Barcelona, one of the world’s top tourism draws, has been showing growing signs of crankiness with its popularity, and with the costs to the city government of serving the millions of visitors—especially those who come by cruise ship or bus and leave without sleeping.
City officials are considering ways to collect more from those day-trippers. Barcelona is a popular cruise destination, but only those ships that stay more than 12 hours pay the port taxes and fees that are assessed by the city; one proposal would apply them to all.
Another proposal would find a way to gain revenue from visitors who come on bus tours that don’t include overnights; that could be done by a road toll, or higher parking fees for the ubiquitous buses.
For more details on the issue and the proposals from TheLocal.es, click HERE
Photo by DrFumblefinger
As a very recent visitor to the city, which is a great destination (though I don’t love it the way some seem to), I’d definitely say that “day tourists” crowd up the place, especially the narrow lanes of the old medieval era city. One way to deal with this would be to let less cruise ships dock there, but they’ve apparently increased that from four to five ships a day max (with some 20,000 plus tourists entering just from the ships).
That said, many of the cruise ship tourists are loaded with shopping bags of merchandise. No question in my mind that they already are a tremendous boom to the local economy. Not sure what the right answer is, but without tourism Barcelona’s economy would be another just that of another struggling EU city relying on the generosity of the Germans.
And if I were Barcelona, I’d watch the anti-tourism rhetoric. There are many fine destinations in the world that are happy to see tourists dollars. It could hurt Barcelona in the long run.
In my view cities should learn from Paris. They manage to have a ton of tourists and still retain the magic.