These European Cities Say They Have Too Many Tourists. Why Are Their Airports Expanding?

Outside the Santa Lucia train station in Venice this summer, officers equipped with QR scanners stopped visitors to make sure they had paid the day-tripper fee intended to curb overtourism. Yet just miles away, construction was underway on an expansion at Marco Polo Airport, which will eventually serve 20 million passengers a year, up from 11.6 million.

Venice is hardly alone in this paradox. Across Europe, airports are expanding to meet growing travel demand, even while the cities they serve struggle to contain the flood of visitors with tourist taxes, short-term rental bans and carbon-reduction initiatives.

For example, in Amsterdam, Schiphol Airport is building a 592,000-square-foot boarding gate area that will open next year. An ongoing expansion at Athens International will increase its capacity from 26 million to 40 million passengers a year. And in Barcelona, where a new commissioner for sustainable tourism is rolling out policies to diminish tourists’ impact on residential life, the Spanish airport authority’s plans to expand El Prat Airport has prompted opponents to schedule a demonstration for Sept. 20.

“It definitely is a contradiction,” said Alex Chapman, head of economic and environmental policy at the New Economics Foundation, a progressive British think tank, in London. “There are cases like Barcelona where you’ve got a population that’s almost on the streets in revolt at what they perceive to be unsustainable and unfair tourist-industry practices. To be proposing another huge expansion of the airport alongside that is just really hard to reconcile.”

Competition From Within

The clashing efforts stem from competing authorities. In general, national governments in Europe oversee their airports, while the areas most affected by overtourism, like housing and sanitation, fall under the purview of municipal or regional authorities. As citizens have begun protesting tourism’s impact, those local governments have been obligated to respond.