When speaking of tourism, we can say without a doubt that it is a resource. In fact, it contributes significantly to the Italian GDP (0.8 percent). However, according to the most recent data, Italy is no longer the top attraction for tourists, but the fifth, and according to forecasts, will soon drop to seventh. But why is Italy, which has more artistic assets than other countries and features landscapes and places as immensely beautiful as those of other countries, slipping backwards down this list? This question is not easy to answer.
However, it is interesting to examine some of the aspects here, and in particular the phenomena of so-called overtourism and of tourist rentals, which are often indicated as being responsible for overtourism,even if that is not really true, or rather a false flag.
In fact, there is no relationship between the two aspects. The causes of overtourism can be identified in a process that began years ago, perhaps as early as the 1990s.
In practice, there are many factors that have contributed and continue to contribute to creating the phenomenon. The first is the rise of the widespread need to travel to visit “uncontaminated” places, that is, sites without tourists or “must-see” locations. This “need to discover uncontaminated places” could represent a reality in the nineties, but today it is absolutely no longer realistic, even though advertising always tends to create images of this kind, with deserted places and very few people. Think of car ads, which are always presented in deserted contexts, in solitary and silent natural or urban landscapes, never in the chaos of city traffic, or in traffic jams on the beltways surrounding large cities. Would such an image be just as attractive to a potential buyer? The same can be said for tourist places, for cities of art, or for the use of museums.
Obviously, as demand increased, tour operators multiplied their offerings and so the skies became saturated, huge ships capable of hosting up to five thousand passengers were built, and airports were constructed in the most inaccessible places, with the result of pouring millions of people into cities and tourist sites, saturating and consuming them, not to mention undermining the quality of the visit.
However, it is also possible to observe and identify another contributing cause that has a considerable impact, specifically, the “enthusiastic” policy of the administrations that do everything they can to attract ever greater quantities of visitors only or mainly to certain cities or locations, lowering the quality of the tourism itself and creating bad conditions for the citizens who, subjected to excessive pressure in their daily lives and with few protections, tend to move away and abandon these centers.
There is another contributing factor that must also be mentioned, one that is always the responsibility of public administrations. That is, urban planning that favors commercial, managerial and artisan settlements in the first and second urban belts, consequently emptying the centers of primary services, local shops and other things, thus pushing citizens to move their residences.
If these are the most obvious causes of overtourism, how can we explain the attack on tourist rentals? The reason is that it is the only possible, easy and concrete target available. The real causes of the problem cannot be fought.
So, why has the tourist rental market developed? Partly because the approach to tourism has changed somewhat for families, both for holiday resorts and for tourism in cities of art. Hotels are too expensive, with spaces that are too small to accommodate a family for several days. Thus the preference for staying in apartments, which often also offer the possibility of “eating in”, with a notable advantage in terms of costs. The first ones to think of this alternative, anticipated by guest houses and bed & breakfasts, were the hoteliers themselves, who now want to stop and destroy what is perceived as competition.
Why do small property owners prefer tourist rentals? The main reason is to be found in the legislation on rentals, procedures and the time needed to vacate an apartment in a normal rental lease (4+4 years or 3+2) as well as the differential in income if the property is rented with short-term vs a normal rental. The gap is significant: for the same property unit, you can have a gross monthly rent of one thousand euros with normal rental, or five thousand with short-term rental. Expenses and taxes are significantly greater in the second case, but the income is still considerably higher. Above all – except in very sporadic cases – the property remains available to the owner in case of need. On the contrary, when a property is rented normally, cases of default or end of lease can result in a very long and exhausting procedure, sometimes lasting several years, to obtain return of the property. And very often, in these cases, the property is surrendered in terrible condition, requiring huge investments and expensive restorations to put it back on the market.
If these brief considerations are correct, overtourism cannot be fought by criminalizing tourist rentals, but rather with other strategies, such as regulating or limiting access, preventing urban decay, and keeping public and private functions in the city centers, not moving them or encouraging them to move to the edges of cities or peripheral areas. Last but not least, however, we must consider revision of the legislation on the rental of urban residential properties and of the entire procedural-judicial complex established for the release of apartments.
Text taken from the introduction to the conference proceedings
La valorizzazione e il sostegno dei Beni Culturali privati
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