When an older woman walks by in the Alexanderplatz subway station, one of them shouts "pussy" and "nice ass" at her. People of the world, come to Berlin to go binge-drinking.

'It's a nightmare!'

The group is in top form in the subway. They all crowd into the same car, where they begin hopping around and caterwauling, until the car begins to sway. "Ole, ole, ole, ole" is their most harmless chant. Soccer fans are angels compared with these people. It is events like these that cement Berlin's reputation as a party town – and simultaneously damage the city's image.

"This is precisely the sort of recreational activity that we don't want," says Berlin tourism chief Burkhard Kieker. "It's a nightmare."

Tourists are conquerors who disguise themselves as friends, and this often makes them difficult to deal with, no matter how much money they spend. Ever since short trips to nearby or faraway cities have become a national pastime, city dwellers around the globe have complained about the growing inhospitality of their own cities. They feel overwhelmed and stretched too thin.

A crowd of sunbathers at Levante Beach in Benidorm, Spain. Spain is the "beneficiary" of budget travellers but now cities like Barcelona are begging for mercy. David Ramos/Getty Images

The business of city trips is flourishing, from Asia to South America. In Europe, the number of booked trips to cities grew almost 40 per cent from 2005 to 2014. German cities such as Munich have seen even larger increases in visitors. Even companies such as coffee retailer Tchibo and grocery discounter Aldi have got into the travel business.

The hype is fuelled by companies like Airbnb that provide additional lodgings in an already overheated market. The number of available places to stay is especially high in Paris, where there are half as many vacation apartments as hotel rooms.


Desolate downtowns

Things are moving – for travellers, the travel industry and providers of lodgings. But local residents are groaning, especially in densely populated Europe, where attractions are often concentrated in an area of a few square kilometres, in cities like Barcelona, Prague and Salzburg. Tourist destinations perceive the crowds of visitors as an affliction. Residents are fleeing, and businesses such as bakeries and grocery stores are disappearing along with them, replaced by souvenir shops and currency exchanges. Downtown neighbourhoods are becoming desolate.

The conditions German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger warned against in his treatise A Theory of Tourism almost 60 years ago are becoming reality. Enzensberger argued that travellers, through their mere presence, threaten or destroy what they are actually seeking: originality and local colour.

The arrival of cheap fares on discount airlines like easyJet made short city breaks possible, especially for young people. A flight could be had for the price of a London taxi.

Enzensberger wrote, "tourism anticipates its refutation". The visitor sets out on a search for new thrills and attractions, and when he reaches his destination, he immediately deprives it of its mystique. This is why he is constantly searching for unknown destinations and sensations.

Venice is an example of a city that has lost its magic. Since 1980, the local population has shrunk from 120,000 to only 60,000. In return, 80,000 individual and cruise-ship tourists visit the city of canals and lagoons every day. Venice, the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper recently wrote, has been largely "mummified" and mutated into a "walkable postcard landscape".

Loss of Identity

To protect their city from a similar fate, residents of European cities are rebelling. At the forefront are the people of Barcelona, whose tourism boom began with the 1992 Olympic Games. The capital of the Catalonia region reinvented itself for the global event. City planners and architects built futuristic buildings and created a long, sandy beach that turned the fishing community of Barceloneta into a playground.


Restaurants on the boardwalk display neon-lit signs of mussels and chicken over rice. But beyond the beach, in the narrow streets of Barceloneta, residents protest against the crowds of tourists by hanging the district's flag from their windows, an image of a sailboat and a lighthouse on a blue-and-yellow background, along with banners with slogans like: "No Tourist Apartments!"

A throng of tourists on the steep stairs of the Pyramid of the Sun at the ancient archaeological grounds of Teotihuacan in Mexico. Few of us can resist the "must-see" sights. AP

There have been repeated demonstrations over the years, starting in 2014, when three naked Italians strolled into a supermarket, presumably tourists staying in vacation apartments.

But there is hope, and it is fuelled by people like Ada Colau. The 42-year-old developed a reputation as an activist and figurehead of the squatter community. She was elected mayor of Barcelona more than a year ago. Mass tourism is her biggest issue. Colau has promised citizens to recapture the city for them.

A mayor with attitude

It's mid-June, a morning in city hall, Colau's office. The furniture and the Miro painting on the wall are from her predecessor. Colau brought along the black-and-white photos of famous female Spaniards: the country's first female cabinet minister, a female writer, a concentration camp survivor. They are all her role models. Colau came to work late today, because she spent an hour talking about Barcelona's future to 10-year-olds at her son's school. The children were most interested in the refugees living in the city, she says. They also asked about tourism, because they are confronted with it every day.

The school is near the Sagrada Familia church, the city's most-visited structure. Colau lives in the same neighbourhood. The apartments in the building next door to hers are all rented to vacationers. Colau gets to know some of them in person, when they block her building's front door with their suitcases or ring her doorbell by mistake.

Foreign tourists wander in the coastal Croation town of Dubrovnik. As an alternative to Dubrovnik, the huge tourism company TUI Group now offers trips to Kotor in neighbouring Montenegro. AP


"In the old city, the number of tourist beds is now three times as high as the number of residents," says Colau. "And then there is the loss of identity. If I want to get together with someone near my apartment, it's difficult to find a cozy pub that reflects the atmosphere of the neighbourhood. Most are now parts of large chains with no character of their own."

The tourists truly become an ordeal on La Rambla, Barcelona's tree-lined pedestrian mall. "I used to go for walks there with my family. Today locals avoid this street, because it's become too touristy for them. Thousands of people live along La Rambla, and several million tourists join them every year. That's incredible," says Colau. The city has started to organise events for its residents, to strengthen their cohesion and deter them from moving away.

Barcelona backlash

Her supporters see Colau as an avenger of the oppressed. But she is hated by those who make their money with tourism. Shortly after taking office, Colau imposed a one-year moratorium on 30 planned hotel projects. The city has also put a hold on issuing permits for new tourist apartments.

Enrique Alcantara, 42, refuses to put up with this. He's the chairman of Apartur, an association of providers of about 7000 of the 10,000 vacation apartments that are officially rented to tourists in Barcelona. There are probably a few thousand more, when the illegal apartments are included, but he is quick to point out that he has nothing to do with them.

Alcantara places a small white box on the conference table of his office in downtown Barcelona, like a warrior presenting his weapons for the next battle. It is no longer a question of whether the tourists are a nuisance, but of how much. The little box is supposed to answer that question, by measuring noise levels in the environment. Alcantara has linked it to his smartphone. An app depicts a curve that reflects the noise level: minimal, moderate, or high.

Since April, these noise-measuring devices have been installed in thousands of vacation apartments. They enable city officials to intervene when the temporary tenants get carried away – or prove how quiet they are.

"Every Catalan family is louder," says Alcantara, "including mine." He himself is on the quiet side for a Catalan – too quiet, say some members of Apartur, who would like to see their top representatives be more combative. "We are victims," says a person who has rented apartments to tourists for years. "Keep in mind that tourism accounts for 13 per cent of Barcelona's revenues!"


Air tickets as cheap as taxis

In the 1950s, when Enzensberger wrote his essay about the essence of tourism, multi-day excursions to European cities were still the privilege of the moneyed class. Visitors arrived by car or train, with only a few able to afford flying. Tourists were interested in seeing mainly noteworthy cultural and architectural sights. Shopping and drinking were secondary.

US-based websites such as Airbnb and Couchsurfing cause headaches by ''clogging lifts, creating noise and damaging fittings''. Andrew Harrer

City tourism became a mass phenomenon in the 1980s. Rising incomes led to a new trend, the second trip, which was distinct from the main annual vacation to the beach or the mountains. New airlines like Ryanair and Easyjet began to revolutionise aviation, accompanied by the derision of traditional airlines like Lufthansa and Air France.

Tickets were now available for the price of a taxi ride. The discount airlines brought new customer groups to hotels and bed-and-breakfasts, especially young people. Suddenly, their pocket money was enough to get them farther away from home than ever before.

Today the price cutters of the air have a share of more than 40 per cent of aviation in Europe, a number that is likely to increase significantly. Lufthansa stopped making fun of discounters long ago, instead entering the fast-paced business with its new budget brand, Eurowings; it cannot afford to lose this important customer segment.

The budget carriers play a key role in determining where the flow of tourists will go next, by adding new, previously expensive destinations to their flight schedules. Current examples are Geneva and Toulouse, which used to be expensive destinations for travellers from Germany. Now tickets can be had for as little as €50 ($73).

Retraining tourists


As an alternative to Dubrovnik in Croatia, the huge tourism company TUI Group now offers trips to Kotor in neighbouring Montenegro. The city also has a port. Instead of Amsterdam, which is also operating at capacity, the company is increasingly advertising Rotterdam. And German soccer coach and former player Jurgen Klopp is achieving what the Beatles did not achieve for their home town of Liverpool. Since Klopp left Dortmund for Liverpool, TUI also sells trips to the working-class English city, shifting its emphasis away from London.

In the end, however, cities are like people. Some are simply more popular than others. But when love becomes oppressive, it's time to make a radical change, which is what some cities are now planning to do. And some are also calling Vladimir Preveden, a Vienna tourism expert with the global Roland Berger management consulting firm. He develops proposals for cities and regions on how to control flows of tourists. He and his team recently devised a concept for Kuala Lumpur, and Preveden has also developed ideas for Prague.

Crowding the castle

On a grey day in June, at the square in front of Prague Castle, where hundreds of tourists are waiting for the changing of the castle guard at noon, Preveden, dressed in a suit and tie, sticks out like a sore thumb in a sea of people wearing T-shirts and functional wear. The crowds begin to stir shortly before noon.

"Go back, go back!" the guards shout at the onlookers: Germans, French, Chinese and Koreans.

Anyone who wants to see the Alhambra in the Spanish city of Granada is well advised to register online months in advance

Using their full physical strength, they push back the tourists to form a lane. Families are pulled apart, children look for their mothers and mothers for their children. There are fanfares, and the replacement guard approaches, goose-stepping and dressed in blue uniforms. This is perfectly normal insanity on a perfectly normal weekend in Prague.

Preveden observes the scene like a doctor looking at someone who is seriously ill. The diagnosis: Prague's situation is serious but not hopeless. He has an eye for things that aren't quite right, as he walks down from the castle into the city, passing a Segway rental shop, stores selling junk from China and Taiwan, and currency exchanges offering outrageous rates.


There's a Thai massage studio at the bottom of the stairs leading down from the castle. There are three Asian women in the window, whose bare feet are being nibbled on by black kangal fish – a new, not particularly appetising method of removing calluses.

"What business does something like this have here?" Preveden expostulates. "None!"

He advises cities like Prague to turn their backs on their budget image, raise prices and attract new groups of customers, a practice Paris and London adopted years ago. The bottom line, he says, is that revenues remain the same, but local residents are no longer exposed to as much stress.

Some politicians and lobbyists in Prague agree, but they haven't managed to prevail yet. Instead, thousands of short-term tourists crowd across the Charles Bridge every day, walking shoulder to shoulder towards the magnificent castle and cheap beer.

"You hardly see local residents during the day any more," says Hana Balasch, who runs a trendy bar in the historic centre.

"Sometimes there is almost no room left on the bridge for any more people," says Otakar John. He's a member of the board of the Czech hotel association, as well as of the tourism advisory board of the City of Prague. With him, Preveden is preaching to the converted with his proposals.

By building a museum district and BMW World, Munich managed to attract new visitors and relieve pressure on entertainment hotspots.

If John had his way, Prague, like Barcelona, would have imposed a moratorium on new hotel construction long ago, because the city has a surplus of guest rooms. "We have to do something to stagger the flow of visitors, in terms of both time and place," he says.


Initial steps to help Prague recover have already been taken. Starting in September, Segways will be permitted in the historic district only in exceptional cases. City officials hope that the annual marathon, a laser show on the Vltava and several cultural festivals will help to attract more visitors during the low season.

New rules in play

Other cities are also resourceful – and quite rigorous in some cases. Berlin recently introduced a rule requiring that vacation apartments can be rented out only with the approval of the authorities. Some places, like Barcelona, are now charging a visitor's tax for day trippers, and visitors have been charged a fee to use Park Guell on the city's Carmel Hill for some time.

Anyone who wants to see the Alhambra in the Spanish city of Granada is well advised to register online months in advance. Cinque Terre, a strip of Italian coastline known for its five picturesque villages perched on cliffs, plans to use entry tickets this year to radically reduce the number of visitors by a million, down to 1.5 million guests.

Munich has developed one of the cleverest concepts for dealing with tourists. By building a museum district and BMW World, the city managed to attract new visitors and relieve pressure on entertainment hotspots like the Hofbrauhaus and the English Garden. The city also advertises the lakes and mountains in the surrounding countryside as alternatives to sightseeing and shopping.

Bars on wheels for cyclist tourists

Burkhard Kieker, the head of tourism for Berlin, has redefined his job in recent years. In the past, he did everything he could to attract as many vacationers as possible to Berlin, but now he is plagued by the question of what to do with all the tourists.

Half a million visitors – up to a million in the summer – roll through the German capital every day. And while people make bets over whether the new airport, which has turned into a joke, will ever open, the number of flights processed through Schonefeld Airport in the first six months of this year was almost 40 per cent higher than in the first half of 2015, thanks to additional flights by Ryanair.


"Hospitality is part of the DNA of such a big city," says Kieker. "But you also have to pay attention to the visitors – and to local residents."

He wants the Senate, the city's governing body, to approve additional toilets for Berlin, preferably several hundred, and a better guidance system. He thinks it's a blessing that bierbikes, basically passenger-powered rolling trolleys that make the experience on board something akin to cycling inside a bar, are now banned in the busiest locations.

To promote peaceful coexistence between Berliners and visitors, his team has already contacted authors of travel guides and asked them to stop recommending certain areas as sites for open-air parties, because residents are no longer able to sleep.

New kind of tourist wanted

Once a year, Kieker invites the mayors of Berlin's 12 districts for a conversation. This is the usual scenario: 10 districts want more tourists, while Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and Mitte want fewer visitors. An app that became available a year and a half ago helps guide the flow of tourists to less-well-known gems like the Jewish cemetery in Weissensee. The only problem is that the app has been downloaded only 60,000 times. Another problem is that people who visit Berlin for the first time want to see the Brandenburg Gate and the Hackesche Hofe, no matter what the app says.

Kieker doesn't want fewer tourists but different ones, and to attract them he is advertising Berlin as a city of culture. He has travelled to Sydney with the Berlin Philharmonic and visited Paris and Milan with designers.

He also went to the Persian Gulf countries with doctors from Charité Hospital to promote medical tourism. When a wealthy sheikh goes to Berlin for an operation, his children, nieces and nephews travel with him and rent an entire floor at the Hotel Adlon. But this is nothing new.

Ultimately, the task is too massive for Kieker to handle himself. In response to his proposal, a group of cities under especially high psychological pressure have joined forces: Barcelona, Prague, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Hamburg and Berlin. Their heads of tourism have already met twice to learn from one another.

One thing Kieker already knows is that something called the Sneakair is unlikely to be the solution to his problems.

The budget airline Easyjet, not entirely innocent when it comes to the problem of too much tourism, developed the Sneakair, billing it as a technological miracle. It's a sneaker-type shoe with a special, built-in navigation device that is connected to your smartphone via Bluetooth. It can remotely guide pedestrians by means of vibrations. So maybe, just maybe, it could thus even divert them to less-overcrowded zones within a city.

Der Spiegel