A water squirt is preferable to getting your rental car window smashed and your luggage stolen, like in SF.
Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
31–40 of 127 posts
Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#32Sounds like these protestors should never go on vacation anywhere else either. Stay in your home city your entire life.
Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#33It’s Barcelona in July. I would pay to get squirted. But also, Being mad at tourists seems weird to me. These are people who want to come and experience your city, learn about your culture, pay to eat food at your restaurants. Buy local art, have gelato with you. If your gripe is increased housing costs (which it almost always is) The problem is not tourists. The problem is short term rentals are more profitable than…
> They pay your wages, they elevate the economy. Even if I don't work in those industries? And what about the places where this money came from, and could have been spent? Point being, tourism isn't all good for all people. There are tradeoffs.
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Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#34Why is mass tourism such a problem today and not the 90s/2000s. Is it really all thanks to platforms like Airbnb allowing cities to host so many more tourists that is the problem?
Lower costs and higher incomes mean more people can afford to travel. Which means people and countries that didn’t travel before. There is also style of travel of going to most popular places and taking photos for social media that overloads popular spots.
Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#35Why is mass tourism such a problem today and not the 90s/2000s. Is it really all thanks to platforms like Airbnb allowing cities to host so many more tourists that is the problem?
There are a lot more people and the same amount of places to go.
Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#36There's two sides to this story. Claiming that tourism is just a negative is just plainly wrong: [1] 2021: Barcelona started to recover, recording direct tourist spending of €3.7 billion with 4.5 million visitors. This marked a significant improvement as the city began reopening and international travel resumed. [2] 2023: Tourists in Barcelona spent €9.6 billion in 2023, up 14.7% from 2019 More than 12 million people…
The subtext, which is absurd when made explicit, is that if not for tourism then those 100,000 people would not have jobs. In reality, jobs are created in response to demand, and you can obviously have arbitrarily large economies that are ~0% reliant on tourism and there's no reason to suspect Barcelona et al couldn't or wouldn't produce such an economy for itself in lieu of tourist demand.
Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#37I would never dream of doing that to tourists that came to New York. A jerk move by these protesters, but a brilliant move by the politicians that have somehow dodged this blame.
Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#38This will surely result in change to the government policies that make Spain an attractive tourist destination.
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Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#39This is the utterly foreseeable consequence of the HN-funded Airbnb, which effectively lets rich tourists drive up the cost of living of city residents.
I find weird why this is being downvoted comparing to some Airbnb related comments on a same situation 3 years ago but in Amsterdam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28903530
Re: Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
#40Why is mass tourism such a problem today and not the 90s/2000s. Is it really all thanks to platforms like Airbnb allowing cities to host so many more tourists that is the problem?
Poor people can do it now.