Bans, Fees, Taxes. Can Anything Stop Overtourism?

For years, Dubrovnik, Croatia, has been a poster child for overtourism, with summer visitors vastly outnumbering the local population and the municipal government repeatedly introducing measures to diminish the size and impact of a flood of tourists that turns the historic center into a crowded parking lot of selfie-snappers.

But you would never know about the negative effects of so many visitors from the Croatian Ministry of Tourism’s recent triumphant announcement noting that arrivals to the city had increased 9 percent in 2024, compared to 2023. “By all parameters we achieved another record year,” the tourism minister, Tonci Glavina, was quoted as saying.

If 2024 was the year in which concerns about overtourism achieved a critical mass in places around the globe, sparking protests from Amsterdam to the Canary Islands, and triggering new regulations from Iceland to Indonesia, it was also the year in which it became clear just how complicated reducing tourism, once it is unleashed, can be.

This year will see even more locations enact measures, but the evidence on how — or even whether — tourism can be constrained remains scarce. Competing economic interests have a way of impeding attempts to stem the tourist tide.

“The hard truth is that once overtourism has arrived,” said Rachel Dodds, professor of tourism management at Toronto Metropolitan University, “it’s exceedingly difficult to turn back the clock.”

A longstanding problem

As early as 2010, tourism experts observed that some destinations were approaching or had exceeded their carrying capacity. By the middle of the last decade, cities like Amsterdam and Barcelona had begun taking tentative steps to relieve tourism’s impacts on infrastructure, housing, the environment and quality of life.

But it was only after the pandemic, when “revenge travel” brought greater numbers of visitors to more destinations, that efforts to apply the brakes became more widespread.

This year, travelers will feel the effects of those efforts. New legislation regulating Airbnbs and other short-term rentals goes into effect in France, the Czech Republic and Greece, where a 24.5 percent surge in foreign visitors in 2024 over the previous year is also behind an increased tax — up to 20 euros a day — for cruise passengers on the islands of Santorini and Mykonos.

Ports from Ibiza, Spain, to Juneau, Alaska, are restricting the number of cruise ships that can dock simultaneously, and in Juneau’s case, will be cutting back on the number of passengers allowed each day. Bruges, Belgium, has halted new hotel construction, and Amsterdam, after imposing a similar measure in 2024, only to discover that some accommodations were exploiting a loophole, passed another measure in November that prevents them from adding more rooms or beds to their offerings.

In Italy, tourists will be limited to 20,000 a day in Pompeii, and new legislation in Florence may prevent tourists from using golf carts to tool around.

New Zealand will require visitors to pay a $100 tourist tax — three times higher than it was for most of last year, while the Galápagos Islands has doubled its fee to $200. In Japan, the mountain town of Ginzan Onsen recently joined Mount Fuji and some streets in Kyoto in restricting tourist numbers. And in South Korea, authorities have imposed a curfew in a historic neighborhood of Seoul to dampen tourist excesses.

Will regulations work?

“The major issue is that for many, many years, we’ve been utilizing an extractive model of tourism that says ‘numbers at any cost,’” said Marina Novelli, the director of the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Center at the University of Nottingham. “Now we are in a situation where all these kinds of things are being implemented, like restricting numbers and tourist taxes as reactive strategies.”

Whether these strategies will work remains to be seen. The evidence is spotty and suggests that measures take a long time to have an effect. Barcelona, for example, implemented its first tourist tax in 2012, began restricting short-term rentals in 2015 and capped new hotel construction in 2017. Yet tourists continued to arrive in record numbers through the first third of 2024. It was only at the end of the year that the annual rate of arrivals showed a modest 0.7 percent decline over 2023. In Amsterdam, which began targeting overtourism in 2016, arrivals are expected to climb to 26 million in 2026.

Curbing numbers is not always the primary aim. Capping short-term rentals, for example, is frequently posed as a solution to housing shortages, while tourist taxes can be intended to offset the strain that overtourism can place on resources.

“Some places, like New Zealand and Hawaii, are trying to do it as more of a regenerative or stewardship measure,” Ms. Dodds said. “While in others, like Venice, it is punitive, slapping a tax on and thinking it would persuade people not to come.”

Set at an amount roughly equivalent to a coffee and cornetto, Venice’s 5 euro fee, introduced last year, was hardly dissuasive. Venice seems to have reached the same conclusion: This year, the rate doubles to 10 euros.

Will that have more of an impact? According to Ko Koens, a professor of urban tourism at Inholland University for the Applied Sciences, no one knows. “I can tell you for sure that 5 euros wouldn’t work,” he said. “But we don’t have enough data to know how high it has to be to work.”

Other measures in Venice have also come up short. The city recently began diverting cruise ships from its historic center. While the initiative may lessen environmental damage, it has not had any discernible effect on passenger numbers. In the fall of 2024, Venice predicted a 9 percent increase for the year over 2023, thanks to its newly ‘distributed’ ports.

In fact, restricting passengers in one area may channel overtourism to another. “It’s like a water bed,” Mr. Koens said. “By spreading people out to other places, you’re potentially increasing overtourism issues.”

New York City began enforcing a pre-existing ban on short-term rentals last year. The measure, which some experts correlate to 2024’s 7 percent increase in hotel rates over the previous year, has sent tourists to surrounding areas where the rentals are legal. New Jersey has become the fastest growing market for Airbnb demand in the United States, according to the analytics site AirDNA. Yet it does not appear to have reduced the number of tourists to New York itself — the city expects to surpass its previous record of 66.6 million in 2019 by 1.4 million in 2025.

Dubrovnik and Copenhagen, and the resistance to limits

The greatest obstacle to solving overtourism may be the lack of consensus that it is actually a problem. As a source of revenue and employment — globally, tourism generated a record 1.6 trillion dollars in 2024 — travel is an engine for economic growth.

Because of that role, most attempts to limit tourism face opposition — witness the recent decision to repeal Bali’s planned moratorium on new hotel construction.

Mato Frankovic, the mayor of Dubrovnik, has experienced that resistance. After he reduced the number of cruise ships, restricted rentals in the Old Town, and cut the number of tables and chairs in outdoor cafes by 30 percent and the number of souvenir stands by 70 percent, international and local businesses rebelled. “The opposition was saying I was going to ruin the city,” Mr. Frankovic said.

He persevered. This year the city will reduce the number of taxis; introduce apps that regulate tour bus arrivals and direct visitors to alternative sites at peak times; and enact national legislation that requires apartment owners in multidwelling buildings to obtain the consent from 80 percent of other residents before they can rent their apartment.

Yet even when municipal or regional authorities are determined to make changes, they can find themselves pitted against a national government that prioritizes economic growth.

Take Copenhagen. The city council approved a tourist tax in 2024 “as a nice way to prevent us from ending up like Barcelona,” said Rasmus Steenberger, a member of the municipal government. But the national government — which is currently expanding Copenhagen’s airport, and recently announced a plan to increase tourism revenue to 200 billion kroner per year (about $28 billion) from 152 billion kroner, by 2030 — rejected the proposed tourist tax.

Searching for a real solution

Such conflict is why many experts believe more profound changes are needed.

Ms. Dodds, of Toronto Metropolitan University, said that a solution requires rethinking the definition of success. “U.N. Tourism still measures success by the number of arrivals, which essentially is perpetuating the problems of overtourism,” she said. “So the conversation needs to be, how do we change the metrics of success?”

There are signs that new metrics are emerging. Both Bruges and Norway pulled tourism advertising campaigns last year, and some cruise and tour companies have voluntarily scratched Santorini and Mykonos from their itineraries for 2025 and 2026.

But with international arrivals globally expected to grow 12.4 percent in 2025 over their 2019 levels, overtourism seems likely to spread. “I’m not sure there is a solution,” said Ms. Novelli of the University of Nottingham. “Unless it’s people taking responsibility and saying, ‘You know what? I don’t need to see Venice. I’m not going to go.’”

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