7 ms·

So you work hard to make your city to become one of the major tourist destinations in the world, who bring in a lot of money and help the local business flouris

So you work hard to make your city to become one of the major tourist destinations in the world, who bring in a lot of money and help the local business flourish, and then need a reprieve from that? Kinda counterproductive, no?

WJW 5y ago
At some point the tourism became somewhat self-reinforcing and needed no more inputs from the city itself. However, when every evening you have an unending stream of tourists puking all over the streets, starting fights and bothering locals there is a point where the downsides for the 90% of people in the non-tourism sector become more important than the upsides for the 10% who make their money off tourists. We'll find something else to do for them.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
Even as an expat who has been traveling and living abroad for years, I'd have to admit it's true that tourism doesn't necessarily remain a beneficial thing as tourist numbers get larger. I'm generally not a fan of the word "sustainable" so I won't use the phrase "sustainable tourism", but it behooves cities (and countries) to find a balance between making themselves attractive to tourists and making sure that the costs of tourism don't exceed the benefits. Tourism should allow tourists to experience a different place and everything that it's home to (the people, the food, the culture, etc.). When places fundamentally change in an effort to serve tourists, you basically have what I like to call "Disneyland syndrome". They become artificial destinations and the interests of the people who live there are sacrificed to create an optimal experience for the guests. Airbnb is a parasite and one of the first things cities should look at when rethinking their tourism strategies.
- pietrovismara 5y ago
  > tourism doesn't necessarily remain a beneficial thing as tourist numbers get larger I always said this. Italy is addicted to tourism, an addiction that so far has only benefitted a few, while impacting negatively the majority of the population.
- tristor 5y ago
  > Airbnb is a parasite and one of the first things cities should look at when rethinking their tourism strategies. As someone who has traveled extensively, I agree entirely about "disneyland syndrome", and I'm one of those travelers that tries to avoid such things. I generally don't travel to places which are tourist destinations, in the first place. Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local, mostly buy groceries and cook, and work during the week only going out in the evenings and weekends. AirBnB is essential to the way I travel, because it allows me to rent an apartment for a month that has normal apartment amenities like a basic kitchen. Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience. From my perspective, AirBnB has enabled me and others like me to connect to the world and experience things that would be impossible otherwise, and at the same time has provided opportunities for those we interacted with along the way (I leveraged my network while traveling to help many of the people I met, connecting a budding craft brewer with resources to help them succeed, introducing a very good local photographer to english-language resources online to let them sell their photography, connecting someone who wanted to come to the US as an SWE with the right people so they could get hired and have their H1B sponsored, etc). It's not really AirBnB, or rather what AirBnB is in essence, that's the issue, it's that it creates and enables a pathway for individuals to skirt location regulations to make a profit. Many of the places I visited had no regulations against short-term rentals because the idea that someone might do such a thing wasn't really on the mind of local regulators, but in key tourist destinations this is very much on the mind of local regulators, not the least of which because they can tax tourism directly via stays.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    > Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local... The thing is that as a tourist/traveler, it's not all about you (or me). You need to consider and be respectful of the impact your experience can have on the very locals you want to live like. Your desire to have a kitchen is reasonably not more important than a local's desire to not see the apartment next to them converted into a illegal short-term rental where random strangers routinely come and go, or to be priced out of the market because it's more profitable for landlords to convert properties into illegal short-term rentals. Incidentally, "living like a local" is about more than having a kitchen and this is in my opinion one of the most overused terms among the nomad set, but that said, if you really want to stay somewhere longer term and have a visa that lets you do so, you can try to rent a property legitimately. In fact, finding a legitimate rental, meeting a landlord, signing a lease, etc. is a perfect opportunity to "live like a local". > Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience. As you said, some places don't even have regulations because they don't see many tourists. It's one thing to show up in a town that's off the beaten track and be introduced to someone who will rent you a room for a few nights. It's another to have property owners interested in maximizing their earnings advertising their property to every Tom, Dick and Harry using the internet.
lnxg33k1 5y ago
It's rich getting richer at the cost of a whole bunch of individuals getting f*ked, hospitality staff is still being underpaid with 0hours contracts, and tenants are still being f*ked with increased housing prices, so COVID was quite good for lower classes, and I have no sympathy for the upper ones, the worst they get, the happier I am
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  > and I have no sympathy for the upper ones, the worst they get, the happier I am That's the stance I fully despise. My country (Russia) has suffered tremendously (and still does, 100 years later) because people sharing such ideas took power, killing dozens of millions in the process.
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    The thing is that you guys from Russia have started thinking that you're the solo holder of human sufference, I come from Southern Italy with Mafia and absent government, where rich get richer, kids play on the street surrounded by heroin needles, all with few castles of rich people being the kings among the shit, so yeah I won't dare to tell you how entitled you are to your ideas, but probably if the people that took power had the feeling that doing what they did was fair, maybe had their reasons
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      The proper solution is not to rob the rich under the cheering applause of people like you, but to make poor people more wealthy.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - lnxg33k1 5y ago
        Yeah it's a shame that no one thought about fighting inequality making workers wealthier so far, thank God there are people like you that enlighten us, you're also one of those who found that guns don't shot people but it's people that shot people, right? If the solution is that then why the rich oppose the increase of minimum wage? What should be the solution to making workers wealthier without touching the bosses? The stock market? After all the crashes and wealth theft of funds? Do you guys ever connect the brain before typing?
TomSwirly 5y ago
How could we possibly think of changing with the times? Why wouldn't we want to continue have mobs of drunken British yobbos throwing up in the streets? (Note: I'm British for a little bit longer, so I can say such things.) And we're seriously thinking of banning cruise ships here in Amsterdam - against, too much hassle, not enough revenue, lot of pollution. If that happens, they will raise the bed of the river IJ 4 meters and put a bike tunnel underneath it!
elzbardico 5y ago
Let me tell you. I was a poor boy growing in a tourist city in a latin american country. It was a small town, a bit sophisticated, so we got the cream of the tourism business: Upper middle class families. Indeed, plenty of money flowed into the city. But, it was not distributed equaly. Social mobility was almost null, because tourism have lots of jobs, but most of them low skill jobs. Then, there's this permanent humiliation of feeling like a servant in your home-town, because the local upper class makes very clear to you peons, that you're less important than the tourists, and they also think this very clearly. Any business not related to tourism is basically discouraged, because it could "change the character of our lovely paradise". Basically, unless you're rich and have business in tourism, tourism is not that great. Yeah, it puts food on the table when you're poor, but so other jobs that you could have if it were not for the damned tourists that make you a second class citizen in your own place of living.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Then, there's this permanent humiliation of feeling like a servant in your home-town, because the local upper class makes very clear to you peons, that you're less important than the tourists, and they also think this very clearly. We see this happen in the US, too, when a handful of billionaires buy up small town property and turn it into a resort town, driving out the locals. Some of my friends in that situation got "servant" level jobs as teenagers and really think that, somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
  - solveit 5y ago
    Somehow I suspect you're not being very charitable towards your friends. Would they describe their own thought processes as > somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      At least one would, yeah.
  - 5y ago
phicoh 5y ago
Relatively speaking, Amsterdam doesn't make that much money from tourists. In a city center that is completely overcrowded, there is no net gain of having even more people. Tourists are good for certain local business. Mostly low quality bars, restaurants, shops. Anything more upscale doesn't benefit from an endless stream of people who seem to have nothing better to do than just walk around. Without tourists, buildings would quickly fill with residents. Bars, restaurants, and shops have to up their game to sell to local people. Obviously, there is no reason to get rid of all tourists. But restricting the number of tourists to avoid an overcrowed center is a good idea.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  The one thing they're really good for is the drug trade. Visitors here are always surprised that the locals don't all seem to be weed/cocaine/whatever using junkies. Pointing out that the bulk of the tourists does not come to Amsterdam for the architecture but for the dope and the red-light district usually doesn't go down well because they are not that kind of tourist.
mmarq 5y ago
Tourism is for the largest part an extremely low value added activity, for which location is the most important factor. So the owner of the hotel makes millions and everybody else makes peanuts. The very last thing we should work hard to achieve is turning cities into major tourist destinations.

WJW 5y ago

At some point the tourism became somewhat self-reinforcing and needed no more inputs from the city itself. However, when every evening you have an unending stream of tourists puking all over the streets, starting fights and bothering locals there is a point where the downsides for the 90% of people in the non-tourism sector become more important than the upsides for the 10% who make their money off tourists. We'll find something else to do for them.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

Even as an expat who has been traveling and living abroad for years, I'd have to admit it's true that tourism doesn't necessarily remain a beneficial thing as tourist numbers get larger. I'm generally not a fan of the word "sustainable" so I won't use the phrase "sustainable tourism", but it behooves cities (and countries) to find a balance between making themselves attractive to tourists and making sure that the costs of tourism don't exceed the benefits. Tourism should allow tourists to experience a different place and everything that it's home to (the people, the food, the culture, etc.). When places fundamentally change in an effort to serve tourists, you basically have what I like to call "Disneyland syndrome". They become artificial destinations and the interests of the people who live there are sacrificed to create an optimal experience for the guests. Airbnb is a parasite and one of the first things cities should look at when rethinking their tourism strategies.

pietrovismara 5y ago
> tourism doesn't necessarily remain a beneficial thing as tourist numbers get larger I always said this. Italy is addicted to tourism, an addiction that so far has only benefitted a few, while impacting negatively the majority of the population.
tristor 5y ago
> Airbnb is a parasite and one of the first things cities should look at when rethinking their tourism strategies. As someone who has traveled extensively, I agree entirely about "disneyland syndrome", and I'm one of those travelers that tries to avoid such things. I generally don't travel to places which are tourist destinations, in the first place. Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local, mostly buy groceries and cook, and work during the week only going out in the evenings and weekends. AirBnB is essential to the way I travel, because it allows me to rent an apartment for a month that has normal apartment amenities like a basic kitchen. Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience. From my perspective, AirBnB has enabled me and others like me to connect to the world and experience things that would be impossible otherwise, and at the same time has provided opportunities for those we interacted with along the way (I leveraged my network while traveling to help many of the people I met, connecting a budding craft brewer with resources to help them succeed, introducing a very good local photographer to english-language resources online to let them sell their photography, connecting someone who wanted to come to the US as an SWE with the right people so they could get hired and have their H1B sponsored, etc). It's not really AirBnB, or rather what AirBnB is in essence, that's the issue, it's that it creates and enables a pathway for individuals to skirt location regulations to make a profit. Many of the places I visited had no regulations against short-term rentals because the idea that someone might do such a thing wasn't really on the mind of local regulators, but in key tourist destinations this is very much on the mind of local regulators, not the least of which because they can tax tourism directly via stays.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  > Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local... The thing is that as a tourist/traveler, it's not all about you (or me). You need to consider and be respectful of the impact your experience can have on the very locals you want to live like. Your desire to have a kitchen is reasonably not more important than a local's desire to not see the apartment next to them converted into a illegal short-term rental where random strangers routinely come and go, or to be priced out of the market because it's more profitable for landlords to convert properties into illegal short-term rentals. Incidentally, "living like a local" is about more than having a kitchen and this is in my opinion one of the most overused terms among the nomad set, but that said, if you really want to stay somewhere longer term and have a visa that lets you do so, you can try to rent a property legitimately. In fact, finding a legitimate rental, meeting a landlord, signing a lease, etc. is a perfect opportunity to "live like a local". > Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience. As you said, some places don't even have regulations because they don't see many tourists. It's one thing to show up in a town that's off the beaten track and be introduced to someone who will rent you a room for a few nights. It's another to have property owners interested in maximizing their earnings advertising their property to every Tom, Dick and Harry using the internet.

lnxg33k1 5y ago

It's rich getting richer at the cost of a whole bunch of individuals getting f*ked, hospitality staff is still being underpaid with 0hours contracts, and tenants are still being f*ked with increased housing prices, so COVID was quite good for lower classes, and I have no sympathy for the upper ones, the worst they get, the happier I am

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
> and I have no sympathy for the upper ones, the worst they get, the happier I am That's the stance I fully despise. My country (Russia) has suffered tremendously (and still does, 100 years later) because people sharing such ideas took power, killing dozens of millions in the process.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  The thing is that you guys from Russia have started thinking that you're the solo holder of human sufference, I come from Southern Italy with Mafia and absent government, where rich get richer, kids play on the street surrounded by heroin needles, all with few castles of rich people being the kings among the shit, so yeah I won't dare to tell you how entitled you are to your ideas, but probably if the people that took power had the feeling that doing what they did was fair, maybe had their reasons
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    The proper solution is not to rob the rich under the cheering applause of people like you, but to make poor people more wealthy.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lnxg33k1 5y ago
      Yeah it's a shame that no one thought about fighting inequality making workers wealthier so far, thank God there are people like you that enlighten us, you're also one of those who found that guns don't shot people but it's people that shot people, right? If the solution is that then why the rich oppose the increase of minimum wage? What should be the solution to making workers wealthier without touching the bosses? The stock market? After all the crashes and wealth theft of funds? Do you guys ever connect the brain before typing?

TomSwirly 5y ago

How could we possibly think of changing with the times? Why wouldn't we want to continue have mobs of drunken British yobbos throwing up in the streets? (Note: I'm British for a little bit longer, so I can say such things.) And we're seriously thinking of banning cruise ships here in Amsterdam - against, too much hassle, not enough revenue, lot of pollution. If that happens, they will raise the bed of the river IJ 4 meters and put a bike tunnel underneath it!

elzbardico 5y ago

Let me tell you. I was a poor boy growing in a tourist city in a latin american country. It was a small town, a bit sophisticated, so we got the cream of the tourism business: Upper middle class families. Indeed, plenty of money flowed into the city. But, it was not distributed equaly. Social mobility was almost null, because tourism have lots of jobs, but most of them low skill jobs. Then, there's this permanent humiliation of feeling like a servant in your home-town, because the local upper class makes very clear to you peons, that you're less important than the tourists, and they also think this very clearly. Any business not related to tourism is basically discouraged, because it could "change the character of our lovely paradise". Basically, unless you're rich and have business in tourism, tourism is not that great. Yeah, it puts food on the table when you're poor, but so other jobs that you could have if it were not for the damned tourists that make you a second class citizen in your own place of living.

nitrogen 5y ago
Then, there's this permanent humiliation of feeling like a servant in your home-town, because the local upper class makes very clear to you peons, that you're less important than the tourists, and they also think this very clearly. We see this happen in the US, too, when a handful of billionaires buy up small town property and turn it into a resort town, driving out the locals. Some of my friends in that situation got "servant" level jobs as teenagers and really think that, somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
- solveit 5y ago
  Somehow I suspect you're not being very charitable towards your friends. Would they describe their own thought processes as > somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    At least one would, yeah.
- 5y ago

phicoh 5y ago

Relatively speaking, Amsterdam doesn't make that much money from tourists. In a city center that is completely overcrowded, there is no net gain of having even more people. Tourists are good for certain local business. Mostly low quality bars, restaurants, shops. Anything more upscale doesn't benefit from an endless stream of people who seem to have nothing better to do than just walk around. Without tourists, buildings would quickly fill with residents. Bars, restaurants, and shops have to up their game to sell to local people. Obviously, there is no reason to get rid of all tourists. But restricting the number of tourists to avoid an overcrowed center is a good idea.

jacquesm 5y ago
The one thing they're really good for is the drug trade. Visitors here are always surprised that the locals don't all seem to be weed/cocaine/whatever using junkies. Pointing out that the bulk of the tourists does not come to Amsterdam for the architecture but for the dope and the red-light district usually doesn't go down well because they are not that kind of tourist.

mmarq 5y ago

Tourism is for the largest part an extremely low value added activity, for which location is the most important factor. So the owner of the hotel makes millions and everybody else makes peanuts. The very last thing we should work hard to achieve is turning cities into major tourist destinations.