This week thousands of Canary Islanders marched against the 18 million tourists who visit the tiny Spanish island chain each year.
One marcher said, “We’re not against tourism. But the current model is predatory.” The Spanish government also removed 60,000 Airbnb listings across the country and by 2028 Barcelona will ban Airbnb completely.
Oh…and Amsterdam has banned the construction of new hotels, except to replace closed ones, and Florence has banned key boxes and guides with loudspeakers. Athens has limited visits to the Acropolis to 20,000 a day. Dubrovnik (the most overcrowded tourist city in Europe, with 27 visitors per resident), Sardinia and Marseilles are all limiting short-term rentals, and Copenhagen has created a rewards program to get tourists to behave better.
Overtourism is already swamping Europe, and the summer hasn’t even started.
There’s overtourism here in Canada, too. We’re predicted to host 20 million international visitors this year, with a growing number of them crossing the border from America. Parks Canada will continue to limit access to high-traffic sites like Lake Louise and Moraine Lake. At this stage of the year tourism authorities haven’t begun to ‘demarket’ iconic locations like Niagara Falls the way European destinations have.
But overtourism isn’t the only story here. Its opposite – undertourism – is growing fast. As always, there are countries suffering from undertourism, like Egypt, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Haiti, Congo, and Colombia. Basically, the usual suspects riven with insecurity, unrest and violence.
But this year for the first time in memory, America has seen a big decline in tourism, not from places that have never liked the US, but from its long-standing allies, like Germany, Spain, Denmark and Canada.
Indeed, Goldman Sachs predicted that America will lose up to $90 billion in tourism revenue this year. That’s a big number, even for America. A rule of thumb is that every $1 billion lost in international visitor spending costs 10,000 domestic jobs. So…900,000 jobs lost. Goldman is careful to say their $90 billion number is a worst-case. But even if it’s half that…
No surprise, the two countries that have avoided travel to America the most are the ones America has threatened to annex: Canada and Denmark (which has sovereignty over Greenland.) As of this week, Danish travel to the US is down by 34.5% and US border crossings from Canada are down 20.2% from the same time last year. In April, traffic across the Sault Ste. Marie Bridge into Michigan was down over 35% over last year.
So it seems that staying at home in your native land can be an enormously effective tool in fighting threats from an invasive species next door.
“We won’t go there” – WWGT – may lack the slickness of MAGA. But it can work wonders to Make Canada Great Again.
Meanwhile…
1. Crashes and crushes. France’s President gets stiffed…Plus, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra played out their British conductor and airline pilot Daniel Hardingafter 19 years with a never-before-heard version of Auld Lang Syne. Plus, City Hall beating City Hall. Plus Donald Trump’s niece, a psychologist, wades in (for 50 minutes or for 9) on the President. Duck, Donald. Duck. Plus, a British climber who broke his neck in a fall sues his partner for ‘letting go of rope’.
2. Domestic issues: Why does Canada host 60% of all the world’s lakes? Why are there three periods in hockey? Why do most Canadians live in the US?...Plus Cory Doctorow on how Canadians can grab back our digital rights that US tech impounded…Plus, the case against drinking alcohol, not just too much, but any, grows apace.
3. Que sera sera: Nicholas Negroponte on the Salon des Refuses that grew into the MIT Media Lab. Plus Bill Gates and the end of perpetual philanthropy. And Kermit the Frogfinally delivers his commencement speech.
4. Two guys meet in a bar. And maybe the world will change because those two guys are Sam Altman and Jony Ive making fresh new grounds.
5. Assuring words and pictures…on the uses and need for enchantment…on using AI and testing your ethics…on the longest cruise in the world…and on getting inside (really inside) the music. Speaking of music, our ability to be moved by it is inherited…And finally, do you remember Boris Brott? He was the larger-than-life conductor of the Hamilton Philharmonic who was killed in a hit-and-run in 2022. His killer had hissentence reduced this month from 10 years to 8.
6. Things you’ll want to go to or tune in to:
On May 31 on HBO. The premiere of Mountainhead, the hot new series about tech bros gone wild, from the creators of Succession.
June 6, 6 p.m. ET at Hot Docs – A special screening of the big new documentary,Digital Tsunami: Big Tech, Big AI, Big Brother – Directed by the Emmy-winning Fred Peabody, about the dangers of AI and the remediation done by people like Ron Deibertand the U of T’s Citizen Lab. Tickets are just $15. Get them here.
June 17, 11:30 a.m. ET to 1:00 p.m. online – and free. The Midlife Manifesto. The topic is why life gets better with age (I hear it’s a supermarket and not a waiting room) and the speakers are midlife expert Chip Conley and the CBC’s Alison Smith.
7. Woe are they. Amidst Harvard’s other plagues, there’s this. Why The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is such a hit. And why Trevor Noah eats Indian food.
8. Filming plants. This man did it every day for 15 years, and not all of them work out.Meanwhile, bamboo grows very fast, at up to 35 inches a day.
9. Winning big. It’s one thing for a Canadian writer to win a big literary prize. It’s another that the Dublin Literary Award comes with $156,000 in cash, which Michael Crummey just walked home with for his 2023 novel, The Adversary of sibling rivalry gone very wrong in 19th century Newfoundland. Another reminder that you can’t eat fame.
Also, another reason to envy Switzerland.
10. What I’m reading: Two new books, Pitfall, a gritty financial thriller about the 1929 crash by writer and lawyer Terry Kirk. And Carry the Flame, the story of the Canadian Outward Bound Wilderness School – an experience and cause dear to my heart.