From Venice to Split, cities are punishing bad tourist behaviour

Tourists made 1.3 billion cross-border trips in 2023. Somewhere in that number, patience ran out.

The global tourism sector now produces more than eight percent of world greenhouse gas emissions, a figure that has hardened attitudes in cities already crowded with visitors. Paige McClanahan lays out the toll in her 2024 book, The New Tourist, which traces how popularity became a liability for the places that courted it hardest.

Venice moved first among the marquee cities. In 2024 it began charging day-trippers an entry fee, the kind of measure that would once have seemed unthinkable in a city built on hospitality. Amsterdam went further the year before, shutting down its downtown cruise ship terminal rather than continue absorbing the crowds it delivered.

Other cities have gone after conduct rather than numbers. Budapest, Munich, Dusseldorf and Prague have all banned the multi-passenger beer bikes that once trundled through their old towns. Dubrovnik has outlawed climbing on statues and walking shirtless through its streets, and neighbouring Split now fines visitors for public urination and vomiting.

Iceland shows what happens when the maths simply stops working. By 2017, foreign arrivals had passed two million a year against a resident population of 350,000, a ratio that reshaped the country's roads, housing and coastline before most locals had a vote on it.

Bhutan chose a different mechanism entirely. Every visitor pays a sustainable development tax of $100 a day, a price designed to keep the country desirable rather than merely full.

Copenhagen has tried persuasion instead of pricing. Its tourism board launched Copenpay in 2024, a scheme that rewards visitors for eco-friendly behaviour rather than penalising the alternative.

Not every government is trying to slow the flow. Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Rwanda and Japan are all still running campaigns to bring overseas visitors in, a reminder that overtourism is a problem of geography, not of travel itself.

McClanahan's own prescription is blunt. "Travel to fewer places, and spend longer there," she said.