Stopping the flow of visitors - harder than you think.

In their efforts to stem the tide of tourists, cities often forget that they have usually been at the forefront of tourism development and promotion. One of the effects of this legacy is that many cities are trying to cut down the numbers of visitors while the number of hotels is growing. This is because it takes years for new hotels to get a licence, so there is usually a reservoir of new hotels waiting to open, even when a city tries to implement a ‘hotel stop’, as Amsterdam did recently.

The most recent evidence of this comes from Portugal, where the major cities of Lisbon and Porto now have 176 new hotels in the pipeline for the next few years. For Porto this represents a 64% growth in the number of hotels, underlining the stellar rise of Portugal’s second city with a heady combination of port wine, gritty culture and low-cost flights. For Lisbon, which already has a considerable supply of hotels, the growth is about 16%.

As we have seen elsewhere, hotel development is one of the best indirect marketing tools for a city. The hotels need to fill beds, so they will sell them, come what may. With tourism demand internationally showing no sign of slowing, this is likely to mean a considerable increase in tourism density in Lisbon and Porto, with challenges for infrastructure, amenities and the patience of locals.

So far, however, it seems that the local inhabitants are relatively tolerant of the growing popularity of the cities. Research in Lisbon shows that residents associate increasing use pressure in the city with migrants and expats rather than tourism specifically. Around 44% of residents think that hotel growth has a positive impact on the city, although 52% also think there should be limits imposed on new hotels.

In Amsterdam, another city struggling with tourist pressure, new hotels have also opened in recent years because they were licenced when there was a more liberal tourism policy. One of the problems with continuing tourism growth is the increased user pressure on the inner city.

Research among inner city residents of Amsterdam shows that 74% agree the city centre should be lively and busy, and 73% agree that it   should accommodate very different groups of people. Slightly less agree that the city should be an international place (57%).  

The problem seems not to be the tolerance level of Amsterdammers, but rather the idea that the inner city is being taken over by specific groups. Almost two thirds of residents said that foreign tourists were ‘dominantly present’ in the city. The growth of tourism also coincides with an increased sensation among residents of the city being ‘unpleasantly busy’. Although there are still more day visitors to Amsterdam (15 million in 2023) than tourists staying overnight (9.4 million), the ratio of hotel guests to residents has climbed from 18 hotel guests per 100 residents in 2016 to 23 per 100 in 2023. There were also sharp falls in resident satisfaction in 2023, with particularly marked declines in areas with high levels of tourists.

Amsterdam initially had some success in combating the growth of Airbnb, with a reduction in listings from 16,648 in March 2021 to 2,924 in October 2021. But since then Airbnb supply has crept back up to over 10,000 listings. Now it also has to deal with a backlog of growth in hotel supply for years to come. Not quite the ‘hotel stop’ that was supposed to happen.