Instead of giving visitors visa free access who hold strong passports, rather make them require a visa prior to entry (meaning they can’t just pack their bags and go, now having to pre-plan in advance and line up for getting a visa & paying money for it, they’re not alone since hundreds more are doing the same thing. There’s also the guarantee whether they’ll be eligible or get rejected on the spot).
It may cause strain on visa applications that’ll lead to mass rejections due to overload. If I were a country that’s suffering over tourism, just rescind visa free access for ALL nationalities (including those who have strong passports like US, UK, DE, FR, AU or CA to name a few) as in when they check visa requirements: it’ll be rewritten as “visa required” rather than “visa not required” prior to entry.
Or, they can apply for a tourist visa many times as they’d like but reject them. (Basically a real life travel “shadow ban” if that’s the right way to say it), leads to them giving up as they’ll know a visa will never be guaranteed regardless of numerous attempts. However, would this move alone reduce over tourism? Since you can’t just show up in someone else’s nation uninvited (illegal immigration).
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If you want to curb tourism, the only thing you have to do is going after airbnb and the like. And heavily tax (like exponentially tax) each house someone owns after the second. Tourism wasn’t a problem when we only had hotels and some eventual Bead and Breakfasts. Tourism became a problem when suddenly everyone could have a room to rent for brief periods.
oh yea, you can bring in a very large group of people on a single airbnb property. which was complicated under th hotel system. but that would mean less tourism dollars for a country/region though.
Overtourism kills the cities tho. Sure, you get tourism money, but people leave the cities because they can’t live on them, so shops close and get bought by multinationals to make chain stores (and pay way less in taxes than what would pay a traditional store). It also causes the city to degrade in terms of security and livability.
It’s good in the short term, but awful in the long term.
Overtourism has gotten worse, but it existed before airbnb. In some places it was already a problem in the 80s. When a place gets popular suddenly a lot of hotels get build which in turn ruins the place.
Yeah, but it’s easier to control hotels because you can just limit licenses. Right now, if you have a free house, you have a hotel and, the worst part is that you not only are worsening tourism, you are also screwing people who needs to buy/rent a house to live.
In some places, one needs licenses similar to or the same as a hotel to run an air bnb. In Tokyo, there have been problems with illegal ones, though.