Tourist tax: let's talk about value, price and governance

Barcelona will have the highest tourist tax in Europe. This is how some media outlets reported on the decision of the Generalitat Government to double the tourist tax. According to what was agreed, Barcelona will charge travelers staying overnight in the city 12.1 euros per person per day in a five-star hotel; 8.14 euros per person per day in a 4-star hotel, and 6.6 euros per person per day in the rest of the hotel categories. Some even anticipate that Barcelona could charge up to 15 euros for five-star hotels, something that Mayor Jaume Collboni has ruled out in the short term.

The debate on the tourist tax is more emotional than economic, despite some sectors announcing frontal opposition, because it would reduce the sector's competitiveness. Others, for their part, welcome it given the increase in tourist overcrowding and the obligation to dedicate a quarter of all collected resources to housing policies and not just to tourist promotion. All positions are legitimate, but none of them get to the heart of the matter. The tourist tax, as it is designed, is not a tool to reduce the influx of tourists nor does it serve to reduce overcrowding. Perhaps the debate should focus, as with other fiscal instruments, on thinking about the value it generates and what the appropriate price is.

The value of a good or service is determined by how much it is estimated to be worth in terms of satisfying needs, desires, or expectations, that is, its calculation and evaluation must be done based on its utility, in this case, if it serves the general interest of the city. On the other hand, price refers to the amount of money paid for a good or service in a given market. In the case of the tourist tax, we have not seriously analyzed the value it generates or can potentially generate, but rather we focus on the cost, that is, on the price a visitor will pay.

The debate should not be the price of the tourist tax, but the value it generates to reconcile and balance the economic, social, and environmental life of the city

The Barcelona Tourism Observatory estimates that the city received a total of 15.6 million tourists in 2024and, added to the 10.3 million visitors from metropolitan Barcelona, reach an influx of 26 million tourists. A considerable figure that is reflected in an economic impact of direct spending from tourist activity of around 12.750 billion euros, about 9.676 billion euros in the city of Barcelona and about 3.074 billion in the metropolitan region.Tourism thus represents an indispensable pillar of the local economy, and global, and is a source of employment and a driver for many local economies.

However, debates are raging about the risk of tourist saturation in many destinations, and especially about the negative impacts, both from an environmental and social point of view. Acts and manifestations of tourismophobia emerge as a symptom of the fatigue of cities and the growing discomfort in broad sectors of society in the face of excessive tourist pressure. A reality that shows that we are not facing an economic debate, but rather one that has to do with more complex problems, which include mobility, noise, dirt, gentrification of certain neighborhoods, the increase in housing prices, and even coexistence among the different actors that interact in the city. That is why the debate should not be the price of the tourist tax, but the value it generates to reconcile and balance the economic, social, and environmental life of the city.

This is a complex debate that cannot be approached with naivety or simplistic views. We must heed the signals before conflict overflows, and for that, we need spaces for reflection, new ideas, new narratives, a renewed offer, and new forms of governance in an essential sector. We face an uncomfortable truth and no one has the recipe for the solution to tourist overcrowding. In a world where the economy of mobility prevails, in the coming years we will see how the global middle classes go from 3.5 billion people today to 5 billion people in 2050. And what does the middle class do? Travel, and they do so to beautiful, well-connected places with good services. And that is called Europe and, particularly, iconic cities like Paris, Rome, London, Lisbon, Florence, Madrid, or Barcelona. The economy of mobility, and tourism with its different levers, such as shopping, concerts, fairs and congresses, sporting events, gastronomy, and culture, has led to an exponential boom in travel, especially to trendy urban destinations, generating an excessive concentration of visitors in certain places. Is it possible then to design a more balanced and sustainable urban tourism, and what is the role of the tourist tax?

Most tourist cities in the world have largely assumed the costs and services associated with traveler receptivity such as security, cleanliness, and mobility facilities. Nothing was too much to attract tourists and generate a good experience that would allow for economic activity and local jobs. Today, overcrowding strains the coexistence between residents and tourists and generates growing discomfort in many territories or cities. One of the easiest and least sophisticated reactions is to attribute to tourists the responsibility for our own shortcomings in tourism governance. The solution is not easy, but we can point out some clues that may be useful.

The tourist tax must be a tool for cultural change, for the modernization of the sector and its governance

We must move from thinking of tourism as a sector to treating it as a complex, dynamic ecosystem integrated into the life of the city as a whole, acting both in terms of demand and supply. What we call the visitor economy must balance the hierarchy of interests ---and responsibilities--- between tourists and residents.The tourist, as an accidental citizen, must have rights and duties.You have the right to enjoy the city, but you are not oblivious to the responsibility of contributing to its sustainability, both economic, social, cultural, and environmental. A cultural change that will require a lot of pedagogy and breaking with some patterns of yesterday's world in which the tourist tax plays a central role.

This tourist tax can no longer be merely an instrument for tourist promotion, nor a specific fiscal strategy applied to visitors who stay overnight in a legal establishment in the city and which allows for the redistribution of its economic impact. The tourist tax can generate much more value. It must be a tool for cultural change, for the modernization of the sector and its governance. On the one hand, it must concentrate its resources on segmented and even micro-segmented destination promotion to attract visitors who understand, respect, enjoy, and protect the destination. On the other hand, it must contribute to activating a new offer in the territory to decentralize and diversify the tourist uses of the city. Likewise, it must be a tool to improve the material living conditions of the city and its residents through improved financing for local governments to offer better public services.

The visitor we should aspire to attract is one who enjoys and cares for the destination regardless of their income.

However, while the tourist tax is necessary, it still has some gaps, because is not an efficient instrument to reduce the number of tourists or visitors.Paying five, ten or fifteen euros to stay overnight in the most iconic cities on the planet does not seem to be a significant deterrent in the overall budget of a trip. The solution is not easy or obvious, and must be the result of the reflection and synthesis work of that new, broader and more sophisticated governance that the sector and the city require. A reflection that goes beyond the actors of the tourism sector itself, since it has to do with the physical carrying capacity, the environmental carrying capacity and the social carrying capacity of a tourist city, which is much more than how many hotels or apartments we can have.

It is about generating a great conversation between supply and demand to reorient tourism activity towards quality parameters and escape from that absurd race to be at the top of the rankings by the number of visitors. The more involvement of the visitor with the values we want to promote of the destination, the more effective our tourism promotion and management actions will be. There is, however, a significant error in linking tourism sustainability to what is called prioritizing the attraction of high value-added visitors. Or what is the same, tourism for the rich or for those who spend the most at the destination. A conceptual trap that is also unfair and incoherent from the point of view of the open, inclusive city and environmental sustainability. It must be said loud and clear: data shows that mostly the visitors who spend the most are also the ones who pollute the most. The rich cannot buy the right to visit a trendy city by excluding travelers with fewer resources. The visitor we should aspire to attract is one who enjoys and takes care of the destination regardless of their income level. The more they spend, the better, but the goal should be to attract tourism that appreciates and respects the identity, tangible and intangible heritage, and natural environment of the destination, becoming that accidental citizen with rights and responsibilities.

In short, we need new tourism governance with a renewed focus on the economic, social, cultural, and environmental sustainability of the city. Tourism is not only an economic activity; it is a social process that requires much more inclusive and sophisticated governance and demands the participation and agreement of broad political, economic, and social sectors to renew its social license to operate, offering responses to its negative impacts. A complex and profound debate in which one must distrust those who offer quick and miraculous solutions that polarize debates, or those who simplify them by reducing them to a single problem. In this debate, the tourist tax plays a relevant role because it can generate much value, where price is not the most important variable. Tourism is a powerful factor of socioeconomic transformation and an aggregator of creative singularities. Let's show that in Barcelona we have the capacity to innovate and build new coherences and syntheses with audacity, dialogue, creativity, and efficiency. A lot is at stake for us in this.