An imaginary letter from Minister for Tourism Catherine Martin to her Greek counterpart Olga Kefalogianni:
Dear Olga,
I hope you are well. I read with interest a piece in the Financial Times the other day about your problems with over-tourism and the measures you are contemplating to tackle it. I hope you don’t think it presumptuous, but I thought I would share with you a few of the policies we have successfully implemented in Ireland over the years that have helped us avoid the scourge of over-tourism.
The first thing you need to do is make it hard for tourists to get to Greece. I would suggest you take a look at the model we have adopted around the regulation of Dublin Airport. What you do is make the number of passengers who can transit the airport a matter for the local planning authority to decide based on local concerns. Then you make the number of planes that can land at the airport something the aviation regulator decides on a national basis. In the middle, you put in a company to run the airport with a brief to maximise revenues. It has worked very well for us and this year we hope to turn back several million potential tourists because the airport is not allowed breach the cap set by the local authority.
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The next thing you want to do is make it hard for tourists to find somewhere to stay once they get here. We have something of a multipronged strategy in this regard.
We started by manufacturing a housing crisis. It’s easily done and I can fill you in on how to do this separately if you are interested.
A housing crisis has several benefits when it comes to preventing over-tourism — primarily a lack of affordable accommodation in the private rental sector near big tourist centres.
This helps in several ways. First, it makes it very hard for tourist businesses to find staff, particularly the low-wage casual staff on which they depend. Any staff who can find accommodation will have to pay handsomely for it. They will need higher wages and this puts pressure on hospitality prices, which helps drive away the tourists.
But what about Airbnbs and other short-term tourist lets, I hear you say? Well, you can clamp down on that via registration and taxation. Again the old housing crisis gives you some cover here. There is an opportunity for a double whammy if you are smart because if you frame the regulation correctly, you can take out most of the bed-and-breakfasts in your prime tourist areas, as we have done along the Wild Atlantic Way.
Access and accommodation are the sweet spots in the battle against over-tourism but there are plenty of other smaller initiatives that can help. One thing we have trialled with some success is to create a climate of fear in your inner cities. This is best done by getting your parliamentary backbenchers to make statements about violent incidents in the centre of your capital city rather than focusing on the actual crime figures which show it to be safe. The media is usually happy to help in the national struggle to discourage tourists from visiting.
There is also taxation. Having first engineered a situation in which many hospitality businesses are struggling to stay afloat, it’s very important that you don’t throw any of them a lifeline by reducing VAT or something equally daft.
Finally, there is the business of how you maximise revenue from your assets. We are charging €125 a pop for getting on to Skellig Michael (which you probably know as the Star Wars Island) by boat. If I can get that out of a rock in the Atlantic with some stone huts surely you can do better than €15 a head for that large rock in the middle of Athens with the ruined temples? Nothing like ridiculous prices to drive away tourists.
Anyway, I hope you found this helpful. Don’t be overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge. It is possible to drive away tourists. Only today I heard the encouraging news from Fáilte Ireland, our tourist board, that there were declines in all parts of the market. Great job.
Believe me when I say that if you follow these simple steps you will soon have a tourist product that only rich Americans can afford. The good news for you is that there are only three million of them who claim Greek heritage. We have to deal with 36 million who say they are Irish. It’s a bit of a headache, to be honest, but we working hard on driving them away too.
Yours,
Catherine Martin