"The collapse of the travel industry caused by the virus offers a unique opportunity for cities plagued by mass tourism to rethink their business model."
Article from the Guardian's world edition, July 20th 2020
Barely a year ago the graffiti on the walls of Barcelona read Tourists Go Home. Now, the collapse of the travel industry caused by the virus offers a unique opportunity for cities plagued by mass tourism to rethink their business model
Xavier Marcé, the Barcelona councillor responsible for tourism, said: “I don’t want more tourists, I want more visitors.”
However, good intentions are one thing, concrete proposals another. According to Janet Sanz, Barcelona’s deputy mayor, cities that have grown dependent on tourism are paying the price for having a monocultural economy and now the challenge is to diversify.
Easier said than done with the scale of tourism in these cities. Barcelona, which has a population of 1.6 million, received 30 million visitors in 2019.
With tens of thousands of jobs at stake, the headache for cities is how to rethink tourism without causing mass unemployment.
“There are people who think that the city is magnificent the way it is, without tourists,” Marcé said. “But they may change their view when the state stops paying 80% of their salary in September and unemployment goes up to 18%.”
Marcé believes it is less a question of numbers than of distribution. He wants to encourage tourists to visit other parts of the city and not just the traditional sites, although it is difficult to discourage visitors from congregating at iconic sites.
“Thirty million visitors managed the way they were up until the beginning of this year is not sustainable,” Marcé said. “The same number with different interests dispersed to different areas may not be such a big problem.”
Octavi Bono, the director general of tourism for the Catalan government, agrees. “We don’t want more or less tourism, we want better tourism with a better distribution of tourists by season and by location. We are continuing with an agreed marketing plan.”
Read the full article in the Guardian’s digital edition:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/20/how-coronavirus-is-reshaping-europes-tourism-hotspots |