Taking a picture, of you, or just an `identical` is not why people travel. It's just the most easy way of documenting your visit and a way to have something from that place without actually taking something from that place. Literally the best way to leave no footprint of your visit and be satisfied, but for some reason gatekeepers hate it.

Some people travel to meet locals, some people travel to watch sports, some people travel to just lay at the beach and feel the breathe, some people travel to try the food, some people travel to jump around museums and sights.

Nothing wrong with any type of travel, unless you're trying to brake local laws or disturb locals (those who try to meet locals no matter what could do that and not even see what they're doing).

For some reason westerners are not able to take easy loitering. Maybe because it's illegal in some states or countries, but in most places around the world it's perfectly legal. If you want to just walk around San Marco square, there's no one stopping you, even if you live in Slovakia or Mexico, or Canada. And there should not be anyone stopping you. It's a public place, it's there for everyone to enjoy. If local authorities think they're unable to maintain infrastructure, they still will be fine after implementing a city tax for visitors. But the nature of public spaces should and will be untouched.

> Taking a picture, of you, or just an `identical` is not why people travel.

As some who just had the dubious pleasure of sharing a vacation with his 19yo cousin, I can tell you that for her it was exactly like that.

We used to have a good way to regulate the amount of tourists in specific areas, called city planning.

Maybe it’s a well known fact, but I didn’t personally know this before I started working at a municipality, but there are entire departments who do nothing but plan. The best description of what they do, is that they play really complicated real world sim city, and at some level they draw “residential area”, “industry”, “commercial area”, “hotel” on a map, and those plans determine what we’re allowed to build on those locations.

If they plan correctly, there is a finite amount of hotels or holiday homes available in an area, and once those are full, the town or city can house no more tourists. This means that you could actually regulate how many people could physically visit London at any given time by limiting the amount of hotels and the amount of rooms a hotel was allowed to house with city planning.

Private rentals and popular apps to handle it, broke this system. At least until regulation catches up.

Tourist destinations being overrun predates Airbnb by several decades. Take Venice, it was operating at maximum hotel capacity for at least 30 years. What happened is people stay in neighboring cities and take the train or bus in, or arrive and sleep on cruise ships. It has much more to do with the increased number of people who can afford to travel. Take China alone. In 1990, the number of Chinese citizens who could afford to travel to Europe for vacation was probable in the tens of thousands. Now it is in the hundreds of millions. Add in low cost airfare, things like Ryan Air, and it is simply that more people are able to afford travel.

Being capped at maximum hotel capacity isn't a bad thing per-se because it gives some measure of control. AirBNB blew that up.

Yes, but being maxed at hotel capacity wasn't solving the the overcrowding problem. It was just pushing tourists further out of the city. It would be like trying to solve traffic in San Francisco by freezing housing construction - it just spreads the problem out over a larger area.

Here is a NY Times article from 1987 talking about the overcrowding problem and limiting the number of tourists in Venice.

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/08/world/venice-moves-to-lim...

I can only speak of Salzburg but at least there the issue that the city faces is the opposite, namely that a huge % of visitors are just in town for a couple of hours congesting the city while not consuming anything.

Is that because of Airbnb rentals, or just more tourists that are also chasing a more shallow experience? Snap a few photos and take the bus to the next stop. If I had to pick a tech product to blame, it would be Instagram, not Airbnb.

Thats just an untapped opportunity. How do they get there? It’s either bus, car, train, or plane. Raise fares or tax rentals so you can build to ease the burden from their traffic.

Is that what city planners do in tourist cities?

Maybe this is just an American thing, but city planners in the US generally do not do any of that -- they exist solely to help property developers and landowners generate as much wealth as possible, as quickly as possible, so that the city can capture as much of the tax-base growth as possible.

Effectively zero thought is given to people, how they could live, work, transport themselves, utility infrastructure, schools, or anything of that nature. Affordability especially -- how real people are supposed to afford any of this -- is never ever planned for.

Planners talk about this all the time, of course, and love the illusion that their work somehow solves these problems. But in truth, they don't. And usually, the results of their effort are slightly worse than prior.

The only things planners routinely accomplish, are things that privatize urban core's wealth for the wealthy and/or increase taxable value of acreage -- things that make cities more expensive and less hospitable to human life.

> If they plan correctly, there is a finite amount of hotels or holiday homes available in an area, and once those are full, the town or city can house no more tourists

Is there any city that actually follows this? In the US, any idea of capping growth like this would get you labeled "anti-business", "NIMBY", and "economically illiterate". Capitalism demands infinite growth forever indefinitely (literally every facet of the whole world is just a commodity to be 'supply vs demand-ed', dontcha-know?), and any plan that limits that in any way would be immediately be rejected by every professional planner in the nation.

> Is there any city that actually follows this?

Yes? Many European cities are quite busy banning private rentals and requiring owners to actually live in their apartments. In my country it’s even illegal for foreigners to buy vacation homes.

Legislation moves a lot slower than the market though.

> Many European cities are quite busy banning private rentals and requiring owners to actually live in their apartments. In my country it’s even illegal for foreigners to buy vacation homes.

Those all seem like really great ideas. I wish we had anything as strong/effective as that in the US.

Could you please name a few such cities/countries? Or, better yet, link to some sources?

I'm very interested in planning best practices and not sure how to google this.

Barcelona, Amsterdam.

Berlin have limited it too, it's something like you can rent out spare rooms but not whole apartments, unless they're only rented out for no more than 90 days per year.

In every city in the US you cannot just build a hotel on a plot you owned. It must be zoned for a hotel, and that zoning level will tell you how tall you can go and how much parking you are required to provide.

Growth is already capped in the U.S., your last paragraph doesnt make much sense. It’s also not government but the residents themselves who are to blame. Look at LA. Most of the city is low rise apartments or single family homes and there is a housing shortage pushing rents to astronomical levels. Developers want to make money by building supply to meet demand. They want to build towers. They want 2000 units in a parcel. They dont want to have to build 5 stories of subterranean parking. But the councilmans ear who can make these projects possible doesn't listen to the developers. A developer doesnt vote in the councilmans district. The NIMBYs who vote in council elections are the ones suing these projects for vaguely racist and myopic reasons, suing transit projects, suing infrastructure projects, burning precious public money in litigation hand over fist, and they get treated like princesses in council meetings because renters do not vote in LA, and who votes runs this city.

This is not how planners work in most of the US. You sound like you are angry at a specific city.

> but city planners in the US generally do not do any of that

N=1 here, but that's nonsense where I live. Both the city and county have 10 year plans which describe how the area looks, feels, how people live, etc. Any significant changes (such as re-zoning residential to industrial, whatever) requires changes to both the city and county plans to be approved. These things simply do not happen willy-nilly or just because it brings in money.

Keep in mind that this is not a particularly liberal / progressive area. Maybe there are some places like you describe, but in my experience that's been very much the exception, not the rule.

> Maybe this is just an American thing, but city planners in the US generally do not do any of that

Yes, they do. It maybe often be true that parties with intense financial interest like developers pay the most attention to, and provide the most input and pressure on, things like city/county General Plans, but those plans almost always address all those areas you suggest are not considered.

Well Airbnb may have merged some % of the "residential" and "hotel" zones, but until tourists decide to sleep in tents they still have some way of approximately controlling the number of people in the city.

"Number of people in the city", yes. But the relative percentages of tourists to locals, no. Which tends to be the problem. Tourists spend money differently and create different logistical issues than residents.

I'm so old I can remember when people were encouraged to travel and buy experiences rather than goods, to meet different people and cultures, live outside one's comfort zone, and broaden one's horizons.

Now it is stay home, don't travel, don't eat meat, don't have kids, don't buy experiences or things. Ain't progress wonderful?

Not everything scales. If you have 7 billion people that take two two week package holidays per year the planet will collapse. Now, we're not quite there yet but the strain is showing in many places and if we don't stop this then there won't be any tourist destinations left to visit.

Note that the number of people that make meaningful connections with the locals compared to the number of tourists is vanishingly small. You just can't do that when you fly in on Sunday evening and leave again a few days later. All you get to do is to rush from one photogenic site to another, maybe visit a museum and eat at the local versions of the chain stores from somewhere else.

>If you have 7 billion people that take two two week package holidays per year the planet will collapse

Slightly disagree with this. There's a lot of places where tourism should happen but doesn't. I've known a few people who raved about Syria, now obviously that's out of the question for tourists. Lots of African countries would make great tourist destinations but aren't safe enough to visit. In a world where every single person is able to take a two week holiday each year, we probably won't have as many poverty-stricken areas which aren't safe to visit.

Pollution caused by actually getting to places is another issue, but one that's slowly being solved.

Your second paragraph is on point. This is why when I travel I go to a new city for a month or more, and I live in exactly the type of places people are deriding in this thread (AirBnB) to live more like a local, not in a hotel. I am not there to be a tourist, although certainly my visa is a tourism visa and I'm counted in those numbers.

There's a huge difference in ecological impact and cultural impact of package tours where you have ~30 people following one guide with a flag sticking out of their back vs one person spending month+ in a place and minimizing their ecological impact. The one thing I haven't been able to do yet is stop flying, it's required both for work and for pleasure, but I do buy carbon offsets for air travel.

I just don't know how to clearly separate the types of activities I'm talking about without it automatically coming off as elitist when these types of discussions happen... it's not really fair, but the reality is that the Western world had enough various constraints that helped make tourism if not perfectly sustainable, relatively so. With Asia coming up we've added literally billions of potential new tourists to the pot and that's just not scalable. It's even very obvious to me, as I try to visit places which are not tourist destinations... and I visit off-season. I don't really care for tourism itself, I want to meet people and discover food. I go to these places to find not English dual-language, but Mandarin Chinese...

The impact can be more subtle. Personally I’m more worried about the individuals who don’t know anything about conservation going into these areas. Usually the tour groups follow a set route, limiting their impact. The grand canyon likely prefers you stay in the disneyland of the south rim where there are park rangers, trashcans, bathrooms, shuttles, and roads, rather than hike offtrail in the canyon and damage the more pristine ecology found there.

I mostly agree but not with the last part. Eating local food made for locals is probably the most easily accessible genuine experience you can get when you travel for short periods of time.

If you live in America, you can travel a ton and meet tons of different people and cultures and live outside one's comfort zome IMO. There are a ton of (unfortunately underserved) reservations to visit filled with peoples coming from a completely different history and culture. One can travel to a church of a religion one doesn't follow (jewish, sikh, buddhist, pagan, catholic, muslim...), go and worship with them in their sacred holidays. If you're from west, go east, and vice versa. If you're from the north, go south, and vice versa. There's BBQ competitions and dance competitions, buffalo wings and gumbo, rodeos and derbies, BDSM meets and city halls. Volunteer at an animal shelter. Volunteer at a planned parenthood. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Volunteer at a furry convention.

These will all broaden your horizons equally well as flying to another country. It's showing you your own country as an infinite fractal of human experience.

That's kind of a straw man. The type of tourism that would warrant congestion pricing isn't the one where people really get to "meet different people and cultures, live outside one's comfort zone, and broaden one's horizons" anyway.

Do you think a visit to the Louvre or del Prado doesn't expand horizons?

Both have opening times and entry tickets, they have very easy solutions. Venice doesn’t...

At a certain point people need to live in physical reality. The 'progress' of everyone going on vacation, eating meat, and building nuclear families was a momentary and unsustainable aberration fueled by willful ignorance of the damage we were causing.

There's a big difference between being in the same space with the famous thing to experience it with your own body, and just seeing even the best reproduction. While I agree with you that we have to reconsider the way we use our wealth vis-a-vis the environment, I can't share your scorn for people who want to explore and experience things.

How about this crazy idea: allow the governments at those cultural places to decide how and if they want to limit tourism there, instead of some know-it-alls in America. If they want to have 1M tourists there, that's their business, not yours.

I'm a know-it-all in Europe, smack in the middle of one of those tourist destinations, where there is no more room for me and mine due to the tourism.

Oh, and the government here is doing just that.

>Oh, and the government here is doing just that.

Then what are you complaining about?

> All this jetting about to take the 1000,000th identical picture of some landmark just to say you've been there

Like everything else, motivations for travel are many and varied; most people probably have several. Reducing them all to bragging rights is an overly reductive and unhelpful view.

> to take the 1000,000th identical picture of some landmark just to say you've been there too

That's only one reason for tourism and is not a motivation we all share. That said, this is perhaps another externality of social media that we should seek to redress, alongside the concerns with privacy and manipulation.

Instagram doesn't really help anyone when it sends thousands of people to a landmark, so they can take photos of themselves in front of it.

Tourism is not about the visiting landmarks (although it's also nice to have). Tourism is more about understanding that the world is small, the people around you are still people and that essentially we are all connected to each other.

Its about selfies and Instagram these days.

> Or some lottery system

They would sell the tickets, and we'd be back where we started, unless they have to travel alone and can't bring any companion.