Venice, for example, has an #EnjoyRespectVenezia campaign listing the finable offenses, including diving into the canals. In September, the city plans to introduce a new daytripper tax, requiring the daily selfie-stick brigades to pay fees from 3 euros, or about $3.35, on relatively uncrowded days, to 10 euros when the city is packed. As for the nearly 1.5 million tourists arriving annually on roughly 500 cruise ships, the city is hoping that this month’s crash will motivate a paralyzed national government to green light a plan to divert the ships elsewhere in the lagoon. Activists want them out altogether.
The Venice mayor’s spokesman, Antonio Bertasi, told me that the city had secured funds for stewards in St. Mark’s Square and other heavily trafficked areas to “maintain the decorum of the place.” Other European countries are also imposing regulations to help resuscitate some Grand Tour decorum.
Amsterdam, which has doubled hotel room taxes and limited Airbnb rentals, has also released a video at airports and on booking sites, reminding gallivanting-age men that spilling bodily fluids into the red light district’s streets is unacceptable and subject to fine. The mayor of Barcelona has promised to limit room-renting to take the helium out of the city’s overinflated real estate market. Dubrovnik’s Rupe Museum for ethnography and folk tradition is now mobbed with tourists — despite being a museum of ethnography and folk tradition — because its facade doubles as a brothel on the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” which was filmed there. Fans of the series have invaded the old city and chased away the vast majority of the residents, forcing the mayor to try and impose limits.
Competitors are seeking to capitalize on the woes of the crowded cities. In 2017, Oslo launched “the Great Escape Oslo,” a publicity campaign in which city officials poached frustrated tourists, including a suspiciously photogenic New Zealand couple who had complained on social media about crowds in Paris.
“We actually want to rescue you guys and fly you over to Oslo,” a city official is recorded saying to the couple. The couple go and have a ball. “If someone contacts you through Instagram saying come to their city, then just go for it,” the satisfied Kiwi tourist testifies, in perhaps the worst advice of the social media age.
In Italy, there is also an effort to divert tourists away from its own tourist traps. “I invite the tour operators to promote the Beautiful Country also away from the most frequented routes,” said Marco Centinaio, a former tour operator who is now Italy’s minister for Farming, Food and Forest Policy, and Tourism, and a member of the governing anti-immigrant League party. “Discover the lesser known and smaller towns,” he said.
But tourists increasingly are seeking out new destinations on their own, ones they often return to, again and again.
from Best News Viral http://bit.ly/2MCCLh8
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