How cities can fix tourism hell
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Pigovian taxes have been a thing for fifty years, yet they are still seldom used. It seems like such an obvious solution to me that the fact it's not used more often (ex: towns banning airbnb vs taxing it) suggests to me that I'm missing something obvious.
Back home, there’s been debate about doing this too. I hope the pro-tax side wins. Our country is suffering under the annual tourist load, and we need more money in the pot to support it — at the basic end of the spectrum, there are lots of popular places that desperately need toilets and rubbish facilities for the tourists (and the locals) to use. Private industry cannot fill that gap (or, so far, has not) — and while the public are profiting from the visitors, more of that profit needs to be diverted to public coffers to enable the government to fix the problem. A bed tax is a great tool for helping that to happen.
This is exactly the right strategy! And the "infrastructure to support more tourists" is exactly what this article lays out.
[1]: https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/15/18096775/bart-second-crossi...
I suppose you'll say everybody should just move out if they don't like it, but most people consider it the better option to plan how their cities evolve.
A bed tax in general, applicable to both hotels and AirBNB, I suspect probably deals better with the other end of the spectrum. At the end of the spectrum I'm thinking about (and probably my co-poster), extra funding is necessary for the municipalities that can sustain further growth of their tourism industry, but are struggling to keep up with demand. New Zealand falls somewhere in here; we have significant problems with tourists literally shitting on walking trails because the previous Government dropped all its tourist budget on global advertising, and didn't anticipate the sheer success they'd have; we therefore lack basic amenities like toilets in many popular tourist spots (or -- if there are toilets -- they're long drops maintained by the Department of Conservation, which most tourists won't use). We can do better with a little extra cash; I believe the new Government is currently investigating a border tax, but a bed tax would help the regions too. Other major metropolises popular with tourists like Paris, Rome, Barcelona etc. could use the extra cash in broadly similar ways; supporting the growth of transit systems and developing infrastructure that supports and promotes distributing the tourist load to other attractions.
I suspect that if you were to put in a large bed tax with the explicit goal of discouraging visitors in places like Venice... it might not work? The rich would put up with it and go anyway. You'd probably cut out many of the poorer visitors, but I doubt you'd see a big net drop unless the tax approached a point that it killed the tourism industry altogether, and sunk the local economy. I suspect that for somewhere like Venice, there needs to be stronger intervention; the category of idea I'm thinking of is a lottery system like the US parks or something.
A tourist tax doesn’t really increase the cost of staying somewhere - if I’m willing g to spend $200 on a hotel in Venice it doesn’t matter if it’s $190 for the hotel and $10 for the tax, or $100 each.
On the other hand if the hotel could get customers willing to pay $300, they would charge that anyway.
A tourist tax shifts the money away from the hotel owner to the local government to pay for the externalities the hotel owner doesn’t. By targeting tourists rather than beds it also means that people on a business trip pay less, helping diversify the economy.
The problem with charging a tourist tax is of course defining what a tourist is, ensuring that Airbnb hosts pass on the tax, and ensuring it’s leveed on day trippers
A bed tax is essentially cutting the demand.
You could make the bed tax season adjusted. The peak months are the main problem.
Huge number of visitors for example affect the local stores and services. Places catering for locals getting replaced by tourist attractions.
Except in many places there is no room to build that infrastructure to support larger numbers of tourists - Venice, NYC and Amsterdam being examples. Nor do many of the people living in places that are over-touristed want infrastructure built to support yet more tourists. "Putting them off" is exactly the point in the tax.
Their sales and goods/services taxes are high, which works out to close to 20% total tax on a room. Still not that crazy.
Source: https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g155032-i51-k6671607-H...
(I'm not suggesting that high taxes are bad. I support aggressively high VAT taxes refunded to the poor and lower middle class.)
It's more to do with how airports are structured and managed in Canada versus other countries. It's a user-pay model rather than having them subsidized by the government. In fact many actually pay ground rent to the federal government.
And they wind up with fewer flights and worse route options to their own domestic airports as a result.
Ex: Burlington VT is about 40% Canadian, Plattsbugh + Niagara Falls NY are almost entirely Canadian traffic.
Edit: is that even legal?
Because that's really tricky to do without reducing the town to just tourism. Some people forget that in tourist towns there are also people who live, who have families and friends and some of their activities look very much like tourism.
Sure, you can try to do all kinds of things to work around this but ultimately the solution of taxing tourists does not work well in practice.
What am I missing here?
As an example, the country of Bhutan has zero desire for tourists, but instead of banning them they just charge a $250USD tax per day.
Hard to call that a tax when it includes lodging, a personal guide, a driver with car, food, and entrance fees to the things you go see. All you have to cover while there is tips and alcohol.
Got any examples? Many cities in the world have tourism taxes, charged as a per-night fee added to hotel bills. Miami has a beach fee for tourists. Somehow, despite no income tax, Miami manages to stay solvent.
Ed: explicitness
http://www.city-data.com/us-cities/The-South/Miami-Economy.h...
As for the cities of Miami and Miami Beach being solvent, LOL. Depends on who you ask. There is never enough money for the things we need (public transport, housing, education) yet plenty of money for things we never asked for (stadiums, Amazon HQ2).
How do they differentiate between business travelers and tourists or do they just pass on the fees to both?
Local governments are incredibly susceptible to this, but it very clearly plays out nationally as well. The idea that government can “do good” in the USA is very co troversial at best.
This is a great article about it, as a simple litmus
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/economy/slipping...
Tourists already get taxed. Hotel taxes are huge. It sucks. Traveling for conferences to meet new people and learn new things is soooo expensive and tourist taxes are a big part of why.
Tourist taxes are how you destroy diversity and trap people into the tiny bubble in which they were born. We should be striving for the opposite.
Conferences are almost always a split of local and non-local attendees. Forcing conferences to be exclusively non-local attendees makes zero sense. It would be even more expensive, in absolute dollars and environmental cost, to have everyone travel to the middle of Nebraska.
I know it's not your intent, but your stance here reeks of elistism, xenophobia, and othering. Extrapolating your worldview I don't know why a country hotel would, or even should, be accommodating.
> don't organise conferences in places which are full of tourists already.
This is absurd. Conferences are about people. Places with a lot of people will naturally have those people come together for events. Things that make a place attractive to live can also make it an attractive place to visit.
Travel is so expensive it's almost crazy NOT to make the most out of your trip. Adding a day or two of tourism to a multi-day work or education trip is more than reasonable.
Cost of living has grown so large that it's almost cheaper to fly into SFO every day from a regional airport instead of renting a hotel room.
If you want to do work+fun trip, then a tourist destination could be great - but you have to be prepared to pay for it. (Or go to a nearby tourist place) If you want conferences for locals, they will always happen anyway.
The rest of your accusations don't make sense to me. How can something for mostly non-locals be xenophobic? How is an expensive conference in a big city less elitist (who can afford to live there?) than one outside of it?
And you’re worried about an extra $5 a night to pay for tourist infrastructure?
How much would a trip's cost be reduced with the elimination of tourist taxes? Totally depends. It's not the biggest cost. But it ain't zero either. They call it nickel-and-dime for a reason.
The question is in what case does somebody avoid booking a trip that they otherwise would’ve taken because they just can’t stomach the tourist taxes once they’re already paying hundreds for flights and lodging?
What's the total cost? I don't know. Probably more than 1 percent and less than 5? How many more people would travel if costs were reduced by 5 percent? More than zero, less than a lot.
I was responding to a post arguing for MORE tourist taxes. I think we should we have less.
>Tourist taxes are how you destroy diversity and trap people into the tiny bubble in which they were born
To reiterate, my original reply was someone asking for MORE tourist taxes. We can probably agree that travel is already expensive. We can debate about what percentage of that cost is from tourist taxes and how impactful that added cost is.
Making travel more expensive will obviously cause fewer people to travel. If you make travel sufficiently expensive then fewer and fewer people will travel and more and more people will stay in whatever place they happened to have been born. I can not give you the equation for what increase in price leads to what decrease in travel.
Growing up in rural Tennessee I remember conversations about travel. The number of high school students who had ever left the country was tiny. The number who had never left the south eastern US was decently large. The number who had never left their home state was alarming.
I'm fortunate to work in tech and be able to travel. If I want to see half my family I have to travel to them. They can't afford to travel to me. I have on multiple occasions paid for travel costs for family. Because they otherwise couldn't afford travel costs for events such as our grandfather's funeral. I find the idea that people who want to make travel even more expensive to be morally reprehensible.
This whole comment thread is about how cities can deal with the problems that come with an excess influx of tourists. These problems are real, no matter how romanticized the tourists' view of their trip was. In short, the destruction that massive tourism waves leave in their wake (to use an exaggerated analogy) is ultimately an externality to their action that needs to be paid by someone.
Yes, modulo everything, paying more for things sucks. Paying for externalities that you are not used to paying probably sucks even more. Tourism is not special in that regard. But the problems caused by tourism to the locals also suck, and if one of the fixes for them is increasing taxes, then you can't argue it away by saying, effectively, "no! I don't want to pay more".
Marginal customers always exist. If you raise prices by a small amount, most customers will ignore it, but a small percentage won't. That's why the thing you bought for $X didn't cost $(X*1.01) instead.
This is patently untrue. NYC had just shy of 63million visitors in 2017, and is one of the most expensive places on Earth.
Edinburgh (where I live) has about 480,000 people, and we get about 2 million visitors in the month of August. Accommodation is full, and prices are 2 or 3 times what they normally are for the entire month, and yet the city is full. A tourist tax of 1.50 a night is not going to deter anyone from visiting Edinburgh when the bus from the airport is 5 times that, or a night in a hotel is 20 times that.
I'm keenly interested in better understanding the problem space. I am very leery of such "obvious" answers.
(not proposing all places instate this, but rather places where the footprint of overtourism is too much to bear)
Isn’t identifying issues a prerequisite for solving them?
Does increased surveillance do anything to improve the score?
At what direct and/or indirect costs?
There's not much interest, say, in sensors which measure ground conductivity between separated points and process that data to detect water main leaks. Yet water system leaks are a big issue for many cities. Sensors mounted on city vehicles to detect and report potholes and road damage would be useful. Put them on garbage trucks; they see most streets regularly. Those are things cities have to fix and need to track.
No, the author wants to track tourists in detail. Guess who wants that data.
As the article mentions, travel and lodging has definitely gotten cheaper, however I still feel like, due to stronger economy and more disposable income, world travel is no longer limited to the obscenely wealthy.
If my read on history is correct, world travel just wasn’t available to so many people as it is now.
Is this simply better economics or has our new(ish) interconnected and open world also made travel less scary? Like, since we interact online and trade with people from all over the world, do their different cultures no longer terrify us?
I mean, I try to make it to at least one new country a year, and when I travel it terrifies my Midwestern grandparents. It seems that in their generation, foreign countries and foreign cultures are so distant and extremely scary—I don’t want to imply as if they’re bad people, just that the world was much much bigger and out of reach to their generation for whatever reasons.
[edit] clarification.
Once people toured the seven wonders, but now most of my friends stay within the country visiting niche spots to recreate or eat a different variety of food. That's a lot harder to do if Joe Small-town can't get the word out about why you should visit.
As millennials get more power and reach a majority, entering their 40s with no monetary assets to speak of, many debts, but still have income, they’ll push for policies to increase inflation and keep interest rates low. This means the debt they owe reduces, their salaries increase, cost of living increases, but only those with cash investments lose out.
This is a failure of the previous generations to ensure that the wealth is spread widely.
When you’re dribbling in a nursing home the millions of dollars you’ve saved aren’t going to wipe your ass, it’s the downtrodden youth.
Couple this with airbnb and now travel is far more within reach to an average person. Why not spend on it.
The businesses that cater to this influx of tourist spending employ locals, which pushes up local wages and spending. The goods/services produced are also not scarce. They can be increased in supply. In fact higher volume retail shops result in more economies of scale, which can reduce local prices.
In a housing supply restricted market, tourism can contribute to higher housing costs, but that can be fixed by removing constraints on housing supply, like zoning. And even when this effect is present, its effect on quality of life is counter-acted by the positive effect of tourism spending on local incomes.
Local businesses do not always generate income from tourists. For example, some of the destinations complaining about overtourism are upset at cruise ships, where the tourists do all their eating, drinking, and sleeping on the boat, and they only walk through the city during the day without spending any significant amount of money.
Tourism is an industry that pays less than most. Most tourism/hospitality jobs are low-income and menial which compared to the exponential rise in both property value and everyday goods, is peanuts.
Hawaii, a state whose largest contributor to GDP is tourism has 1 in 6 residents living under the poverty line. The lack of other jobs and focus towards locals drives most people to poverty.
If the locality is fortunate enough to have home-sharing, the profits from tourism accommodations also flow to local pockets, creating potentially thousands of high income micro-hoteliers.
Moreover, not all tourism spending directly contributes to what are traditionally considered "tourism jobs". For example it contributes to more revenues for restaurants, retail businesses, etc.
As for Hawaii, I think a much better explanation for its poverty levels is the migration of people from other parts of the US to enjoy Hawaii's homeless-friendly climate.
Secondly - as I have already mentioned, tourists are price-insensitive, so businesses have no incentive to reduce prices by employing "economies of scale".
Our city put up new signs in a wooded area that never had signs before. Tour companys now post material on these signs. Locals are chopping down the signs. Keep the woods dark imho.
If one more of them asks me where the twilight house is . .. google that to see of where i speak.
I dont say ban any people, but the city should try and keep the tour groups where they can do the least damage
What if tourism wasn't solely focused on one's own experiences, as though such things exist in a vacuum, and was a spiritual practice in connecting with and respecting other cultures?
Maybe what we need to fix tourism hell is cultivating global cultures of interdependence, respect,community, and service?
Educate tourists to make their effects less hellish; trying to control people is old school management-oriented nonsense. It's time to start respecting people's autonomy more than that.
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I live in Toronto and was surprised to hear that the population doubles during the summer, because of a large number of tourists.
Having spent most of my life here, and some of it right next to the biggest tourist attractions - I never thought any of it was a problem. It hasn't affected my quality of life in any way that I'm aware of.
In some European cities, native people can't pay the rent to live in reasonable places because tourists will pay more. This has been a problem in Spain (Barcelona & Madrid) and both municipalities are working on it, but it's difficult. At the same time, a lot of stores became tourist specific. In the end, you have two cities at the same time, the old and beautiful for tourists, and an outside city for native people, which native people who lived and worked in the old city, don't like.
Interesting, as a born and raised American, I find it odd that I keep seeing people praise europe about how great their public transportation and living wages are and yet you claim both suddenly fail when you get some tourists who spend money in your town?
I imagine that the influx of tourists is well above that number.