When overtourism becomes a problem for the local population is essentially a question of perception: When does the quality of life of the people who live there suffer too much due to mass tourism – and what do they get in return?

Local people can get the impression that only a few people derive much direct economic benefit from tourism in their town and that they get nothing out of it except to make sacrifices. Even if they are sometimes not aware that perhaps they are only living well or their town is doing well economically because there is so much tourism.

It is also about the question: who gets what benefits and who makes what sacrifices and to what extent? And in many places there is an unfavorable symmetry in the perception.

Laesser: One consideration would be: How can I better compensate the locals who feel like they are only making sacrifices? And that brings us back to the example of Venice. If the money collected from day visitors is distributed directly to the local population and does not simply disappear into the city’s coffers, that creates a completely different narrative.

Ultimately, the protests are also based on a kind of distribution problem: who bears the costs or endures the consequences of overtourism and who benefits from it?

ABOUT THE PERSON: Prof. Christian Laesser teaches and researches at the Research Center for Tourism and Transport at the University of St. Gallen. One of his research interests is whether and how tourist flows can be controlled.

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