Tourist destinations being overrun predates Airbnb by several decades. Take Venice, it was operating at maximum hotel capacity for at least 30 years. What happened is people stay in neighboring cities and take the train or bus in, or arrive and sleep on cruise ships. It has much more to do with the increased number of people who can afford to travel. Take China alone. In 1990, the number of Chinese citizens who could afford to travel to Europe for vacation was probable in the tens of thousands. Now it is in the hundreds of millions. Add in low cost airfare, things like Ryan Air, and it is simply that more people are able to afford travel.
Yes, but being maxed at hotel capacity wasn't solving the the overcrowding problem. It was just pushing tourists further out of the city. It would be like trying to solve traffic in San Francisco by freezing housing construction - it just spreads the problem out over a larger area.
Here is a NY Times article from 1987 talking about the overcrowding problem and limiting the number of tourists in Venice.
I can only speak of Salzburg but at least there the issue that the city faces is the opposite, namely that a huge % of visitors are just in town for a couple of hours congesting the city while not consuming anything.
Is that because of Airbnb rentals, or just more tourists that are also chasing a more shallow experience? Snap a few photos and take the bus to the next stop. If I had to pick a tech product to blame, it would be Instagram, not Airbnb.
Thats just an untapped opportunity. How do they get there? It’s either bus, car, train, or plane. Raise fares or tax rentals so you can build to ease the burden from their traffic.
