‘Without fear there is no change’: Furious protesters to target holidaying Brits at airports and tourist hotspots
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/protesters-set-to-target-holidaying-brits-at-airports-anti-tourism/
Posted by tylerthe-theatre
‘Without fear there is no change’: Furious protesters to target holidaying Brits at airports and tourist hotspots
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk/protesters-set-to-target-holidaying-brits-at-airports-anti-tourism/
Posted by tylerthe-theatre
31 Comments
Where’s that’s famous EU welcoming of foreigners that I’ve heard so much about?
Fair enough if they don’t want tourists then eventually people will take their money elsewhere, other holiday destinations are available after all. They may regret their stance further down the line when all that cash disappears but you reap what you sow.
No idea why people go on holiday to areas that are just filled with English people to be honest
So, when it’s not immigrants to blame, it’s tourists. 😂 The world’s “elite” really do have us all wrapped around their finger, don’t they. 🤦♂️
I’m sure plenty of these people would love to go back to agriculture and fishing as a way of life.
Maybe even set up a medieval trading port, or run inns for the crusaders and pilgrims who pass through.
EDIT: to be serious, I believe this to be a local regulation issue. If a place is super popular, and can’t sustain the crowds, then they have a “first world problem”. They can raise prices because of the demand, they can apply tourist taxes, and they can regulate the land/resources that go into tourism to maintain the balance between locals and tourists.
Slightly fashy overtones to that quote. Otherwise this seems like legitimate complaints about the tourism industry.
Didn’t Greece go through this and went bankrupt because of it?
12% of their GDP is tourism.
The message is all getting mixed up now. It was all started over holiday lets sapping the home market.
Now it’s just plain hate all Brits on holiday, and Germans to some extent.
UK is 1.4% of their GDP from tourists alone.
Imagine losing that.
Fair enough on the holiday lets, but take that up with your government. Spain’s hotel sector needs tourism, their economy depends on it.
Hotels do not drain housing supply.
People just love getting sucked into a protest these days.
When more than 40% of your local economy comes from tourism it makes you wonder what they will do for work/income if they succeed in driving the tourists away.
How many places around the uk complain about tourists and people owning holiday homes
Are tourists staying in generic large hotels a problem?
The problem isn’t the tourism. The problem is governments allowing overseas buyers and all the properties to be turned into holiday lets, pricing locals/natives out of the market.
It’s easy to attack tourists.
Though I do have wonder, do any of these protestors own passports or do they only holiday in their own country?
I get it…
But scaring off tourists is certainly a choice.
Now, i don’t know anything about the situation. This is new and confusing to me. But surely the anger needs to be directed at a lack of building?
If you want less money on in sn area then destroying tourism is a good idea. If I was a hostile state who wanted to sew discord I’d probably tell locals that it’s wealthy tourists who are the enemy.
Fear is a sure fire way to criminalise change. If you can get a bunch of people to be disruptive, convince them to think of a better solution.
Instead of saying I’m not doing this until we have a better solution, be the better solution. If it’s good, we might just follow you.
I think a contributing factor of this upswell in anger is Airbnb. A few years ago all tourists stayed in large high density hotels – in tourist areas, which didn’t really affect the locals everyday lives.
Now they are dispersed over the entire city, they see houses being taken off the market to be used as holiday homes when their own rent is rising rapidly, they can’t get the bus to work because it’s now full of tourists. They can’t ride a bike through their neighbourhood as a lost tourist is walking through it.
Tourists are now impacting locals everyday lives and it’s causing annoyance.
People are angry all over the world and for all sorts of reasons. In this case they are angry at tourists but that is just a symptom of the real issue, which is for a generation people have been allowed/invited in to buy up real estate on the cheap, with no intention of ever making these places their homes, which naturally has driven up supply and demand and house prices with it. Great for them who have been able to afford to buy up property wherever and pay whatever taxes were involved. Not so great for people born and raised locally who are being priced out of their home towns or villages. There isn’t a person alive now that could disagree that housing prices are massively inflated irrespective of where you live. The same issue is playing out in the UK where coast based housing has been bought out over the years as holiday lets. I’ve seen articles in the last year saying the exact same thing here in Britain and it is understandable.
There are some genuine real problems regarding holiday lets, especially not regulating AirBnb properly so it isn’t subject to the same controls as any other holiday property.
But scaring the tourists away from your area when your entire economy is built around tourism is just a really dumb move.
As the article says, rents *across Spain* have gone up 44%, that isn’t because tourists are buying up all the houses in the whole country, it’s because of structural economic factors that affect all of Europe. Your house in Mallorca is still going to be expensive, but you won’t have all the tourist money propping up your services.
As another comment says, we know what happens to seaside tourist towns when the tourists move on, just look at any of our British ones.
So I have some skin in this game, we’ve had a family home in Costa Brava for 35 years, which is currently on the market (parents need to downsize due to age and it’s shared with other family who want some money out of it to help their income). We’ve never rented the property out, my grandad bought it as an investment in the late 80’s.
The towns it’s near are tourist hotspots and they don’t have the anti tourist sentiment yet, mainly because there are smaller towns they live in, largely unaffected and they commute to tourist towns for work. But these are small sleepy towns with very little in the way of business going on. The businesses in the area are either tourism related, so holiday lets and sales, boat sales, restaurants, bars, some supermarkets, camping, etc etc…… otherwise the options are farming, and then there’s your normal domestic services. To be frank off season the tourist towns shut down, and money is drained from the area, the only people sustaining it are the locals, the immigrants (expats) and the new waves of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East who barely spend any money.
Barcelona, the nearest big city, on the other hand, is overwhelmed by tourism at all times, I’ve been going since I was 4, there’s been anti tourism stuff happening there and I completely understand why, the cost of living has risen exponentially, chains have moved in, airbnbs are everywhere and just walking down the street is a pain in the arse, in summer people are walking around city centres in bikinis (which I’ve no problem with, but at its root Spain is quite a socially conservative country).
The problem comes when city dwellers take anti tourist sentiment to the max it’s going to completely kill the towns around it. If that’s what the populace as a whole wants, then fine…… but if they want deprived towns like we have on our coast lines, that used to be tourist towns, like we have in the U.K., they’re going the right way about it.
The problem isn’t tourism though is it, it’s off the peg package tourism available to the masses, which coach loads of people arriving, being a menace and getting away with doing whatever they want with no consequences. It’s not just an issue in Spain, I’ve just got back from Japan who have the same issues, and just look at the backpacker regions too.
As for us, Spain is trying to introduce 100% tax on non EU residents purchasing property abroad, so I doubt we will be rebuying in Spain.
> One protestor, Elena Boschi, an English language teacher from the Italian riviera
Doesn’t like tourists but is likely either teaching the locals to speak English so they can cash in from tourists, or is teaching English to Italians so they can go abroad and be tourists or residents in England…
(Yes, I understand there may be a few other reasons, but I’d imagine these are the bulk of her clients).
Covid made a lot of people realise they could do without tourists. Yes developers and landlords might lose money but who cares about them?
I understand it, I live in an area of Wales that gets a lot of tourism and some pillocks at next doors airBnB can really ruin the week. I’ve nearly stepped on smashed bottles outside my front door, people banging on my windows or peeping in my front room and dealing with the attitude of some tourists is just tiring and just makes you want to lob a rock and the next tourist you see.
The problem is it’s a specific type of Brit that does this. It’s not your well mannered decently dressed, going abroad to take in the local culture and environment Brit that does this it’s the stand-offish 25 year old drunk party goers that trash the areas which most of them have an issue with. Next to no one has discipline anymore
Going to another country is the same as going to your neighbours house, don’t treat it like a pig sty and be respectful and 99% of people won’t have a problem with you.
I feel like this slips into xenophobia far too easily. It’s a bit dishonest that many European countries create massive industry around tourism but then complain when tourists come.
It sounds like people should push their governments to set incentives for alternative industries, like manufacturing or infrastructure.
Enjoy your crashing economy then. Disgusting people
I find protests funny. You get to see clowns without going to the circus. What a pathetic way to try and change society, no spines or balls. Cowardly clowns.
I can’t help but feel that the protestors are being manipulated by states and organisations hostile to the west.
Sure tourism can be environmentally unfriendly but it’s not tourism driving up house prices – that’s by people deciding to move there.
Not that I supported it but when the Welsh were protesting about the English moving into north wales they predominantly targeted the second homeowners (I was a kid at the time so happy to be corrected if anybody has a better recollection).
Interesting, I don’t see any protests about the sheer amount of Spanish tour groups and school trips you see parading around in London and Oxford.
Someone show them the state of British seaside towns. Be careful what you wish for.
They’re taking failures in government regulation and city management out on people that have nothing to do with the problems.
It’s really sad. I’ve been on holiday 3 times in 20 years and we love Spain. Finally saved up enough to go again and we settled on Cyprus this year because we were worried about the anger in Spain. I’m also worried about Cyprus.
When we’ve been we’ve tried really hard to be good guests, but I can see why the Europeans have had enough. Its the same where I live. Every summer we’re buried under the weight of anti social day drinking “holiday makers” who trash everything, don’t supervise their children, getting drunk off their nuggets and being violent for no reason or doing unbelievably stupid things and then opening a gofundme.
Last year we had a 14yo throw himself off the end of the pier (which is covered in signs about hidden rocks, hidden dangers, dont jump in, possible death) tombstoning & ended up severely brain damaged. Shut down the whole beach and traumatised people.
He and his parents lived out of area, he couldn’t swim, was at a beach hours away unsupervised with his friends, but his dad thought it was OK because he’d tombstoned before and survived (dad even had a video of his non swimmer son launching himself off a pier in Spain headfirst). I cant imagine the idiocy the Spanish have to put up with.
Most of the tourists won’t understand a word of the protest as most British people never bother with even a few words of the local language.