by Mia Taylor
Last updated: 3:45 PM ET, Thu July 13, 2023
Crowds? Labor riots? Steep prices? Meh. It seems none of these things are deterring travelers bent on exploring Europe this summer.
A new report from the Associated Press confirms as much, emphasizing that crowds are the order of the day across Europe.
At the Acropolis in Athens, for instance, the wait to visit is more than two hours long. Ditto for taxi lines at Rome’s primary train station. At Venice’s popular St. Mark’s Square the crush of visitors is equally daunting.
Revenge travel may just have teetered over the cliff into the pre-pandemic challenge of overtourism.
Tourism this year is expected to exceed 2019 records, according to the AP, and that reality is materializing across Europe’s most popular destinations. Think: Barcelona, Rome, Athens, Venice, and Santorini.
Crowds of travelers in St. Mark's Square, Venice, Italy (Photo Credit: iStock/ Getty Images Plus/ bluebeat76)
The current influx of visitors across the European continent, and beyond, is primarily due to American travelers who have plenty of pandemic savings to spend and are bent on “revenge travel”— a reality that aligns precisely with a new Allianz study on the travel intentions of Americans this year.
The labor riots in Paris, the high cost of airfare, and the crowds are not putting a damper on any of this travel enthusiasm, either. All of which, is good news for hotels and restaurants that struggled to stay afloat amid the lean pandemic years.
Still, the unchecked level of visitors also reveals an unpleasant reality: That steady drumbeat of pledges in recent years to make travel more responsible, sustainable, and Earth-friendly, may have been empty promises.
“The pandemic should have taught us a lesson,” Alessandra Priante, director of the regional department for Europe at the U.N. World Tourism Organization (WTO), told the Associated Press.
Instead, she said, the mindset “is about recuperating the cash. Everything is about revenue, about the here and now.”
“We have to see what is going to happen in two or three years’ time because the prices at the moment are unsustainable,” she said.
Some destinations are finding their own ways to establish boundaries, however. In Florence, Italy, for instance, the mayor is putting an end to any new short-term apartment rentals (which have apparently been spreading in the historic city center).
It's also worth noting that even amid the growing crowds, WTO data shows travel to and within Europe remains 10 percent below 2019. That lag may be due to a variety of factors, including Chinese tourists not having fully returned and travelers not wanting to venture into countries near Ukraine while the war there continues.
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