“Renew Your View” encourages visitors to look at the city beyond the traditional tourism draws.
The City of Amsterdam will put a moratorium on new hotel construction on concerns that the city’s overtourism crisis has reached a saturation point, city leaders said in an announcement Wednesday.
The city also moved to limit the total number of hotel nights, which clocked in just over 20 million in 2023, not including vacation rentals, bed and breakfasts, and cruise stays. The city has set that 20 million in overnight stays as a high-water mark, saying it will take measures to keep visitation below that threshold in the future. For context, the population of Central Amsterdam is just under one million.
New hotels will be prohibited, unless another hotel location in the city shutters, and only with approvals. New construction must not increase the total number of rooms in the city, and there will also be new rules surrounding new construction—including requirements that new hotel construction replacing closed hotels must be incrementally more sustainable or modern. Hotel developers will also be encouraged to build the hotels outside the city center, which is already saturated with lodging.
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Hotels already under construction may continue, and city leaders noted there are 26 such projects underway already.
Other parts of the Netherlands have also become overly popular with tourists, including the Keukenhof tulip bulb garden and the windmills of the Kinderdijk district. The country was coping with so many visitors at its top attractions that in 2019 the Dutch Tourism Board elected to stop promoting the country as a tourism destination—instead focusing on managing the flow of tourists that do come.
In 2023, the city made even more targeted efforts at curbing nuisance tourism with the “Stay Away Campaign,” targeted at young British men who come for a “messy time” involving drinking, smoking marijuana in the city’s legal cafés, and partaking in the city’s red light district. In addition to speaking directly to the worst tourism offenders, the city introduced new prohibitions on smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, or urinating in public. Sleeping in cars is also banned, and there are new, earlier closing times for many bars and brothels.
A companion campaign, called “Renew Your View” encourages visitors to look at the city beyond the traditional tourism draws—like the red light district—and also promote tourism attractions in the immediate surroundings to take some of the visitor influx to the city away from the overburdened city center.
Although still in early stages, there have already been concerns that the pair of campaigns have failed to achieve their objectives.
The initiatives are in line with Amsterdam’s tourism policy, approved by the City Council in 2021. There have already been restrictions on new hotels and vacation rentals in the city center, and new tourist shops have also been banned in the city center since the introduction of that plan.
In direct wording, the 2021 plan draws a direct line on the root of the problem: “Nowadays, stereotypes about coffeeshops, sex theaters, the red light district, and the misguided idea that freedom equals a lack of morality, dominate the international image of Amsterdam as a tourist destination. As a result, groups of tourists seem to think that Amsterdam is a place that will allow just about anything. We want to get rid of this kind of tourism, which is why we are targeting the offerings geared specifically towards these groups.”
Ultimately, the plan is to move toward a city where visitors, residents, and the tourism business community are not at odds with each other, inviting tourism to the city in a way that doesn’t compromise its livability for residents.