Amsterdam is taking some extreme measures to curb tourism and overcrowding.
The Dutch city has announced that it’s banning new hotels from being built, The New York Times reported on Thursday. New hotels that have already been approved or are in development won’t be affected, but all future properties will have to face the ban.
“Amsterdam is saying ‘no’ to new hotels,” the city council said in a statement cited by the Times. “We want to make and keep the city livable for residents and visitors.”
Alongside the ban, the city is hoping to limit hotel stays by tourists to fewer than 20 million a year, The New York Times noted. Prior to the pandemic, Amsterdam experienced 25.2 million hotel stays in 2019, according to city data cited by the newspaper. Last year, that number was even higher—not even including stays in Airbnbs or on cruise ships.
The measure is just the latest in a string of attempts Amsterdam has undertaken to cut down on tourism. Last year, for example, it debuted an ad campaign asking young British men to stay away from the city. And a few months later it decided to ban cruise ships from docking in the city center. Now Amsterdam is hoping that a cap on the number of hotels in the city will help ease congestion—although the results may be mixed.
“The effect won’t be very big,” Ko Koens, a professor of new urban tourism in Rotterdam, told the Times. But “without such a stop, Amsterdam’s center would become one big hotel. . .You don’t want that either.”
Koens added that the limited supply may make hotels in the city more expensive in the future, which could in turn deter visitors. Right now, the city has 42,000 hotel rooms that can hold 92,000 people, according to Statistics Netherlands data cited by the newspaper. Twenty-six more hotels have already been approved to open, which will add to that total. But beyond that, new hotels will only be able to open if another property closes, and the newer hotel can’t have more rooms than were previously available.
That deals a blow to property developers who were hoping to cash in on Amsterdam’s tourism boom. But it’s not clear whether it will actually tamp down on the tourism itself.
