Cities Say They Have Too Many Tourists. Their Airports Keep Growing

The New York Times reported on Friday that airport expansions in Venice, Barcelona and the Spanish island of Mallorca can undermine local efforts to restrain overtourism, and can even enable more tourists to arrive. The paper's point is structural: a city council may cap short-term rentals, cruise berths or coach permits, while the runway and terminal capacity that feeds those visitors is decided at a different level and points in the opposite direction.

Venice is the Italian case in the Times's reporting, and it is the closest large example to the Alpine north. The paper treats the contradiction as a European pattern rather than an Italian one, with Barcelona and Mallorca cited alongside it.

The mechanism the Times describes does not require a large airport to matter. Additional seats into a gateway city shift the whole travel market around it, lowering fares and making onward road journeys cheaper for visitors who never intended to stay in the gateway itself. Regions reached by car from a growing airport absorb part of the increase without any say in the expansion that produced it.