The European Hot Spots Struggling With the Tourist Masses
Italy, Spain and Greece are on track for a record-setting tourism season, and not everyone is happy about it; ‘It’s too much’
4 min
MONTEROSSO AL MARE, Italy—A worker shouts in Italian, English and French, directing throngs of tourists through the small train station. Wild gesticulations, a fluorescent yellow vest and a booming voice help her to stand out on the packed platform.
Swarms of people holding backpacks and water bottles squeeze past each other, some heading for a departing train, others for the exit and a stunning view of the sea and cliffs that have made the villages of Italy’s Cinque Terre a global tourist draw.
Outside the station, lines form at food shops. Signs say all the umbrellas and reclining chairs are occupied at the pay-only beach on Monterosso’s waterfront. Narrow alleyways are crammed with tourists eating gelato or sipping bubble tea.
“Tourism is necessary, it’s almost all we have here, but it’s too much,” said Angela Costa, a longtime Cinque Terre resident.
Italy’s tourist season started with a record number of visitors over Easter. In the Cinque Terre, the congestion was so bad that local officials made the area’s famous hiking trails one-way on the busiest days. The situation repeated itself over several weekends in May and June.
“Easter was crazy, and now it’s ramping up again,” said David Cefaliello, who works in a cafe in Corniglia, another of the five Cinque Terre villages. “We aren’t at pre-Covid levels yet, but I suspect that will change in a few weeks.”
Millions of Europeans and Americans are engaging in so-called revenge tourism, making up for lost travel time during the pandemic-affected years of 2020-22. Millions of Chinese tourists are expected to visit Europe this summer and fall after the elimination of China’s travel restrictions.
Italy is likely to surpass the record number of tourists and overnight stays set in 2019, before Covid struck, according to market research firm Demoskopika. Arrivals in the period from June to September are expected to be 3.7% higher than the same period in 2019 and 30% more than a decade ago. Italy’s Tourism Ministry has also said it expects a record year, as have Spanish and Greek officials.
All those visitors are giving a welcome boost to Southern Europe’s economies, which depend heavily on tourism. In Italy, more than 10% of the economy is linked to travel and tourism, compared with 15% in Spain and 19% in Greece, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council. In France and the U.S., the level is around 9%.
But locals are increasingly asking how much the Cinque Terre, Barcelona and Athens can take. Discontent is also rising in some places, spurring local efforts to rein in the tourist hordes.
In Portofino, a small upscale village on the Italian Riviera popular with the international jet set, police are fining people who block foot traffic to take selfies.
In 2024, Venice plans to introduce an entry fee to the city on the busiest days of the year, according to the mayor’s office.
In Barcelona, locals hang signs saying “tourists are terrorists,” while in Athens, residents complain about how the spread of Airbnb rentals for tourists is driving up rents and displacing Greeks from the city centre.
In May, about 10,000 short-term rental properties were available in Athens, almost a quarter more than in May 2018, according to market-research firm AirDNA. Demand for short-term rentals in Greece increased 62% in May compared with the same month last year, the firm said.
The Italian Alpine region of Alto Adige has capped the number of beds available for tourists in private properties to fight the proliferation of short-term rentals.
The crowds are spreading far beyond the Mediterranean. On the coast of Normandy in northern France, authorities have turned people away from Mont Saint-Michel, the tidal island topped with an abbey. The Louvre museum in Paris has put a daily limit on the number of visitors.
The French government is planning an advertising campaign to encourage people to travel at different times of the year and to consider less-famous destinations.
The flow of tourists to France has held strong even as the country has been racked with protests, including months of demonstrations over President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to raise the age of retirement. Now the country is grappling with nightly riots following the shooting of a teenager by police.
Luxury hotels in Europe are enjoying the boom, but many are looking for new ways to keep their high-paying clients happy despite the masses of tourists.
“We are always looking for something we can offer that will avoid the crowds, like hiking trails that are less well known, a private boat trip to Capri or a wine-tasting tour,” said Pietro Monti, head of marketing at the five-star Hotel Mediterraneo near the Amalfi coast, where rooms cost an average of about $1,200 a night. “But when it’s the high season, especially a record year like this, some crowding is inevitable.”
Crowds are hard to avoid in Vernazza, the Cinque Terre village that sits just south of Monterosso. On the rocks surrounding the small port, sunbathers battle for space with children kicking a soccer ball and people jumping into the sea. The crush on the rocks grows when boats arrive from one of the nearby towns.
Juli Eger, who was sipping wine and eating focaccia on a recent morning in Monterosso, while ignoring the crowds around her, finds her own workarounds.
“We were just in Venice and if you walk around very early in the morning, you only have to share the city with people taking engagement photos,” said Eger, who is traveling with her mother, husband and teenage son. “If you make Venice your first stop you’ll be jet-lagged, so getting up at 5.30 in the morning won’t even be a problem.”
—Allison Pohle and Stacy Meichtry contributed to this article.
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The federal budget has rattled property investors. But the biggest mistake isn’t the tax changes, it’s the conclusion many are drawing from them.
2 min
The recent budget has forced a reckoning for property investors.
Negative gearing now restricted to new residential builds, the CGT discount gone and on paper, the numbers look different.
And many investors are responding by pivoting toward yield, prioritising cash flow over capital growth in a way that property strategists say misses the point entirely.
“The debate has shifted to yield versus growth as if they are opposing forces,” says Abdullah Nouh, founder of Melbourne-based buyers’ agency Mecca Property Group. “But that framing is itself the mistake.”
Nouh, who works with high-net-worth families and investors on long-term acquisition strategy, argues that capital growth remains the primary driver of genuine wealth creation and that the post-budget environment has made quality assets more important, not less.
The numbers make his case plainly. An additional $500 per week in rental income is welcome. A prestige asset appreciating by $1 million over a market cycle is transformative.
These are not equivalent outcomes, and portfolios built around yield at the expense of location and land value tend to generate income while wealth stands largely still.
The more nuanced shift Nouh is seeing among sophisticated investors is a move toward assets where both outcomes can be engineered simultaneously – established homes on substantial land in quality locations, where the existing dwelling can be repositioned, rental returns improved, and the underlying land value compounds independent of what sits on it.
For investors with existing equity, commercial property is also entering the conversation in a more serious way.
Prestige industrial assets, medical centres and long-leased essential retail offer income profiles that residential property in most capital city markets cannot currently match: longer lease terms, tenants covering outgoings, and greater predictability than the residential tenancy cycle.
“The investors who build lasting wealth are rarely the ones who chased yield or growth exclusively,” says Nouh.
“They are the ones who built a strategy they could sustain – one that generated enough income to hold quality assets through multiple cycles while those assets compounded in value.”
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