💦 Anti-tourist protests

Sightseeing gets awkward… Nearly 3K protesters hit the streets of Barcelona over the weekend to rail against overtourism in the Spanish city. Some protesters sprayed water guns at tourists eating on restaurant patios (it’s hard to enjoy your tapas while folks are yelling at you to go home). The protesters included Barcelona locals, housing activists, and neighborhood associations. They blame the city’s lack of affordable housing on short-term rentals filled by visitors, and they’re fed up with overcrowding.

• Airbnbye: Last month Barcelona said it would ban short-term rentals by 2029. But NYC’s short-term-rental ban, which started last year, doesn’t seem to have helped much.

• By the #s: 26M tourists visited Barcelona last year, bringing nearly $14B in spending to the city. That’s sharply up from 20M visitors before the pandemic.

So over tourism… Protests have broken out in other Spanish vacation hotspots like Majorca, Málaga, and the Canary Islands. It’s not just Spain: overtourism is a global issue and top destinations are rolling out restrictions to curb it. Instagram-(in)famous locations like Bali and Iceland now charge a tourist tax. Japan’s Mount Fuji now has a daily cap on visitors and there’s a toll on one of its popular hiking trails. Alaska last month limited cruise-ship passengers. Overtourism has worsened since the postpandemic “revenge travel” boom kicked in. 

• Venice’s visitor numbers soared from 13M in 2019 to 20M last year. The city of 50K residents recently intro'd a Disneyland-style entrance fee for daytrippers.

• Greece had 33M visitors last year, and arrivals into Athens topped prepandemic levels. The country’s looking to limit cruise-ship passengers, and Athens capped Acropolis on-lookers at 20K/day.

Hand-crocheted cat beanie… Etsy is the go-to online marketplace for handmade and curated goods. Yesterday it updated its policies to clarify its focus on unique items in an era of mega-marketplaces like Amazon. Sellers’ wares now have to fit into one of four categories: “made by” for handcrafted items; “designed by” for digital art; “handpicked by” for vintage goods; and “sourced by” for materials like beads and clay. A new ad promoting the policy shows ceramicists and other artisans doin’ their thing, followed by a robotic arm getting crushed (point taken).

• Unravel: Etsy’s biz boomed during the pandemic, fueled by mask sales and home decor, but last quarter merch sales fell 4% from a year ago. The crafty co’s stock is down nearly 30% this year, and in December it laid off 11% of its staff.

“Amazonification” problem… Etsy’s struggled to keep mass-produced (and, more recently, AI-designed) knickknacks off its platform. When it started allowing sellers to outsource some of their work in 2013 (like: send a custom shirt design to a factory for production), it opened the door to “drop shippers”: people who upsell items from suppliers like AliExpress without ever touching the product. It’s long been Etsy’s policy that humans need to have a (literal) hand in making the products they list, but thousands of Etsy sellers who went on strike in 2022 said mass-produced items have been crowding out artisan goods.