Amsterdam Asks Travelers to Clean Up Their Act

To spread the message, amsterdampartners launched a high-profile “Enjoy and Respect” campaign last year, informing visitors of local customs, rules, and penalties. For many, however, there’s more amiss with contemporary tourism than rowdiness alone.

“You could say quality tourism people travel because they’re inquisitive and want to learn,” says Stephen Hodes, founder of local tourism think tank Amsterdam in Progress. “Unfortunately, that kind of tourism is on the downward trend. The new tourists are the status seekers, who travel because it’s good for the way other people perceive them. They’re people who go to sites, take a selfie first to show they’ve have been there, and otherwise aren’t interested.”

This might be annoying, but you can’t legislate against disinterest. What you can do, Udo says, is channel and distribute people more effectively. Even people who say they want an authentic local experience can fall unwittingly into a tourist rut. People who want to be responsible can, for example, cause hold-ups by riding bikes during morning rush hour.

“If you look at factual data, people behave very much alike,” she says. “Many people go to the Van Gogh Museum in the morning, and on a canal boat in the afternoon. That puts pressure on the city at certain places in certain moments, which can end up creating collisions with the locals.”

The city is thus in the process of tailoring its “I Amsterdam” app to match suggestions to visitors’ tastes, and recommend activities at times when they’re not normally full of people.

Opening the gates

This seems sensible, but is this focus on visitor behavior realistic, or entirely fair? While Amsterdam attempts to manage tourist flows, some aspects of both national and local government policy serve to pump ever more visitors into the city. In 2020, Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport will expand to host a further 50,000 flights a year, making yet more room by shunting low-cost carriers to tiny Lelystad Airport, which is currently closed but set to reopen on a far larger scale in 2020.

This revamped overflow airport, of which the city of Amsterdam owns 20 percent, will also host some new flights, something that is required by E.U. competition law. Meanwhile, cruise ships will soon be able to dock at a vastly expanded cruise terminal (probably 24 miles away at IJmuiden, although the location has not yet been confirmed) one that’s capable of hosting ships containing 6,000 or more passengers. This new terminal may save inner Amsterdam some pollution, but could also increase cruise passenger numbers to 770,000 annually by 2030, almost three times the 2015 figure of 280,000 a year. Hodes says he can’t believe that this could be seen as a benefit to the city.

“[Cruise ships] pollute the environment, their passengers spend the lowest amount of any kind of tourists coming to Amsterdam, and they travel in large groups,” he says. “What’s the idea behind encouraging this?”

Meanwhile, despite the hotel stop, new hotel room construction in the city continues apace, with a total of 8,133 new rooms still due in the coming years. These rooms aren’t limited by the hotel stop because their licenses were granted before it was introduced. With a further 14,000 rooms currently in planning for the outer suburbs, Greater Amsterdam’s overnight accommodation will ultimately rise by 63 percent. Amsterdam has seen a modest drop of 5 percent in Airbnb bookings, but its difficulties in ensuring listings obey the rules means that the city’s control of tourist accommodation is tenuous at best.