RESPONSIBLE TRAVEL, SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL

Don’t Be An Asshole: A Field Guide to Not Making Southern Europe Worse This Summer

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July 13, 2026

If you’ve been watching the news this summer, you’ve probably decided that Europe hates you.

The footage is hard to misread: water pistols in Barcelona, banners in Palma, marches winding through Venice and Lisbon and Palermo. On June 15th, coordinated demonstrations went off in more than sixteen cities at once. Spain alone has now registered anti-tourism protests in over forty. The headline writes itself — TOURISTS GO HOME — and if you’ve got flights booked to Sicily in three weeks, it lands somewhere between guilt and dread.

So let’s clear something up before we go any further.

They are not protesting you. They are protesting the fact that they can’t afford to live in their own neighbourhoods anymore.

The demonstrations are organised, overwhelmingly, by housing groups, neighbourhood associations, and unions. Not by anti-social xenophobes who resent the sight of a stranger with a map. Read the banners instead of the headlines and the demand is almost boringly specific: rents have exploded because long-term homes have been converted into short-term tourist lets, and the people who grew up in these cities are being priced out of them. That’s it. That’s the grievance.

Which is genuinely good news for you, because it means the problem has solutions, and you can be part of them.

What tourism actually does to a place

The damage isn’t the crowd. The crowd is the symptom people photograph.

The damage is structural, and it works like this. A landlord in Palermo or Lisbon or the Canary Islands does the maths and realises that a flat rented to a nurse for €700 a month earns less than the same flat rented to a rotating cast of visitors for €150 a night. So the flat leaves the housing market. Then the one next door. Then the building. The nurse moves an hour out of the city, and so does the schoolteacher, and so does the guy who ran the bakery, because he can’t staff it and can’t afford to live above it anymore.

What’s left is a neighbourhood that looks exactly like a neighbourhood and functions like a hotel. The greengrocer becomes a shop selling fridge magnets. The hardware store becomes a place that sells overpriced ceramic lemons. The bar where old men played cards becomes a bar with an English-language menu and a QR code. It’s still charming. That’s the cruel part. It’s charming right up until the moment there’s nobody left living there for whom it’s home.

This is why the anger keeps escalating even as cities get more beautiful and more visited. Overtourism isn’t a crowding problem that goes away in October. It’s an extraction problem, and it runs year-round.

And the cities have started to agree. Barcelona has doubled its tourist tax and intends to phase out short-term rentals by 2028. Athens has been fining short-term rentals that fail inspection since late 2025, and the mayor has floated capping new hotels altogether. Nice and Cannes are limiting cruise passenger numbers as of this summer. These aren’t fringe demands anymore — they’re municipal policy, and they became policy because people marched for them.

The asshole test

Here’s the thing worth internalising: the question is not did you go. Travel is not a moral failing, and nobody serious is asking you to never see Sicily.

The question is: where did you sleep, what did you pay, and who got the money?

That’s the whole test. You can be a completely benign presence in a city under strain, or you can be an active accelerant of the thing its residents are marching against — and the difference between those two people is mostly a handful of booking decisions made weeks before you arrive.

So. How not to be an asshole:

Sleep somewhere that was always meant to be slept in

This is the big one, and everything else is a rounding error next to it. A licensed hotel, a family-run pensione, a guesthouse, a hostel — these are buildings that exist to host people. A whole apartment in a residential block, listed by a host with fourteen other listings, is a home that stopped being a home. If you change exactly one thing after reading this, change this one.

Pay the tourist tax and shut up about it

It’s a few euros a night, it funds the infrastructure your visit consumes, and complaining about it in a five-star review is a genuinely embarrassing thing to have done with your life.

Go when nobody else is going

Forty-three percent of travellers now say they’re planning to avoid overcrowded destinations — up eleven points on last year — and forty-two percent are shifting outside peak season. This is not a sacrifice. April and May and September and October are, objectively, when these places are at their best: the light is better, the sea is still warm, the Acropolis isn’t shutting at midday because of a heat emergency, and the person serving you coffee hasn’t been on their feet for eleven weeks straight. Summer is when you get the worst version of somewhere at the highest price. You are not being noble by going in October. You are being smart.

Stay longer. Move less.

Four cities in six days is a way of consuming a country without touching it. It also means four sets of check-ins, four sets of transfers, four short stays that are worth more to a landlord than to anyone who lives there. One base, a week, day trips by train — you’ll spend the same money and leave a fraction of the mess.

Spend downward and outward

Eat where there isn’t a menu in your language. Buy from the shop, not the stand. Take the public bus. Get out of the historic centre — the centre is precisely the part that’s been hollowed out, and the neighbourhood one metro stop away is where the city actually still is. It will be better anyway.

Don’t outsource your conscience

If a company’s pitch is that it has offset your flight into carbon neutrality, be aware that from September 27th this year the EU will make that specific claim illegal to make, on the grounds that it isn’t true. Offsets are not a permission slip. There is no product you can buy that converts a bad trip into a good one. There are only better trips.

The one that stings

The single most effective thing most of us could do is not a booking tweak. It’s this: take fewer trips, and make them longer.

Three long weekends in three different countries does more damage than one two-week stay, and gives you less of all three. The slow travel thing is not an aesthetic. It’s just the arithmetic of caring about the place you’re standing in.

That’s a harder sell than “swap your Airbnb,” and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But if you’ve read this far, you’re clearly not someone who wanted the easy version.

So: go

Go to Sicily. Go to Athens and Lisbon and Palma. These cities are not asking to be abandoned — a huge number of people there depend on visitors, and a collapse in tourism would hurt exactly the residents the protests are trying to protect. Nobody is marching for empty streets.

They’re marching because they want to keep living on the street you’re about to walk down.

Book the hotel. Pay the tax. Go in September. Take the train. Eat at the place with no English menu, tip properly, learn to say thank you, and leave the flat above the bakery for the person who works in the bakery.

That’s the whole guide. It was never about you — and the point is to keep it that way.