In mid-July, Katalina Mayorga, the founder and CEO of El Camino Travel, was getting her hair done at a salon in Washington, D.C., when she heard one hairstylist describe to another a recent experience in Barcelona. “A kid on a bike rode by me and yelled ‘Go home; you’re ruining my city’. . . . That didn’t feel so great,” the stylist said, suggesting her coworker perhaps reconsider a honeymoon in Spain right now.
Normally Mayorga, whose travel company includes tours for women and a membership for insider travel recommendations, would be quick to jump into a travel discussion and give her advice. (For instance, don’t write off an entire country for one city’s overtourism.) But following viral images of residents squirting water guns on tourists in early July in Barcelona, she felt conflicted: “I didn’t feel like I was in the right to chastise them for their actions,” she tells Afar.
Outside of Mayorga’s salon, this same conversation was a hot topic: To go or not to go? And if you do go, are you part of the problem? Overtourism together with bad tourist behavior, after all, seem to have reached a tipping point. But does shaming tourists actually make them stay away or behave better—and improve the situation for frustrated residents?
“We like to think of ourselves as the exception,” says Paige McClanahan, author of 2024’s The New Tourist, which tackles travel’s “perils and power.” McClanahan argues that while we might like to think of ourselves as travelers, we are indeed all tourists when we leave home. Considering ourselves as “better than” a tourist allows us to disassociate from tourism—its problems and solutions. But the tourist label doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad one.
“I want to lose some of the stigma and shame around being a tourist, and help people instead understand [tourism] is a powerful, potentially very constructive thing that we can be a part of,” McClanahan says. “We need to help people wake up to the stakes by informing them of the impacts, the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of tourism.”
Amsterdam knows the perils of mass tourism well, and it has implemented numerous measures to control the floodgates, including a recent ban on new hotels. Its 2023 “Stay Away” campaign squarely targeted 18–35-year-old British men and other “party tourists” arriving in large groups.
Still, the “Stay Away” campaign did not move the needle much, Cora Doppenberg, program manager for Economic Affairs and Art and Culture for the Municipality of Amsterdam, tells Afar. “We didn’t see a significant number of people from our target group who were [deterred from] going to Amsterdam.”
In March 2024, Amsterdam evolved the campaign into Amsterdam Rules, an online interactive quiz that questions a traveler’s intentions for visiting the Dutch capital. One of the questions asks “What famous Dutch products would you like to try/buy?” Stroopwafel is a choice, as is cocaine. (You can guess which is the wrong answer.) Choose correctly, and it takes you to Amsterdam’s tourism site, as a way of signaling approval.
There was backlash to both of Amsterdam’s campaigns, claiming it used unfair stereotypes of British tourists and that no one would take the time to click through its questions. Wrote the Independent’s deputy travel editor, Benjamin Parker, who falls into the target British male market: “It’s a humiliating and condescending approach to finding ‘better’ tourists.” Still, Doppenberg says the city was pleased with the most recent campaign, with online panels showing 10 percent of their target group were less attracted to Amsterdam as a party destination.
Miami also tried out a different “stay away” approach. After two fatal shootings during spring break in 2023, the city launched a “Break up with Spring Break” campaign in March 2024. Melissa Berthier, director of marketing and communications for the city of Miami Beach, says the viral campaign video had an estimated 220 million social media impressions. The campaign, which also included measures such as curfews and closing liquor stores early, was considered a success as the city remained free from any incident of gun violence in 2024. Its felony arrests were down 32 percent, while its visitors numbers grew by 11 percent from 2023, and its hotel occupancy rose slightly 1.8 per cent.
“Travel is a happiness industry,” says behavioral scientist Milena Nikolova, the CEO and founder of BehaviorSMART, which works with tourism boards and travel companies to apply behavioral insights to influence more sustainable and responsible travel. “You travel to feel good, to escape stress and complications back home.” To increase the likelihood that travelers will opt for better behavior, she suggests, ”We need to create ways where desired behaviors [of travelers] are made easy and appealing.”
If a destination wants people to choose local foods, for example, Nikolova suggests promoting how good the food will taste rather than spotlighting that it will help the local economy. For choices that might not have a pleasure-driven component—such as not using single-use plastics or limiting water usage—if the responsible choice is easy, then it will become an automated behavior. Nikolova adds it’s most effective when sustainability is weaved into offerings in a way that’s unobtrusive, even invisible.
Of travelers’ considerations, “free” and “easy” are often at the top of a list. In 2017, Switzerland’s Italian-speaking canton of Ticino created a pioneering initiative to help prevent tourist congestion: the Ticino ticket, which grants every tourist a free, unlimited ticket for public transportation. (Switzerland now offers free public transportation nationwide for visitors.)
The creative part of it, Nikolova says, is that the tourists still actually paid for it: Ticino raised its tourism tax at the same time, so 70–75 percent of the cost of the program was covered by the tourism tax. But since it was easy—and framed as “free”—tourists welcomed it.
And other destinations have taken note. This summer, Copenhagen launched a CopenPay campaign that rewards tourists for sustainable behaviors—free meals for collecting trash, say, or a free boat ride for walking or biking. Elsewhere, Tourism Queensland just announced its incentive-based “Guardian of the Reef” program to promote “reef-positive travel” to the Great Barrier Reef. The new platform, backed by marine scientists, hopes to dispel the myth that traveling to the Great Barrier Reef will harm it—in fact, tourism dollars supporting the right initiatives will help protect and conserve the reef, which is suffering from massive coral bleaching. (Tourism activities only take place on 7 percent of the Great Barrier Reef.) To receive discounts on tours and chances to win eco-certified stays via Expedia, travelers must watch a series of short educational videos.
But not everyone is taking the high road.
From an ex-flight attendant’s popular passenger shaming Instagram account to anti-tourism graffiti spreading across European cities, tourist shaming runs the gamut.
But shaming tourists for problems caused by overtourism is misdirected according to some observers. Instead, Nikolava and McClanahan both argue that while we all are responsible for our own travel behavior, governments are the ones at fault for failing to manage tourism numbers and not enabling travelers to make better choices.
The travel industry also needs to make sustainability and responsible travel built-in and supply-driven, Nikolava says, “We know that from a psychological point of view, tourists will never be the ones to choose it.”
She adds, “We also can’t blame—or shame—the tourists, as they have the least responsibility and the most limited tools to actually influence the system in a way that would change the outcomes.”
In The New Tourist, McClanahan explores how both Amsterdam and Barcelona once pushed hard for tourism. Barcelona heavily promoted tourism from the lead up to the Summer Olympics in 1992 until 2015, and Amsterdam even was targeting tourism after the financial crash in 2008 with a marketing video “Come and have a messy night out here.” Governments need to have accountability, McClanahan tells Afar, to protect their citizens from the downsides of tourism before it gets out of control and residents take to the streets like they did in Barcelona this summer.
Inspiring travelers to make behavior changes that will ultimately have a positive impact on the destinations they are visiting is key—but chastising them is not, McClanahan says. “I don’t see any place for shame to get where we need to go.”
