Amsterdam tourism in a post-corona world – a kinder,
gentler industry?
Business
April 5, 2020 - By Lauren Comiteau
Amsterdammer
David Veldhoen could not have been happier on the day the city removed the
iconic IAmsterdam letters from the Museumplein in its efforts to combat
overtourism. ‘The letters were for me a symbol of tourism, so I made this
picture with the letters enlarged as a ruin,’ he explained of his mixed medium
artwork I Amsterdam. ‘The tourists come up from the fog and also disappear in
the haze while colonising the city. I’m very happy that the letters are
leaving. It’s so fantastic to see an open field again behind the Rijksmuseum.’
That was in December 2018, the height of the holiday tourist season. The city
and many of its residents had had enough with the record number of visitors
that saw its population of 850,000 accommodate a staggering 17 million visitors
last year. ‘If your only reason to come to Amsterdam is to get drunk and blow
your mind out smoking pot, then don’t come. We don’t want you here,’ said the
city’s former economics alderman Udo Kock at the time. The city, saying it
wanted to reclaim Amsterdam for Amsterdammers, enacted a number of
controversial measures to discourage what were now being called ‘visitors,’
including relegating tourist buses to the outskirts of the city, halving the
number of days residents could rent their homes on Airbnb and encouraging
luxury travellers over lower-spending backpackers. While some found the
measures draconian, Amsterdam, like several other postcard-perfect mid-sized
European cities (think Venice, Barcelona, Prague) was pulling out all the stops
to deal with a surge in mass tourism created in part by budget flights,
home-sharing sites, the worldwide economic upturn and an urban renaissance that
many said was turning its fabled canal-laden capital into a tourist theme park.
The new normal Fast forward 18 months, and in an extreme case of ‘be careful
what you wish for,’ the city is now virtually empty of tourists. Because of the
corona virus, government measures have led to the closure of the city’s major
sights and cultural institutions to at least June 1, including the Van Gogh
Museum, Rijksmuseum the Anne Frank House, and Artis zoo. With social gatherings
banned for the time being, even King’s Day has been cancelled. Theatres,
restaurants, bars and brothels have also been forced to close their doors,
while the city’s famed cannabis coffee shops are doing take-out business only.
For the Van Gogh Museum, which depends heavily on ticket sales among other things
to sustain itself, the impact of the virus is massive. ‘The museum never
comments on financial details like how much we expect to lose,’ says a museum
spokeswoman. ‘But the whole cultural sector, like the rest of society, is
severely affected by this crisis. Since we generate 89% of our own income, the
Van Gogh Museum is also suffering.’ ‘The effect is huge,’ says Vera Al,
spokeswoman for deputy mayor for finance and economic affairs Victor Everhardt.
‘There is no tourism, which means there’s no income from tourists.’ The numbers
According to the city’s latest budget, tourist tax was expected to generate
€197.9m for Amsterdam in 2020, a figure that is now unrealistic. Parking
revenue, to which tourists contribute, was slated to bring in an additional €273.2m
out of a total city budget of €6.3bn. Research from the Amsterdam
University-affiliated SEO Amsterdam Economics research agency estimated the
total revenue for the Amsterdam economy from tourism in 2017 at €2.7bn,
including wages and profits for local workers and businesses. While it is too
early to know exactly how the numbers will play out after the crisis, its
impact on Amsterdam’s economy, said a city official, is ‘enormous.’ Freelance
violist Kyra Philippi, who used to play for the Netherlands Philharmonic
Orchestra, has had all her performances cancelled. She used to live in a
historic canal house in the city centre until 2017, when the musician moved her
family to Duivendrecht on the outskirts of Amsterdam to escape the noise from
neighbouring Airbnb renters and the hordes of drunken tourists that were
turning her picturesque city into an ‘open-air museum with no high and low
season, just a high season.’ ‘When I bike into the city now, it’s really
empty,’ she says. ‘You don’t wish any city an overdose of tourism, but you wish
them this even less. Maybe the city government will rethink some of its
policies. Mass tourism presents extra risks, not only for tourists but for us
as travellers.’ Learning curve? While the city government is busy dealing with
the crisis, Al says its tourist policy remains the same. ‘We still want quality
tourism,’ she says. ‘Overtourism is bad for some neighbourhoods and Amsterdam
should remain liveable for its residents. The coronacrisis hasn’t changed this
view.’ Zef Hemel, a professor of urban planning at Amsterdam University and
sometimes advisor to the mayor, thinks the coronacrisis can be an opportunity
to start again. ‘This very strange situation is kind of a timeout that could
start us re-thinking the whole tourism business,’ he says. Hemel thinks a mix
of increased sustainable tourism—wherein consumers become more conscious of
their footprints—and entrepreneurship in the tourist sector will all lead to
solutions. No tourist traps, what might sustainable tourism in Amsterdam look
like ‘Even the booking.coms and Airbnbs will have to refine their businesses,
he says. ‘I believe we can learn from these shocks. After the post-war period,
too, you had a situation where people came together and started collaborating
in new ways to create a better society. This holds for any serious crisis.’
Artist Veldhoen, meanwhile, hopes the city’s future looks more like the past of
his Amsterdam childhood. ‘The corona crisis is terrible, but in another way,
the city looks beautiful, if a bit spooky,’ he says. ‘There’s no pollution
because there’s no traffic. You can see the stars and the moon again. I hope
that the inhabitants of cities like Amsterdam will take over their cities again
and make them inhabitable for the students and artists and the people we need
now—police, care workers, firefighters—who hopefully will be able to afford to
come back.’
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