Why Europe is rising up against mass tourism.
As protestors have taken to the streets across Spain, disrupted a billionaire’s wedding in Venice, and even caused a shutdown of the Louvre in the shape of a staff mutiny about overcrowding, Noel Josephides has been watching with one phrase on his mind: I told you so.
“I could have told you that would happen 10 years ago,” he says. “And I said so. I said, ‘This is going to get out of control.’”
Josephides is the longstanding chairman of Sunvil, a UK-based tour operator that has been sending comfortably-off Brits on vacation since 1970. He’s also a former chairman of ABTA and AITO, both UK travel industry bodies, which makes him one of the big beasts of European tourism.
And he says he saw Europe’s current overtourism meltdown coming.
“I said there’ll be enormous problems going forward,” he recalls of a speech he delivered to the ABTA annual convention, held in Dubrovnik, in 2013.
He delivered that warning as the sharing economy — spearheaded in travel by Airbnb — was mushrooming across Europe. His concern, however, was not just short-term rentals.
What he saw coming was a perfect storm: rapidly expanding budget airlines working in tandem with proliferating short-term rentals to create vast new vacation capacity, driving down prices and ushering in a new era of large-scale budget travel.
Of course, as a tour operator, Josephides works in direct competition with short-term rentals and the independent travel-planning that budget airlines encourage. Yet today, he seems like a Cassandra figure — he foresaw the chaos, but no one acted. Now his worst fears have come to pass.
“The local populations are quite right,” he says about the spiraling protests. “It’s out of control. I’m on the side of the protestors, even though it affects my business.”
