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…