Overtourism? Amalfi launches 11 actions for sustainable tourism

A more sustainable tourism for the city of Amalfi. And to achieve it, Daniele Milano, the mayor of one of the most famous places in the world, has illustrated eleven areas of intervention, with specific actions, which intend to guarantee a balance between economic, social, cultural and environmental development.

Interventions such as tourist etiquette but also such as monitoring pedestrian flows and cracking down on short-term rentals.

"Tourism, both nationally and internationally, is increasingly and predominantly associated with problems and hardships for the population," says Milano. "This narrative is negative and, above all, risks generating, as has happened in many places, anti-tourist sentiment.

For this reason, in Amalfi, a year ago we activated a 'DMO' (destination manager organization) to "manage, not suffer" tourism.

Among the actions, a system for monitoring pedestrian flows that will be implemented through a technology capable of detecting the presence of people and vehicles in order to be able to rely on quantitative data.

"Numbers are an important topic, because in tourism we often talk and reason based on feelings or 'eyeballs'."

Attention will be paid to arrivals by sea and land: the proposal is to transform the Cassone pier terminal, which handles nearly a million passengers annually, into a true embarkation and disembarkation station.

Then there's "tourist etiquette." "Precisely to avoid anti-tourist sentiment, we'll ask citizens, through a questionnaire, what behaviors they least appreciate from visitors and guests.

This is to try to highlight to those arriving which behaviors should be avoided," adds the mayor. "We won't do it with bans, but through a social media campaign to try to guide people and make them understand that more than just tourists and visitors passing through, they are true guests of the City of Amalfi, a community made up of people who live and work here."

Milan calls for specific numbers: the progressive growth of tourist beds (today 4.512) has been accompanied by a significant reduction in the number of residents, from 5.530 in 2002 to 4.653 today.

"The localities must do their part by also asking for new regulatory interventions to provide the necessary tools to the Municipalities that experience the well-being of tourism to create a correct balance between those who live in the places and those who choose them for their holidays - he concludes -

This is an example of the proposal developed to give municipalities greater power to regulate new openings of non-hotel businesses and short-term rentals. Our proposal is to grant greater powers when a certain threshold is exceeded based on the ratio between resident population and tourist destinations.