Tourism in Europe is eating itself

The evidence is in. Tourism in Europe is eating itself. The combination of cheap airfares, Airbnb and motorised caravans means that everywhere you always wanted to go is full and getting fuller by the minute, like the bin bag in a student kitchen.

And it’s not just in mid-summer that stasis has taken hold. You can’t move in the Louvre or the Uffizi in any month of the year. If you want to look out over Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower or gain entry to the Sagrada Familia or wonder at the splendours of the Sistine Chapel, be prepared to grow old in the attempt.

Whole communities have been consumed. Venice, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Prague – now Budapest, Dubrovnik and Krakow. There are so many tourists in each of these cities at any one time that the locals feel themselves under siege. Yet the same locals are renting out their homes to Airbnb on an industrial scale. They don’t live there anymore; the tourists do.

When I was a boy, not long after the death of Little Nell, I would sometime lie in my bed in Belfast listening to the deep-throated hum of aircraft overhead, en route, I imagined, to all sorts of exotic places. In fact, the planes I heard were bound for London, Birmingham and Liverpool. Those on board were mainly off on business or else looking for work in England. Only a minority would have been tourists, and those intent on voyaging beyond the UK would have had to change at Heathrow.

Today, just from Belfast, it is possible to fly to at least 25 European destinations, ranging from Alicante to Warsaw. Half the population – and not just the richer half – seems to spend its weekends in places that my father’s generation hadn’t even heard of. And the net is constantly widening. Look at any newspaper’s weekend section and there will be articles offering guidance on the latest destinations where you can avoid the crowds – until, that is, the swarm, with you in the lead (or in the van), moves on to include the previously overlooked and the underrated. Soon there won’t be a city from Portugal to the Urals that isn’t infested by visitors in search of that special unique quality that we all hope to share.

But, of course, the rest of the world is now in our orbit, too. Your job, your home and your lifestyle 46 weeks of the year might be driving you bananas, but come the summer, and maybe for your winter break as well, the growing likelihood is that you will be found on the beaches of Thailand, Sri Lanka or Brazil – all of which might as well be Ibiza or Florida for all that you take home from the experience.

Even in Brittany, where my wife and I now live after 15 years working in America, the coastal strips at this time of year are infested with glistening white motorhomes whose occupants, bent over the wheel, one eye on the GPS, are drawn by the lure of the open road. The approaches to every resort, large and small, are dead zones in a permanent state of flux, where you park up, plug in, check your air-con and set up the barbeque.

Outside of the high season, small, family-run hotels are in trouble. Why pay a hundred euros a night for a hotel room when you can either drill down in your motorhome, complete with satellite tv, or move into an “authentic” Airbnb cottage whose owners are camping out in the back garden counting their cash?

You will have read about the growing disquiet felt in Europe’s most crowded cities and of attempts by mayors to stem the tide. You will understand and sympathise with the citizens of Barcelona and Prague who can’t find a table any more in their favourite restaurants or park their cars within 500 metres of their front doors. You will appreciate the resentment they feel as they push their way through throngs of foreigners each morning just to get to the shops and their frustration on hot summer’s nights as they shut their windows to keep out the noise from downtown as young people from every corner of the continent drink and dance the night away, leaving the streets strewn with beer cans, bottles and sick.

But this won’t have stopped you. I have listened to friends who agree with me about the scourge of Airbnb and Ryanair but who then tell me that they scored an apartment in Bordeaux or Lisbon for just 50 euros a night, with flights that only cost them £49 return. They know that they are killing the travel experience. But they don’t care. They are cashing in like it’s going out of style, as if there was no tomorrow, as if climate change (in which most of them profess to believe) made the world a wasting asset that might as well be enjoyed today before it vanishes into thick air.

Do I sound like an old curmudgeon? Oh yes. But if your family had lived in Venice for generations, how would you feel as the swell from the latest 65,000-tonne cruise liner washed over the banks of your local canal and another 2,500 Chinese, American, German and British tourists clattered down the gangways intent on taking in the sights before their ship re-embarks in another six hours, its course set for Limassol?

In one day alone in June of this year, seven gigantic cruise ships discharged more than 18,000 passengers and 6,400 crew members into central Venice, all bent on having a good time. How the gondoliers and the ice-cream stands coped, I have no idea, but if that’s travel in the twenty-first century, then give me central Brittany every time.

Twenty years ago, I visited Dubrovnik to find out how the city’s restoration was progressing after years of war. Today, the areas through which I walked are reportedly like Selfridge’s on the last shopping day before Christmas. Where is the joy in that? Where is the sense of discovery or of sharing the experience of somewhere different with the people who live there?

As something of an art-lover, I am keenly aware of the attraction of the Louvre. But I haven’t visited the world’s most famous art museum for more than 20 years. It’s not so much the queues (if you book in advance, you can apparently be inside in less than half an hour), it’s the sheer number of people inside the galleries, most of them with little or no interest in painting, intent mainly on ticking off the Mona Lisa on their list of things to do.

Security concerns have made visiting the Eiffel Tower even more difficult and time-consuming than it used to be, and that’s saying something. It has become a military operation. But for me the turning point – that made me turn around, that is – was the sight of men hosing down the multitudes as they stood in line to ensure that they didn’t expire of heatstroke.

Travel should be a blessing. It is all the things that the books tell you it is. But not if you can’t move, not if you can’t find a room or a table and not, if you happen to be in a great church or museum, if you don’t have the time and the space in which to appreciate that you are somewhere special, different from home, that has its own story to tell.

Now move along, ladies and gentlemen, Your 15 minutes are up. The exit is to your left. Next group, please.