Amsterdam’s war on over-tourism, previously focused on campaigns against rowdy stag and hen parties, drug use and public drunkenness as well as limiting conversion of housing into short-term rentals, has now turned to the relatively quiet river cruise trade.
The city’s finance chief, Hester van Buren, told press that the proposed cut from 2300 cruise ships a year to 1150 by 2028 is only one of “a hundred” measures the city is taking with the aim of limiting annual tourism numbers to 20 million.
While many of the measures already in place have been aimed at younger visitors and have been accompanied by rhetoric asking for more ‘quality’ visitor who would appreciate the city’s culture, this one appears aimed at an unlikely slice: mostly older, even elderly, tourists who are the heart of the river cruise market.
Van Buren responed that “…we are not going to divide tourists up into good and bad. This is one of a string of measures to reduce the number of tourists in total. It is about the overcrowding and the coaches parked all over the pavements.”
The plan drew immediate fire from owners of high-end hotels in the area, who often provide accommodation to river cruise patrons before and after their cruises; they say it would cost them the equivalent of 200,000 hotel nights a year, and will now be forced to look for other kinds of holidaymakers to fill their rooms.
UPDATE
Perhaps answering the complaints of hotel owners about the cruise restrictions, Amsterdam is now planning a moratorium on new hotel construction, with approvals only being given for hotels that will replace an existing hotel with the same number of rooms or fewer.