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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

I only hope this does not replace one problem with another:

Because Spain's high unemployment, in particular youth unemployment and the construction sector, actions that reduce tourism lead to fewer jobs and less income flowing into the city.

I'm not against the measure (last time in Barcelona I was in a hotel and my friends rented an AirBnB apartment instead; they had fun and I had to move hotel rooms because the guy above me flooded the bathtub), and excessive tourism (Barcelona, Edinburgh, Amsterdam all suffer from it) is annoying even putting housing prices and lack of availability to the side, but I just wonder.

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Tourism is a shit industry. You could mostly annihilate it and replace it with productive things most of the time.

Tourism has its uses, and is a service industry like most modern country industries including most "productive" ones.

Absolutely. I just don’t think that it should be more than 10% or so of an economy.

Any time I’ve visited a place where tourism was a larger industry, it felt the place had became a parody, a Disneyland type version of what once was there.

I know your comment is a "hot take", but the thing is about Tourism as an industry, is that the places where that /is/ the industry end up not gaining any other industries. So they become stuck as a "tourism" industry place

Similar to a country sitting on a large amount of natural resources like oil/gas. You don't have to bother about making your population productive.

Allowed all your productive jobs to be offshored? Mine the natural resource of tourists, as long as there was a golden age that left something interesting for them to visit.

That’s exactly right.

It is exactly like oil and “resource curse”, for many poor countries.

The pay is generally minimum wage and the only ones who see big returns are the owners of capital. It’s not a distributive industry. If you have too much of your country’s economy invested, I’d say you’re almost always looking at an unhealthy economy.

I would argue that while there are some similarities, there are also many differences, and that claiming it's not distributive is incorrect. The number of workers I interact with (and to whom the money I spend flows) as a tourist is quite large compared to the number of people who benefit from use of an extracted natural resource.

It’s not as bad, but fundamentally the vast majority of tourism workers earn minimum wage.

So you can have some tourism to keep some people employed, sure. But if it’s +15-20% of your economy, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

> I know your comment is a "hot take", but the thing is about Tourism as an industry, is that the places where that /is/ the industry end up not gaining any other industries.

This discussion is about Barcelona.

Barcelona is one of the richest regions in Europe. It's hardly a third-world hellhole or a banana republic.

> The tourism industry has a significant impact on Spain’s economy, generating over 70 billion euros in gross value added (GVA) in 2019. This represents a substantial contribution to the country’s GDP and employment, with over 2.5 million people employed in the tourism sector

Well maybe you will just tell Spanish government how to replace that?

Im not saying one should ignore it. Just that it’s not a particularly good industry for a country, particularly poor countries.

The pay in tourism is terrible, usually minimum wage, except for the owners of capital, who gain enormous returns on investing in hotels / airbnbs / tourist aimed businesses.

That means it has an awful return for the ones most in need which are the poor. It’s not a distributive industry.

On top of that, it can cause a “resource curse” type phenomenon where great beaches or some other attraction causes enormous amounts of investment in tourist infrastructure leading to a lack of opportunity for other businesses which could thrive with investment. Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital.

Can tourism be A PART of a healthy economy ? Sure. But it shouldn’t be in charge of that economy, in which case I’d say you’re looking at a “resource curse” type economy where only the rich prosper.

> Can tourism be A PART of a healthy economy ? Sure. But it shouldn’t be in charge of that economy

This is true of any sector. New York get volatile when over-reliant on FIRE; San Francisco goes into a depression when valuations dip.

Also, this is a story about Barcelona. An industrial city. Tourism is a minority.

Tourism has widely distorted market prices for housing and accommodation in Barcelona however. Proving it can have very nefarious effects even in relatively diverse economies.

Having lived in two tourism-heavy cities over my life, I don't think most cites are fundamentally opposed to tourism per se. But — and that is a big "But" it is a question of the amount and the kind of tourism. Too much of the wrong tourism in the wrong area of the city can be a negative thing for living quality, for life outside touristic seasons, for the general development of neighborhoods etc.

So it is within a cities interest to have some degree of control ofer the amount and kind of tourism. And controlling the number of accommodations is a pretty good lever.

> Too much of the wrong tourism in the wrong area of the city can be a negative thing for living quality, for life outside touristic seasons, for the general development of neighborhoods etc.

If that was really a concern, cities like Barcelona would be railing against hostels and would impose a higher baseline for tourist taxes to eliminate the economic feasibility of projects catering to low-cost party tourism.

Well yes and no. Cities do have hostels and hotels under control by their ability to give or deny permits. If everybody can turn their private flat into an tourist rental just by signing up to an online platform that is no longer the case. Suddenly what was zoned as residental turns into tourism.

Surely there are multiple ways ro tackle that, e.g. one could require permits for those as well, but I didn't defend the measures taken by Barcelona, I defended the fact that unregulated AirBnB can turn into a problem for a city and the people living there.

> If everybody can turn their private flat into an tourist rental just by signing up to an online platform that is no longer the case.

In Barcelona, making apartments available as short-term rentals involves the exact same type of reglatio that hostels need to go through to operate.

If AirBnB is suddenly deemed a problem in spite of the absolute lack of evidence, in the very least regular horeca businesses are more to blame.

In New Zealand, Tourism gross operating surplus (profit) looks to be about 20% from graph in https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/tourism-satel...

As a share of the total number of people employed in New Zealand, direct tourism employment was 6.7 percent.

I think the main problem with tourism is that it is a luxury service and tourism income shrinks when the world economy stinks. The other issue is that many tourists are rude and unthankful, so it can be unpleasant working in a service industry, being a servant to well-off tourists.

New Zealand needs export income. Some of our product exports are worse for New Zealand than tourism (some farming particularly has negative effects and can have poor profits).

I wonder if part of the reason why Barcelona has population growth is because it has tourism income and jobs? Remove tourism and what happens next?

And it sucks in New Zealand that some of the most beautiful places are crowded and almost owned by tourists. Literally owned by tourists when we let foreigners buy property here and our current government wants to allow that again.

The pay in tourism is terrible, usually minimum wage, except for the owners of capital, who gain enormous returns on investing in hotels / airbnbs / tourist aimed businesses. That means it has an awful return for the ones most in need which are the poor. It’s not a distributive industry. On top of that, it can cause a “resource curse” type phenomenon where great beaches or some other attraction causes enormous amounts of investment in tourist infrastructure leading to a lack of opportunity for other businesses which could thrive with investment. Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital

Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital

Yep, I'm considering buying a vacation home to Airbnb for this reason. I have mixed feelings about it though, because I don't want to be part of the problem. But I live in NYC and I can't move (shared custody), nor can I buy a suitable home in the city, meanwhile the national housing market is exploding. I need some way to hedge for real estate inflation, and vacation rentals have better ROI.

There should be easier ways to hedge real estate inflation than owning an airbnb.

I'm all ears.

Wouldnt a residential reit work for that? Bonus points for your risk being spread out over multiple properties.

I can’t blame you. Sometimes we know our individual choice is suboptimal but the system in place gives us no option.

I would keep looking. If you feel like it’s an ethically compromised decision, perhaps you’ll have a hard time to live with it in the end.

> Tourism is a shit industry. You could mostly annihilate it and replace it with productive things most of the time.

That's a bold statement, as if the whole world invests in tourism because they don't know better.

Spain's tourism sector represents a double-digit chunk of their GDP and is one of the rare sectors which has a direct effect in reducing unemployment, specially in the low-skilled, NEET cohort which is extremely problematic in countries such as Spain. Claiming that a country like Spain could simply annihilate it and replace it with something else is an extraordinary thing to say, specially as it lacks any support.

The world once had very little to no tourism and it worked just fine. It’s not essential to civilisation, and conceivably you could ban it with no major effects.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea to ban it. But tourism is anything but essential.

Sure the Spanish economy benefits from it right now but over reliance on it, as I explained above, can be a bad thing.

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