Huge number of visitors for example affect the local stores and services. Places catering for locals getting replaced by tourist attractions.
[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.
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.