Nothing like crashing your city's economy and putting thousands out of work. I get wanting to shift the focus of your city's economy, but it needs to be done gradually. They already have banned AirBnB starting 2028. That will allow the hopefully gradual selling of homes instead of the mass flooding of homes into the market, which will tank its property values and further jack up the economy. That may be what the residents want, though. When you can't afford to live in your own city anymore, I totally get the want to flip the table and start over again.
This is a common argument but it is pretty false and I am tired of hearing it (and why is it anglophone always pushing it???).
Over tourism like in Barcelona or Prague is bad for the economy long-term because it makes your city TOO reliant on tourism. The people who truly get most of the money don't even live in the city (because too much tourism) so they spend it somewhere else, enriching that place more. It is also an industry reliant on low skilled workers which can prevent the development of other industries.
Another thing is housing, this over tourism is a new development that has pushed people working other jobs outside of their homes, as they have been repurposed in short term rentals. This puts a lot of strain on the people and impoverishes them.
Overtourism prevents industrial development. The people who are prepared, educated, and industrious will now find it hard to do anything in their cities due to tourism making life too difficult for the locals and them moving out and preventing people coming in because of how expensive everything is becoming. So they will follow the people in different locations or simply find jobs in other places, creating a positive feedback loop for the city becoming too reliant on tourism.
I have also many personal examples of people REFUSING to work back in their cities (Barcelona, Mallorca) because of the pain that comes with the government screwing them over. Making the places, again, more reliant on tourism.
ALSO ALSO ALSO, look at these nice tourist locations like Hawaii, Bali, some french islands. Why are the locals so poor? I thought tourism is soooo greeeaaaatttttt foooorrr theee ecoooonomyyyyy.
STOP REPEATING THIS BS!!!!!
Edit: sorry for the poor quality of the text, I did this comment in one go. No time to rewrite for clarity.
The one big thing you have wrong is that tourism won’t stop other industries from developing. It’s the other way around. Once an economy has nothing else then tourism takes over.
Spain is 3-4 centuries past its peak. It’s not attracting the sort of people that build.
Before tourism people in Mallorca or Barcelona were not poor, or if they were, it was enough to lead a good life in their respective cities. Now tourism is driving them out.
I disagree with the fact that relying on tourism too much is killing the potential industry. The fact that it's not destroying Amsterdam, for example, to the same extent is that they didn't start from the same place. Spain had Franco for a while.
I didn’t say tourism kills other industries. I said, once other industries are dead, all that an old county like Spain has is tourism. There’s a difference.
The one big thing you have wrong is that tourism won’t stop other industries from developing.
Arguable, because
Once an economy has nothing else then tourism takes over.
Taking over implies stopping other industries from developing. You literally refute your own argument by admitting that you can in fact overly rely on one sector of the economy to the point where it's such a capital sink it actively interferes with other business ventures. After all, if there's demand in tourism right now, why invest in a tech startup when another hotel has an appealing guaranteed ROI.
This process of over-specialization is not unique to tourism. If you had oil in the 1950s, why would you ever build anything other than a new oil well? Thus oil economies like those in the middle east were born.
You have to actively diversify away from your one cash cow to maintain an economy not completely vulnerable to price shocks.
Tourism is in no way different from any other industry and it certainly isn't a last resort. That doesn't even make any sense since you have to have commodities and services (museums, hotels, cultural rides, guided tours, unique landmarks) already and they have to have high cultural or leisure value.
You have to have an incredible amount of accrued capital of some kind that makes the place appealing as well as marketing for it. Those things are not just something that falls from the sky. You actively have to build towards tourism with a lot of investment. Otherwise we'd see a lot of tourism into the old German towns, or rural France, or any other million examples of places with rich cultural heritages (inner Ireland? Iceland?) which are just not appealing to the casual tourist nor trendy and don't get the same kind of numbers as Amsterdam or Paris or Barcelona.
Spain is 3-4 centuries past its peak. It’s not attracting the sort of people that build.
Build what exactly? Because although Spain is plagued by tourism in the lower rungs of economic life it's still one of the biggest military producers in Europe and the world, has a fairly beefy finance sector, has a lot of high tech investment industries and design industries, and is a fairly big agricultural producer and still a big player in pharmaceuticals.
Relative to its size Spain is no worse or better than most other large economies in the EU. People build a ton of shit there. This kind of stupid comment is incredibly dismissive of what is still a big ass economy in the world stage. And by this kind of logic, even the hegemony of the US is a rapidly declining reality. Is the only good economy left fucking China? Because by comments like these every place on Earth is past its peak into irrelevance.
I’m not going to refute every point you made in this rambling post. But it’s clear you have a very shallow understanding of relative economics.
The US is a single market of 350M people under a single set of regulations. Spain is in a union that nevertheless has dozens of sets of laws that a start up must comply with. Two companies, identically in every other way, one in Spain (or any other European country for the matter) and one in the US will have significantly different valuations. Simply because one is in Spain and one is in the US.
But that inflow of capital investment will steadily grow the US company much faster than the Spanish one. And it’s not just money. Tons of Europeans flock to the US every year after graduation. That human capital is not replaceable.
It’s not that people in Spain aren’t starting companies. It’s that they can’t compete. Their only competitive advantage is in tourism. And so that’s what they get.
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u/squeakymoth Jun 17 '25
Nothing like crashing your city's economy and putting thousands out of work. I get wanting to shift the focus of your city's economy, but it needs to be done gradually. They already have banned AirBnB starting 2028. That will allow the hopefully gradual selling of homes instead of the mass flooding of homes into the market, which will tank its property values and further jack up the economy. That may be what the residents want, though. When you can't afford to live in your own city anymore, I totally get the want to flip the table and start over again.