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Comment by bmsleight_ | Hacker News Reader

As one of these tourists, who arrived back today form a European cruise, am I struggling to understand the issue (too close to my heart?).

We do need more regulation to force ship to use better fuel and more on-shore energy. More like France to ban short air trips.

By the way - I visit a museum at many places. Not sure what is meant by consuming the city. If you arrive by boat, you must use public transport (or good old feet) to get around. I understand that it is a a surge in demand, but I am putting money in to the local economy. I do not use international chain (except Ikea in Sweden - meat balls). Local worker in local shops.

Rotterdam is a nicer city to visit by cruise ship that Amsterdam. Apart from the Van Gogh museum.

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> If you arrive by boat, you must use public transport (or good old feet) to get around.

As someone who lives in a city that's popular with tourists and has a major summer cruise industry, that's...not entirely accurate. A lot of tourists exit the boat and head straight for a line of taxis and app-based gig workers. This results in a staggering amount of added car traffic. The city has tried adding tourist-focused bus routes and branded shuttles but rail bias is a major thing in tourism.

> I am putting money in to the local economy. I do not use international chain (except Ikea in Sweden - meat balls). Local worker in local shops.

I understand that it feels like this and maybe it is true to a limited extent, but when an area becomes dominated by tourism, tourist-focused industries take over and shops and services that cater to longer-term residents are pushed out.

CityBeautiful has an insightful video on this happening in Venice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SClC9TtQlco

>CityBeautiful has an insightful video on this happening in Venice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SClC9TtQlco

Good video - thanks.

>area becomes dominated by tourism

Good point - make me thinks. How to a be a better customer and stop cruise ports becoming over dominating. Give-up cruising ? Be more selective of which ports.

South-west England is becoming like this (I travelled by sleeper train) and feel like tourists dominate locals. So dont like going there.

Do ethical holiday exist ?

The complaints here make it sound like the tourists hold all the power and the locales are helpless to stop them, but the reality is that tourism is two-sided: Locales actively try to attract tourists, and tourists decide to visit.

If the locals hate the tourist dollars so much they could close down their tourist attractions. That they don’t speaks volumes: They definitely want the tourist dollars.

So visit away, and trust that the locals have lots of options (including tourist taxes) if they really want to curb visitors.

Some locals. Even if the majority of locals want to stop it getting action is very difficult against a business friendly central government.

It's the law of concentrated profits vs distributed downsides. The few that benefit have the resources and incentives to lobby (by all means, both above and below board), without the need for complex organisation, while the widely distributed downsides might be in aggregate worse so societally there is a net negative, but they would have to overcome the hurdles of a huge organizing effort to get to the same effective action because the individual incentives and resources are relatively low per capita compared to those of the former group.

This asymmetry lies at the heart of many net negative societal problems.

This isn’t meant to be a personal jab but in my opinion tourists, by definition, are “consuming” the region they are touring. Consumption is not always over-consumption.

Tough luck for us all, especially when there are so many downsides of cruises or flying. But not all tourism is “bad” and of course many economies depend on it - it’s a tricky balance.

Precisely. Tourists are like locusts. They congregate on that cute little place that suddenly then isn't cute anymore, turn every other store into a souvenir store and the rest into hotels and restaurants to feed the hordes. It drives up the rents and consequently the property prices until the people that used to live there no longer can afford to.

And that's before you get into drug tourism, which Amsterdam has a lot of as well.

I was born there and lived there for 28 years, I'll still visit occasionally because I still have some friends there but on the whole the city has lost its charm for me.

>Precisely. Tourists are like locusts.

Ok - so how to I go on holiday and not be a locust ? What is the solution no holidays, no travel ?

I live in London and its can be fun trying to get a real work meeting near Houses of Parliament as 'locusts' are all around. However - quid pro quo

>And that's before you get into drug tourism, which Amsterdam has a lot of as well. Not sure the tourism came before the changes to local drug enforcement.

A cruise ship is just the mirror to remind us, we are all locusts.

I guess it is possible that in the future there will be generally few people who go on holidays to distant places or travel very far. It is a relatively recent phenomenon for anyone except the wealthy, as in the past, what, 100 years or so? Maybe someday a hundred years from now people will study "The Golden Age of Travel and Vacation".

I’m used to working around tourists, including Westminster. One office is just south of Parliament, I also have sites on the river at horse guards, at Trafalgar Square, near Westminster abbey, and in Downing Street, as well as other tourist locations like Buckingham place, the strand

Working on a few days surrounding the queens funeral was a pain - got stuck near Westminster tube for half an hour, got stuck the wrong side of the mall for a while, but on the whole I find very little impact.

The tourist amenities are on the whole scaled appropriately.

The problem with cruise ships is they dump a thousand people into a small town, they spend very little, use all the space, clog the main instagram landmark, then leave.

A normal tourist visiting the city would have several nights in a hotel, be eating lunch and dinner out, be visiting multiple attractions. This brings more money into the city, spreads them out across different sites, and is naturally limited by the availability of hotels.

Bring your own hotel breaks this model.

Amsterdam cultivated a reputation for its drug tourism. Why was that ever allowed to happen? It seems like you're angry about all the tourism - a problem a lot of other cities would love to have.

The sad answer is that everyone _left_ Amsterdam by choice - and allowed these tourism centric industries to grow. The money that it brought in was too good and eventually lead to the so called decline you seem to be complaining about.

As for property price rise - people have the same complaint against tech workers. So I guess I can no longer be a tourist and I can't work in tech because someone somewhere is definitely going to be angry that I make more money and the world isn't fair.

The reason why it was allowed to happen was because it is very hard to differentiate between those that have a problem and those that arrived without a problem but developed on while there.

Amsterdam's strategy would have worked very well indeed if it had been adopted all over Europe. But to be 'first mover' really hurt.

> If you arrive by boat, you must use public transport (or good old feet) to get around. I understand that it is a a surge in demand, but I am putting money in to the local economy.

Public transport is usually run at a loss, and at least partly funded with local taxes. Same for public museums, although I don't know about the Netherlands.

I think the amount of pollution per passenger is really disproportionately high for cruise ships, and I'm afraid nothing can be really done about it. It's just a less efficient means of transportation.

Now, living in Antwerp the pollution caused by container ships is at a whole other level though.

> It's just a less efficient means of transportation.

Boats could be a very efficient way of travel. Luxury cruise ships are inefficient because they general carries things like swimming pools, golf courses, major shopping malls and restaurants. The proportion of space and weight that is used for transportation is tiny compared to something like a train, buss or aircraft (or even a car).

Ferries in contrast has very low carbon footprint of travel per kilometer, as can be read in this graph: (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-footprint-travel-m...).

Since container ships has a very high ratio of transported goods vs total weight of the ship, and those tend to have one of the lowest carbon footprint per ton/mile. It is one of many reason why things like ore is generally always preferred to be shipped by water.

>I think the amount of pollution per passenger is really disproportionately high for cruise ships

Cruise ships are not perfect. I love to take the sleeper train everywhere. Perfect is the enemy of good. Air travel is bad. Carbon footprints is a hard one, try to minimise impact. I think nudging the industry into electric ships and using shore-side power is better.

>Public transport is usually run at a loss Maybe - look I don't want to go anywhere which do not want the ship to visit, however local officials (democratically elected) keep building facilities for ship to visit.

>Same for public museums, I never bulk at a price - charge me a tourist rate - or use tricks so local can pay less. Put the price of the gift ship. But for example the Gender museum in Aarhus you not going to get a better take on local thinking without a physical visit.

> Now, living in Antwerp the pollution caused by container ships is at a whole other level though.

Meaning diesel exhaust? So, nitrous oxide? I assume they're not allowed to burn heavy fuel oil in port.

Well the netherlands is funded by the tax avoidance in the rest of EU, so I don't really see the problem.

> Public transport is usually run at a loss, and at least partly funded with local taxes.

Worse-- public transport usually more than covers its variable costs at the margin, but has fixed costs related to peak use. Cruise ships help set that peak use, but don't provide consistent ridership.

That is, it's the variability that makes public transport expensive and troublesome, and cruise ships pile on variability.

It's hard to overstate the environmental carnage a cruise ship creates. They sometimes wake up our kid with their horns. I'm suspect about the real economic impact they have, most people seem to use hop on hop off busses, mill around a bit, and go back to their boat to eat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK2F1SeBQXY

Randomized URL leads to "When the Giant Cruise Ships Came to Town | The New Yorker Documentary"

> am I struggling to understand the issue

As the article says, Amsterdam is drowning in tourists, and prefers those that bring in more money to the local economy.

Cruise ship passengers sleep on board, have breakfast on board and may even have dinner on board because that’s included in their fee for the cruise.

I’m also guessing that most of these cruise ships aren’t the most luxurious of cruise ships, and aren’t carrying the richest of tourists.

The pollution has nothing to do with carbon, though nobody will admit it.

You were the pollutant, and the natives want the tourists to go away and not come back.

I feel this if you have economically well off, you want (me) the tourist to get off your lawn. However if you want some growth and jobs, my dollars/pounds are good. Tricky balance. I live in London, sometimes I can be grumpy with tourists but heck everyone needs holiday.

No, the locals want the tourists to pay for an expensive hotel room or AirBNB, respectfully get to know the city, and eat and shop at local establishments. They don't want tourists who load up on the breakfast buffet on the ship, rush around like maniacs trying to see everything in a few hours, maybe buy a little weed or a few trinkets, and then rush back to the ship buffet for an early dinner.

Agreed with everything but AirBNB - tourist areas have hotels located in specific areas to maximize control of the tourist disruptions; AirBNBs have sidestepped that in many areas (often the areas that are now clamping down on short-term non-hotel rentals).

AirBnB is also a plague to many neighbourhoods, and cities should crack down on AirBnB abuse too.

You might be the exception to the rule.

> Mayor Femke Halsema complained last year that cruise tourists were let loose for a couple of hours, ate at international chains and had no time to visit a museum, consuming the city but doing little for it.

They cite 20 million visitors each year, which is a huge number of people. Even if those people each only show up for one day (evenly distributed through the year) and leave, that's 55,000 people each day, which is a huge number.

Those are people who might be putting some money into the local economy, but it sounds like the cost to the government for all of the services provided to support the tourism industry (police, healthcare, etc) isn't making enough of an impact on the local economy to justify.

>that's 55,000 people each day, which is a huge number. Cruise ship has around 4,000 (for a mega ship). So that 10 ships a day. Even Southampton struggle with 5 at a max.

https://cruisedig.com/ports/amsterdam-holland/arrivals

Suggests much less than 55,000 people each day. More like 3,000

55K was all tourists, not just cruise tourists.

Right, airplanes and other forms of transportation exist. But those 4000 people aren't there for a single 24 hour window (as most of them aren't). The point is that it's a huge number of visitor-days in the most conservative case. More visitors for more days means more burden on the city.

And by your numbers, assuming cruise ships dock for roughly the same amount of time as the median tourist visits the city, that means one 4000-person ship represents about 7% of the tourists in the city. Banning cruise ships is an awfully simple solution to take a meaningful bite out of a problem that local authorities clearly think is important.

More days per person means less burden. Think of Cairo. If you visit for one day you are going to see the pyramids. 20 tourist-days = 20 visits to the pyramids. You likely do t have dinner out, as you’re off to the next photo op, you likely didn’t have breakfast either. You perhaps brought a packed lunch.

If you visit for 5 days you’re only going to see the pyramids one one day. 20 tourist-days means 4 pyramid visits, 4 Egyptian museum visits, 2 or 3 up the tower and various visitors to different museums and mosques, multiple meals out throughout the week.

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