To see what isn't working and what could actually help for myself, I talked to experts and activists in Amsterdam and Barcelona – Europe's two flagship overtourism cities.

I start in a café in the heart of Amsterdam's Red Light District, across from René Boer. “It's sad,” he tells me, “because when I walk around here, it doesn't feel like I'm here with my fellow citizens. The number of tourists is so high, the locals living here are very diluted.”

Boer is a curator and architecture critic who's lived in the neighbourhood for years and became one of the sharpest critics of how the city handles tourism.

In recent years, Amsterdam has banned outdoor cannabis smoking in the Red Light District, pushed bars and window brothels to close earlier, tried a plan to relocate sex work to the city's outskirts, and run a “Stay Away” campaign aimed at young British men googling stag weekends. The idea was to shed the city's free-for-all reputation and attract fewer, different tourists.

“It's a very classic gentrification discourse,” Boer said. “Blame the poor, young visitors looking for a good time, instead of the policies which brought about the tsunami of mass tourism in the first place.”

The problem with the approach, he argues, is that it moralises and sanitises the city while doing little to address the real issue. “The problem isn't how tourists behave, or who they are,” he added. “It's how many there are.”

A city is not an island

Let's look at the numbers. Amsterdam had 9.7 million overnight stays in 2010. In 2025, a record 23.7 million. City forecasters expect close to 28 million within two years. Add an average of roughly 22 million day-trippers on top of that, and for a city of under one million residents, it's a lot.

The city is well aware. It's the only European city that has actually set a target for fewer tourists: in 2021, it announced a policy goal to cap overnight stays at 20 million a year. A stop on new hotels was put in place back in 2017, but the number of rooms kept climbing anyway due to existing permits and loopholes, from 35,000 in 2018 to 45,296 today.

Limiting accommodation options sounds like a good strategy on paper, but it created a problem of its own. Sharply rising hotel prices and a substantial increase in the value of hotel real estate made hotel owners richer and led to the construction of big hotels in towns just outside the city limits, beyond the reach of the hotel ban. “Then people take a 10-minute train, and they're here in the city centre,” Boer explained.

“If you limit the people who stay in hotels, even if the limit is respected, a city will still be suffocated by tourism,” Jan van der Borg told me over the phone. He's a tourism economist at KU Leuven who's spent forty years on mass tourism. He doesn't sugarcoat it: “What Amsterdam is doing is symptom management, but it's nonsense.”

“The only thing this achieves is pushing more people to stay outside the city and cram into already overcrowded buses and metros to commute in and out every day. So you actually end up creating more nuisance and more pressure on infrastructure, while also losing revenue because tourists will spend part of their money outside the city,” van der Borg explained.

So if curbing supply doesn't work, I wonder, what about demand? The obvious lever is the tourist tax paid per night spent in the city, which is meant to cover costs caused by tourism. Amsterdam already has the highest in Europe, at 12.5% of the price of an overnight stay per person. It will climb to 20% within a few years.

The idea is that a high enough tax makes the city less attractive to visit, but the research says otherwise. Tourism demand is inelastic: “Someone who wants to come will come anyway, they'll just pay a bit more,” van der Borg said. “Or find a hotel just outside the city where the tax is lower.”

A report commissioned by the municipality in 2023 found the tax wouldn't meaningfully affect visitor numbers unless it roughly triples its current level.

There's no such thing as a good or bad tourist

Weeks later, I'm in Barcelona to figure out whether they've found a better way. The story is shockingly similar: hotel stays more than doubled within a decade – from 17.1 million in 2014 to a record 37.2 million in 2025. Like Amsterdam, the city froze new hotel construction in the centre in 2017 and is working towards eliminating all short-term rental licences by 2028. It also just made hotel rooms pricier and pushed tourists to stay outside the city.

The tourist tax was also increased. On top of the Catalan tourist tax, which increased sharply in April, the city imposed a €5 surcharge per night that will rise by one euro per year until 2029. A guest at a four-star hotel now pays around €8.40 per person per night.

“All cosmetic,” is how Daniel Pardo Rivacoba put it when I had a chat with him in central Barcelona. He's with the Neighbourhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth, which has been organising protests against touristification for years, and he's not interested in being diplomatic about it: the city never actually wanted fewer tourists, just a better way to manage them.

He points to the planned expansion of the airport to accommodate more long-haul flights, and to the tourist tax. By law, 75% of its revenue has to go back into tourism promotion. “Why tax tourism to create more tourism?”

Barcelona's approach is rather aimed at reducing numbers by changing the profile of visitors. “Tourism should serve the city, not the other way around. We want quality tourism,” the mayor ​Jaume Collboni said in May.

The city's own tourism authority has even rebranded itself – from VisitBarcelona to “This is Barcelona” – chasing what it calls “higher-value visitors who generate greater social return.”

Pardo Rivacoba isn't buying any of it. “There's no such thing as good or bad tourism,” he said. “Focusing on ‘quality’ is just about opening new markets without closing any.” It doesn't ease the pressure on housing or public space one bit, he argued.

“Even if you were the cleanest visitor in the world, you're just one in the crowd.” The real problem for him was never the individual tourist, but the fact that the city and the economy have become structurally “addicted to tourism.”

Blame the profiteers, not the tourist

Tourism, despite all its negative externalities, is usually seen as good for the economy. On paper, it brings in money and creates jobs. Tourism accounts for 6% of Amsterdam's businesses and 10% of its jobs. In Barcelona, it's 16% of businesses and 12% of jobs, making up about 13% of the city's GDP.

But does that mean it's good? “There's this constant tone of ‘tourism is the goose that lays the golden egg’,” Claudio Milano, a social anthropologist at the University of Barcelona, told me.

“It creates jobs, sure, but they are often precarious, seasonal, and badly paid,” he said. In Barcelona, tourism jobs paid 26% below the city average in 2023.

The consequences of these unstable jobs impact mostly marginalised groups like migrants, seasonal workers, and disenfranchised youth. One study found that tourism growth doesn't reduce unemployment, it just shifts workers out of manufacturing and construction and into hospitality.

Tourism isn't much of a redistributor, either. Researchers in Barcelona found that roughly 80% of profit runs to employers and 20% to workers, against something closer to 50/50 in almost every other sector. They also show that rising hotel prices don't translate into higher wages for the people working there.

Surprisingly little of what a tourist spends on a trip ends up with the people who actually live there: in Amsterdam, 59% of foreign visitors' card spending happens inside the city centre, which mostly has international fast food chains, big-brand retail, and tourist-catered shops (many linked to the criminal underworld).

There's a name for this: leakage. The bulk of tourist spending flows to a small group of entrepreneurs and companies like booking platforms, real estate investors, hotel chains, or airlines.

“Tourism brings money, yes. But it's about redistribution,” Boer told me back in Amsterdam. “Only some people are making a lot of money. They're extracting money from the city. And the mess left behind, cleaning it all up – that's on us.”

So what do we do now?

But there's only so much cities can do on their own. As a global phenomenon, “analysing the causes of mass tourism goes beyond the scope of any municipal government,” a Barcelona city council spokesperson admitted.

Amsterdam has recently called on the Dutch government and the EU to do more. “Naturally, we will continue to take measures ourselves, but we cannot do it alone,” the city council wrote.

What to do then? My research found a whole range of fixes, some modest and already being tried, some radical.

First, at the city level: cities could buy out existing hotels with tourist-tax money and convert them into housing or other types of buildings for locals. To reduce day-trippers, banning cruise ships (already underway in both cities) is an obvious move. They could also make a booking system for day trippers the way you'd book a museum slot, with fast-track perks for people who plan ahead, to better manage the crowds.

The most radical proposals at national and EU levels include reducing capacity at airports themselves, capping short-haul flights, taxing frequent flyers, or even limiting the number of kilometres each person can fly per year. Hypermobility, Pardo Rivacoba said, is “the real base of it all.”

And of course, we could make rail travel cheaper or use discount schemes to nudge people to travel closer to home instead of funnelling everyone into the same handful of hotspots every summer.

But maybe, what we need above all is a change in our thinking. “We need to break the idea that people must travel,” Pardo Rivacoba told me. “There's no such thing as a right to travel. How could it be a right if not everyone can enjoy it?”

It's true: one in four Europeans couldn't afford a single week's holiday away from home in 2024.

“There's a right to holiday and rest, yes,” he said. “But travelling to see a lot of places, taking a lot of photos, consuming a lot of things in very little time… that's not it. It's not good for the places we visit.”

And honestly, I don't believe it's that good for the visitors either.