Tourist Taxes Won't End the Overtourism Backlash. Crowds Were Never the Whole Complaint.
Locals protest tourists over two threats: housing and identity. Taxes and caps address the first. Here is what threat psychology says about the second.
In the summer of 2024, thousands of people marched through Barcelona with water pistols and sprayed tourists eating at outdoor restaurants. The coverage focused on the water guns. The signs said something else: Barcelona is not for sale. Nobody sprays a stranger because the sidewalk is crowded. Something else is going on, and it has a name in psychology.
Locals turn against tourists for two separate reasons that usually appear together: a realistic threat to resources like housing, and a symbolic threat to the identity of the place. Tourist taxes, rental bans and visitor caps mostly address the first. That is why resentment can keep growing in a city that has successfully reduced its numbers.
The Complaint Under the Complaint
The standard explanation for overtourism backlash is arithmetic. Too many visitors, streets built for fewer people, so cap the cruise ships and tax the day trippers until the numbers fall. It sounds reasonable until you listen to what residents say when they are asked directly. The complaint is rarely just "there are too many people." It is "this doesn't feel like my neighborhood anymore," and "I can't afford to live five minutes from where I grew up because every apartment on my street is a short-term rental."
Those are different complaints. One is about congestion. The other is about who a place still belongs to. A city can fix the first and leave the second completely untouched.
Two Threats, and Neither One Needs a Villain
Psychologists Walter and Cookie Stephan built a framework for exactly this kind of resentment, decades before Airbnb existed. They separate perceived threat into two categories. A realistic threat is a threat to tangible things: jobs, housing, safety, access to services. A symbolic threat is a threat to a group's values, way of life and identity, the things that make a place feel like theirs.
The part that matters most for travel is that the theory does not measure intent. It measures perception. Most tourists are not trying to take over a neighborhood. They are trying to have a good week. But the apartment still isn't available to rent long-term, a bakery that three generations ran can turn into a shop that stores suitcases, and the person who grew up there still looks up one day and doesn't recognize the street. The threat is real to the people living it whether or not any individual visitor caused it.
The Part the Episode Didn't Cover: The Theory Has Four Threats
The original framework has four components, not two: realistic threats, symbolic threats, intergroup anxiety and negative stereotypes. Intergroup anxiety is the discomfort of dealing with people you expect to be awkward, unpredictable or unsafe to be around. Negative stereotypes are the expectations that fuel it.
That matters because the one study I found that applies this framework directly to a tourist destination complicates the symbolic story. Carlos Monterrubio's 2016 analysis of residents' attitudes toward spring breakers in Cancun found that realistic threats and intergroup anxiety were the dominant drivers of prejudice toward tourists, and that residents' perceived dangers were closely tied to the tourists' overt behavior in the destination. Two honest limits apply. Spring breakers are an extreme case of visitor behavior, and a single study cannot tell you what drives backlash in Barcelona or Bali. But it is a reminder that the symbolic threat is not the whole picture either. Resentment toward visitors is a mix, and the mix changes with the place and the kind of visitor.
Doxey Described the Stages in 1975
Researchers noticed the pattern in tourism long before smartphones did. In 1975 the tourism researcher G.V. Doxey proposed what became known as the Irridex, a model in which resident attitudes move from euphoria, to apathy, to irritation and eventually antagonism as the perceived costs of tourism outgrow the benefits. The model has been criticized for implying a neat linear sequence, and communities rarely speak with one voice. Some residents in any destination are enthusiastic, some are indifferent and some are furious at the same time.
Its value is that it names something the arithmetic explanation misses: attitudes shift over time as costs accumulate, not at one magic visitor count.
What Cities Are Actually Doing in 2026
Look at the policy wave through the two-threat lens and a pattern appears. Almost every measure targets the realistic side, because that is the side a government can legislate.
Barcelona is furthest along. Spain's Constitutional Court upheld the city's plan to stop renewing about 10,000 tourist-apartment licenses by November 2028. From April 2026, Catalonia doubled its regional tourist tax and Barcelona raised its municipal surcharge from €4 to €5, bringing the combined rate to as much as €12 per person per night. Venice charged day visitors €5 to €10 on 60 peak days in 2026, up from 54 in 2025. In Amsterdam, a resident group is suing the city over its own limit of 20 million overnight stays, a limit the city now describes as an ambition, while stays reached 23.7 million in 2025.
Then there are hard caps. Machu Picchu limits entry to 4,500 visitors a day, rising to 5,600 on peak dates in 2026, with a fixed route printed on the ticket. The Acropolis allows 20,000 visitors a day, sold in hourly blocks. I saw the Acropolis system this past summer. The timed ticketing clearly made things more orderly, and my guide still told us the crowds that day weren't bad. If that was the mild version, I didn't want to see the peak one.
Notice how the language drifts, though. The Amsterdam lawsuit is not framed as "please build more housing." It is framed as the city breaking a promise about what kind of place Amsterdam gets to remain. In Madrid, when an 87-year-old woman who had lived in her apartment for more than seven decades was evicted after an investment fund raised her rent, the protests spread across Spain. The landlord later offered to let her return at her old rent. Housing was the trigger. Whose city this is was the argument.
When a Government Names the Threat
The clearest recent example is in Bali. Bali has become one of the most visible destinations for foreign digital nomads, with villa complexes and resorts built largely for other foreigners. This summer, two Dutch nationals who ran a foreigners-only run club in Canggu were banned from re-entering Indonesia. According to a social media post that spread widely, an Indonesian woman was turned away from the club while her foreign partner was accepted. Indonesia's immigration director general said "there should not be a state within a state." The official grounds were running an event without the required permits, but the public reaction was about exclusion in a place the organizers were living in.
I did research on this dynamic during my time in Indonesia. A foreigners-only club in someone else's hometown is close to a textbook symbolic threat: a parallel community, closed to the people who actually live there, and this time with a government response attached. If you want to read more about how this plays out with remote workers, I wrote about it in You Moved Abroad for the Culture. You Might Be the Reason It's Disappearing.
A Tax Prices the Problem. A Cap Rations It.
Here is where I land, and it is uncomfortable. I am a travel creator. The cities in this essay are being reshaped partly by people making a version of the choice I make when I book a flight and film a video about it. I am not telling anyone to stop traveling. That isn't realistic, and guilt isn't a strategy.
But the two policy types answer different questions. A tourist tax raises the price of the same experience, so anyone who can afford it still gets in. A visitor cap rations the experience itself, regardless of income, which treats presence as the limited resource instead of price. Neither one answers the symbolic question underneath, who gets a say in what a place turns into. A tax can manage the displacement. It cannot make a place feel like home again to the people who live there.
The Question Worth Asking Before Your Next Trip
If you travel somewhere that is visibly straining under visitors like you, ask which kind of threat you might be part of. Are you competing for an apartment, a table or a resource someone else needs? Or is your presence changing what the place means to the people who have always called it home? Those call for different responses, and most travelers have never been asked to tell them apart.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are locals protesting against tourists?
Research on intergroup threat suggests two reasons that often appear together. One is realistic threat, such as being priced out of housing by short-term rentals. The other is symbolic threat, the sense that a neighborhood's identity is being reshaped for people who don't live there.
What is intergroup threat theory?
Intergroup threat theory, developed by psychologists Walter and Cookie Stephan, explains hostility between groups through perceived threat. The original theory has four components: realistic threats to resources and safety, symbolic threats to values and identity, intergroup anxiety and negative stereotypes. The threat depends on perception, not on whether the outside group intends any harm.
Do tourist taxes reduce overtourism resentment?
Taxes and rental bans can ease pressure on housing and services, but they mainly address the resource side of the problem. They don't answer the identity side, which is why residents often keep framing their complaints around what kind of place their city is becoming.
What is the difference between a tourist tax and a visitor cap?
A tourist tax raises the price of the same experience, so anyone who can afford it still gets in. A visitor cap, like the timed entry limits at Machu Picchu and the Acropolis, rations the experience itself regardless of income.
What is the Doxey Irridex?
The Irridex is a model proposed by tourism researcher G.V. Doxey in 1975. It describes resident attitudes toward tourism moving from euphoria to apathy, irritation and antagonism as perceived costs grow. It is widely used but criticized for implying a linear sequence, since communities rarely hold a single attitude.