The road overtraveled

Valencia combats the tide of overtourism

By Ericka Rivera

For many, the chance to travel to Europe and immerse themselves in a culture so much older and different from their own is a once in a lifetime opportunity—with visits to humanity’s most iconic landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, and the Acropolis topping most travelers’ bucket lists.

But after years of saving and months of careful planning, travelers embark on their whirlwind tour of Europe only to discover while wrestling through herds of camera-clicking tourists that half the planet also had the same idea.

When I went to Paris, the Louvre museum was so crowded that I didn’t even try to wade through the crowds of tourists to see the Mona Lisa,

says Melissa Kindma, an editing, writing, and media student who studied at FSU Valencia in summer 2019.

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, international travel has become a lopsided picture, with European countries receiving the brunt of international arrivals.

Travel has become cheaper, more appealing, and more convenient than ever, spurring a travel boom that has left European countries struggling to keep head above water under the waves of tourists.

In 2016, Spain alone received 76 million foreign visitors—30 million more than the county’s total population— with the majority of tourists swarming the already populous cities of Madrid and Barcelona.

While far removed from Barcelona-levels of overcrowding, FSU International Programs’s hometown of Valencia is also feeling the effects of overtourism, which has led to some resentment from local residents and discussions about how to regulate the effects of tourism boosters such as Airbnb.

While overtourism’s impact has been increasing since the mid-2000s, the term was not widely used until 2015. Overtourism occurs when tourists flood a destination in such large numbers that it strains resources to the point it becomes unsustainable for the affected city or region.

Local residents feel most of the negative impact. Cities’ infrastructures become overloaded, causing crowding in the streets and sidewalks, overfull buses and metros, and long lines at public restrooms.

A 2017 anti-tourism protest organized by Valencia-based Entre-Barris.

Photo courtesy of Heraldo

“Tourism puts a strain on resources in terms of accommodating people,” says Dr. Joe Calhoun, who taught economics at FSU Valencia in summer 2019. “When you put more than a million people into a physical location that is used to only a million, it’s is going to put a strain on existing resources.”

The natural environment and cultural treasures are also threatened by pollution, overuse, disrespectful visitors, or neglect from the host city’s overextended financial or human resources. Apartment buildings become hostels as Airbnbs flood residencies with a revolving door of noisy tourists, destroying any sense of community for people who like to know their neighbors.

Moreover, the cost of living begins to soar as real estate speculation results in high taxes and raised housing prices. Corporate interest and establishment of chain stores threaten not only local mom-and-pops but the city’s very cultural identity as it undergoes “Disneyfication,” morphing into pseudo-travel resorts to become more appealing to traveling consumers.

Even the quality of the tourist experience begins to suffer as people are forced to wait in long lines, stumble through crowded museums, eat at overpriced restaurants, deal with increasingly overtaxed service workers, and fight with hundreds of other tourists to take the perfect picture of the same thing.

A perfect storm

This sudden surge in mass international tourism is caused by a perfect storm of factors. Primarily, the growing middle class in developing countries like China, India, and Brazil means there are suddenly billions of people with disposable income. The dispersion of this new, huge tourist population is spread unevenly as they flock toward travel meccas such as Paris, New York, Venice, and Barcelona.

“With economic growth comes spending money,” says Dr. Jeff Overby, professor of marketing and international business and director of the Center for International Business at Belmont University. “And that’s where you really see the huge difference in the number of tourists coming from what were traditionally developing economies.” Overby was previously on the faculty of FSU in Tallahassee and has taught at FSU Valencia many times.

Overby is not alone in this view. Calhoun agrees.

[There has been] a surge in all incomes, especially middle-class incomes, over the last 20 or 30 years, which simply gives people the ability to travel,

Calhoun says.

Furthermore, with the Internet, people have access to more images of these iconic, far-away destinations. Websites such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, and other reservation platforms make it easy to gather information and plan trips abroad. The price of airline travel has decreased while the speed of the airplanes has increased, meaning travelers can arrive cheaper and faster than before.

Social media and search engines such as Google have increased awareness of potential travel destinations. Even more, social media culture itself has created an emphasis on showing off travel and other similar experiences as a form of status signaling.

Experiential travel is the new kind of materialism,

Overby says. “It sounds like an oxymoron: The words experiential and materialism don’t seem to go together because materialism traditionally relates to something material, an object. Yet, people are spending money on that as much as they are on tangible products.”

As a result, the recent generations of millennials and Gen Zers have expressed more interest in travel than their parents or grandparents ever did. According to Business Insider, 18- to 34-year-olds are most likely to spend more money on vacations than any other age group.

“The desire of people to travel is stronger today than it was 40 or 50 years ago,” Calhoun says. “People just want to go out and see the world more. I don’t remember very many conversations with my immediate family when I was a kid about this huge desire to go see the world. They were just very content in their own town, doing small vacations, maybe going to another state just to see something different.”

Anti-tourism street art near Park Güell in Barcelona.

A blessing and a curse?

Noticing the trend of over-tourism in certain cities, in June 2019 The New York Times published an article titled “6 Places in Europe Offering Shelter From Crowds.” The article recommends Valencia as a travel alternative to Barcelona, stating, “Valencia maintains an under-the-radar vibe and is blissfully free of masses of tourists racing from monument to monument, leaving plastic water bottles and local resentment in their wake.”

While Valencia’s service-oriented businesses and tourism board were perhaps overjoyed to see their city garner the attention of crowd-weary tourists, the Valencia-based anti-tourist organization EntreBarris was less than pleased.

Fearing that the article would lure a large number of tourists to Valencia, and with them much of the economic and cultural problems that plague Barcelona, EntreBarris responded in a June 17, 2019 Facebook post: “The model of overtourism is copied from one city to the other. Barcelona is overcrowded, let’s go then to Valencia and overcrowd it. #VLCforSale.”

According to Ajuntament de Valencia’s statistics summary of the city of Valencia, overnight stays by tourists have slowly increased from 3.2 million in 2012 to 4 million in 2017. Unsurprisingly, Valencia’s variety of attractions makes it an appealing destination. The nearby beaches, the futuristic City of Arts and Sciences, Ciutat Vella’s Gothic marvels, and the traditional festivals—not to mention the abundant sunshine—attract tourists of all kinds.

Having been here since 2001, [I have] seen the number of tourists really explode

Overby says. “[There’s] more of everything: more tourists in general, more guided tours, and certainly more tours associated with the cruises.”

While not quite locals, FSU students have also noticed tourist activity in the Ciutat Vella (Old Town) during their handful of weeks or months in Valencia.

“When I’m trying to get to class, the tours are always in my way, riding their bikes, scooters, and Segways,” senior Kayla Walston says. “I’ve almost been run over several times.”

FSU junior Rebecca McCandless agrees. “It was annoying how many crowds of tourists would try to push us out of the way while we were standing in Plaza de la Virgen,” McCandless says.

Touristic interest can encourage growth and opportunities for local entrepreneurs, but it can also attract corporate interests and tourism-driven gentrification.

Valencians have been impacted the most by an increase in housing costs. In the neighborhoods of Ciutat Vella and Ruzafa, the rise of hotels, tourist apartments, Airbnbs and other tourism-oriented buisnesses have increased rental prices and displaced families from their homes. According to a report made by the Ajuntament de Valencia, the number of apartments with rent less than €450 per month decreased from 2,093 in 2014 to 233 in 2017.

“It’s kind of a supply and demand issue: The more people are demanding real estate, the more likely the value of that real estate is going to increase,” Overby says. “And then that’s going to make the price higher, which is going to make it harder for people to buy.”

Some alienated citizens have been driven to protest. In a demonstration organized by EntreBarris in 2017, nearly 100 Valencians dressed up as fake tourists and marched about the neighborhoods of el Carmen, Velluters and Mercat de Valencia to protest the encroachment upon the historic center by touristic forces.

On May 11, 2019, 100 different organizations, including EntreBarris, joined together in a demonstration titled “València No Està En Venda” (Valencia is not for sale). Thousands of protesters marched to the local seat of government, the Palau de la Generalitat. According to the coalition’s website, the coalition strives “to stop overtourism through restrictive regulation of tourist accommodations.”

Tightening the rules

Responding to pressure from local residents, the Generalitat of Valencia is tapping the breaks on the growing number of tourist accommodations. According to Valencian newspaper Las Provincias, registered tourist housing has decreased for the first time from 5,906 in 2018 to 5,756 in 2019.

By Valencian law, each room used for holiday rental must be registered at the Registro de Empresas, Establecimientos y Profesiones Turísticas. Those looking to apply must meet stringent requirements and cut through bureaucratic red tape to register their properties.

If approved after such a complicated and time-consuming process, landlords receive a license number that they must place on all advertisements. Those without the compulsory license number will be levied a large fine. In this way, the Valencian government hopes to ensure that the demand for tourist accommodations does not replace housing for local residents.

However, the hospitality service brokerage site Airbnb has allowed non-registered Valencian properties to be listed on their database without the necessary license.

According to a February 2019 survey conducted by the Institutional Chair of Collaborative Economics of the University of Valencia on the effects of Airbnbs, of the 1,257 listings for Airbnbs in Ciutat Vella, 531 of them were illegal and operating without a license number.

“Booking[.com] and other booking websites require a number, but Airbnb does not,” says Francisco Redondo, economist, member of Valencia’s Chamber of Commerce, and former University of Valencia professor.

The landlord of the Cathedral Apartments since 1995, Redondo rents out his tourist apartments for FSU Valencia students.

“Airbnb does not meet the increasingly stringent requirements made by the Generalitat of Valencia, which has a strong bias against tourist apartments.” Redondo says.

In response, the Generalitat is levying a sanction of up to €600,000 (roughly $660,000-$678,000 USD, depending on the exchange rate) against Airbnb. For its part, Airbnb reacted with a statement announcing the company’s plans to appeal the sanction and criticized the generalitat’s decision, which Airbnb says “goes against the tourism entrepreneurs of the community.”

Valencia isn’t the only city in Spain to regulate in response to Airbnbs. Barcelona has a similar law that requires all listings to carry a license number.

In 2016, Barcelona’s government created a website for residents to report illegal tourist apartments and used computer tracking software to scrutinize the listings. In Palma, a city on the Spanish island of Mallorca, a flat-out ban has been placed on renting any apartments to tourists.

"Some of the backlashes with Airbnbs is not just what it’s doing to value, to cost, and to prices, but people who want to feel like they want to know their neighbors,"Overby says.

And if a certain percentage of a building becomes Airbnbs, you’ve got a different group of people staying in the condo next door every week. And you want to feel like you know your neighbors and live in a community, and it becomes less of a community.

Finding a middle ground

While residents of overtourism capitals feel the brunt of Airbnb’s negative effects, its positive effects cannot be ignored either. Airbnb’s convenience and lower prices have made it much easier for people to travel, Calhoun explains, emphasizing what the savings can mean for consumers.

“I personally believe that Airbnb probably does more good than harm,” Calhoun says. “Because what Airbnb does is it acts as a middleman, and what a middleman does is reduce transaction costs. What Airbnb does is they come in and they help match information much faster and probably at a lower price.”

Ultimately, Airbnb problems are a side-effect of a bigger issue. With an estimated one billion more people joining the global middle class by 2030, the complex phenomenon of overtourism will not go away anytime soon.

“It is the new normal,” Overby says. “But it can be managed.”

Growing tourism centers like Valencia must hit that sweet spot of watching and regulating tourism growth while at the same time not hindering tourism’s positive monetary effects on the local economy.

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council’s 2017 report “Coping with Success: Managing Overcrowding in Tourism Destinations,” host cities should strive to encourage year-round travel, disperse tourists to less-visited areas, raise prices based on demand, regulate tourist accommodations, and limit tourist access to activities or destinations if the crowding comes to a critical point.

Pre-emptive tourism management and early planning by host cities are essential.

“When overcrowding goes too far, the repercussions are difficult to reverse,” the report says.