With the Herald article I published Tuesday, and with the public comment period underway for STRs (Short Term Rentals), this seemed like an appropriate topic for today’s post. There is a conflux of issues with the STRs and overtourism here in Big Sur. It is one reason this post is WAY longer than I usually post. There just seemed to be so much to cover in this battle to save our community.

One concern, of course, is that as tourism increases, the spending at our local establishments does not keep pace, this is one of the factors in the equation that must be considered. People who are staying at STRs – Airbnb, etc. – are not staying in our local hotels and motels, which then takes away more business from the establishments when the hotel/motel guests would normally patronize their restaurants and stores and are not doing so. Additionally, local businesses have difficulty finding employees And often must provide housing, if they can, or hire people who have long commutes just to get to work in the service industry. Imagine a Big Sur with no Nepenthe or River Inn or Fernwood or Deetjen’s or all the other local businesses.

STRs take housing away from locals so that the owners of the property can support their inflated purchase prices, or simply make money, and then the businesses have trouble getting and keeping employees. No where is this more apparent to me than down here on the South Coast because it is the area with which I am most familiar.

Staffing for the local school has always been a challenge. Some staff must commute all the way from Cambria, which is especially difficult during road closures.  Others live in trailers on the school property. In speaking with USFS staff at the Big Sur Fire open house, and then Tuesday with the District Ranger, Tim Short, I discovered that  staff housing for the USFS Pacific Valley Station has created a dangerous situation. It does not have the staff  it needs to provide an Engine to this community for fire season. It is hoping to rectify this before fire season completely kicks off, but at this time, there is a housing shortage for any future staff.

Other popular tourist destinations are finding that the Airbnb or other STRs are modifying the nature of the community and in many instances, destroying it.

“The plight of Barcelona shows the damage Airbnb can do, exacerbating urban inequality and freezing out young locals.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/31/airbnb-sharing-economy-cities-barcelona-inequality-locals)

“Airbnb rentals reduce the supply of long-term rentals in communities, creating economic costs that outweigh the benefits, according to research presented by Economic Policy Institute Research Director Josh Bivens in a new paper. Local policymakers should pay heed, says Bivens, and certainly not change local regulations and tax structures to benefit Airbnb.” https://www.realtrends.com/blog/economist-warns-airbnb-rentals-impact-housing-crisis/

“Airbnb and Miami Beach Are at War. Travelers Are Caught in the Crossfire.” ““You get to a point where you feel like you’re living in a hotel room,” said Kathaleen Smarsh, a resident of Flamingo Park. “You don’t know who is coming and going at all hours.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/travel/airbnb-miami-beach-war.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

And finally, a Big Sur resident’s perspective from the North Coast:

“Continued [from the comments made on my Tourist Tuesday post] – One of the many reasons why none of the 3 categories of Vacation Rentals should be allowed in Big Sur, and why the County should continue to prohibit them is … See TITLE 20 – Definitions – Section 20.06.360 … the short version “Dwellings …. occupied exclusively for non-transient residential purposes.”

If you made it to the end, I would like to thank you for caring, and hopefully, you can now visit the links above and craft a meaningful comment to be considered on Monterey County’s draft STR ordinance.

From our own Monterey Herald, about the Monterey County Convention & Visitors Bureau on their plans for promoting our area:

http://www.montereyherald.com/2018-travel-impacts-report-monterey-county-visitor-spending-up-5-8-to-3b

I would like to point out a few important take-always from this article:

2018 Travel Impacts report: Monterey County visitor spending up 5.8% to $3B

Tourism jobs up 2.8%, total tax contributions up 8.2%, local tax money up 8% over 2017

“The plan for increasing tourism to Monterey County is two-tiered – one, increasing the number of travelers, and two, increasing visitor spending.

“We are focused on both levels – more travelers which will drive up hotel occupancy, which is essential. But we are intensifying our focus on higher-value travelers who stay longer, do more and spend more,” said O’Keefe. “These are typically people who are traveling from further away … and meetings/conference travelers who are very high value.”

The MCCVB marketing officer said a focus on the drive market – those who travel here by car – will be maintained and will never change.”

”According to the report, the county receives the lion’s share of travel impacts in the region with 33%, followed closely by Monterey with 30%, Salinas with 14%, Carmel with 8%, Seaside (including Sand City and Del Rey Oaks) with 7%, Pacific Grove with 5%, and Marina with 4%.”

How much of this income is brought in BECAUSE of Big Sur? I am willing to bet that the majority of it is. How much does Big Sur receive in infrastructure and/or law enforcement to handle it? Very little, is my bet on this end of the equation.

And one thing MCCVB will be concentrating on is bringing in more visitors on the off season, so we can expect summer-like traffic all year.

Not welcome here: 8 popular places spurning tourists

Locals have had it with visitor hordes

We need a new campaign – Unhashtag Big Sur! And it wouldn’t be hard to do, nor cost a lot of money. Here is one Vienna is doing:

Enjoy Vienna. Not #Vienna

Unhashtag your vacation!

“Social media allows us to travel the world everyday – without even getting up off the couch. But the places we swipe through are not filled with life or memories – they’re littered with hashtags and diluted by filters.

This is an invitation from Vienna – an ideal place for a little bit of digital detox and for creating moments that you, and you alone, can treasure forever. Because Vienna is far more colorful when not seen through the lens of a smartphone camera.

So whip out your city map, make plans and throw them away again. Simply let your senses guide you. And no worries, you won’t go cold turkey when you give yourself a day offline.”

They have sections to explore on:

1. Six signs you should think about a digital detox

2. Influencers on digital detox

3. Best places for digital detox

4. Vacations for your smart phone

5. See Klimt not #Klimt

6. Inspiration for offline activities

7. Meditation on Tram D

To explore this wonderful campaign further see: https://unhashtag.vienna.info/en-us

“In 1904, the city of Barcelona received a petition for development from Eusebi Güell, an industrialist and a patron of the arts. Güell had bought a tract of land on the flank of Muntanya Pelada, or Bald Mountain, which rises above the plain that extends to the city’s port. Güell had ambitious plans for his hillside property: it was to be designed by Antoni Gaudí, the celebrated architect, with sixty houses set on the bosky grounds. Güell’s business model, which required prospective residents to invest in the project before their houses were constructed, was flawed, and only two were ever built. But the grounds were completed. Serpentine paths twisted up the hillside, and at the center of a spectacular bifurcated staircase there was a fountain in the form of a lizard, its skin composed of mosaic shards in blues and yellows.

The development was sold to the city in 1922, four years after Güell’s death, and became a beloved public park, with the lizard as its icon. In time, Park Güell proved too beloved for its own good, and by 2013 nine million visitors were traipsing through it annually. “The Park has almost stopped being used as a park,” a municipal report noted at the time. It had become, instead, a “tourist place.” That year, in an effort to mitigate the damage and crowding caused by so much foot traffic, the city introduced a fee to access the park’s “monumental core,” which includes Gaudí’s staircase, and also limited the number of tickets sold to eight hundred an hour.

From the local government’s perspective, the change was a success: the year after the restrictions were introduced, the number of visitors fell to 2.3 million. Still, the flow remains constant. When I arrived at Park Güell at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in February—hardly peak season—I couldn’t get in for another two and a half hours. When I finally entered the monumental core, at a cost of ten euros, it was as bustling as Coney Island’s boardwalk on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and Instagramming admirers formed a mob around Gaudí’s lizard.

….

Some twenty million tourists descend annually on Barcelona, which has a population of just 1.6 million people. (New York City receives three times as many visitors but has more than five times as many residents absorbing the influx.) A lot of factors have contributed to the throngs in Barcelona. Policy decisions in Madrid, and in Catalonia, encouraged a boom, and framed it as an economic-survival strategy, especially after the global financial crisis of 2008. City officials successfully sold Barcelona to the international market as an especially fun European destination, with good weather, pretty beaches, lively night life, and just enough in the way of museums and architecture to provide diversion without requiring an onerous cultural itinerary.

….

Currently, one and a half million visitors stay in Airbnbs in Barcelona annually, and although five times as many people book rooms in traditional hotels, the company is influencing what the city feels like, especially for permanent residents. There are almost twenty thousand active Airbnb listings in Barcelona. Even in residential neighborhoods, the sounds of dozens of wheelie suitcases rattling over the cobblestones after an 11 a.m. checkout—and of late-night revellers sampling the bars that have sprung up to cater to them—have become as reliable as the bells of the Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s unfinished drip-castle cathedral.

….

Airbnb, aware of the growing hostility toward it, has begun working more closely with local governments. Among other things, it has introduced an online tool that makes it easier for the city to identify hosts who are breaking rental laws.”

….

For the rest of this article see: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/the-airbnb-invasion-of-barcelona

From the World Travel & Tourism Global Summit:

SEVILLE, Spain — As the travel industry prepares for a world facing overtourism and concerns about environmental sustainability, the goals of tourism ministers and marketers are changing.

For example, Fred Dixon, CEO of New York’s official marketing arm, NYC & Company, said at the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) Global Summit here earlier this month that his organization has shifted the way it measures success.

“We got caught up in the race for bigger numbers,” Dixon said. “We realized over time that the true metric for tourism is the economic and social impact on the community: job development, economic impact, neighborhood impact. If you don’t bring locals with you when you’re invigorating or building a destination, you’re missing an important part of the equation.”

Marketing success, Dixon added, is not “just about visitor volume. We as an industry should grapple with that more.”

Steffan Panoho, head of Auckland Tourism, echoed that sentiment. He said that over the past two years, New Zealand’s largest city realized it needed to revise its tourism strategy to incorporate “destination management versus just pure destination marketing.”

“Traditionally, we’ve talked about visitor numbers and arrivals and hotel nights,” he said. “Now, we have a whole new set of imperatives: sustainability and looking after our communities. There’s a whole new set of metrics we have to look at and quantify before we can make a call on whether we’ve been successful.”

For the rest of this article see: https://www.travelweekly.com/Travel-News/Government/Changes-in-destination-marketing-a-topic-at-WTTC-Summit

Yes, there is more we can do. A beginning is to work together as stakeholders to assure we have a destination stewardship plan for Big Sur. This work originally started in May of 2016 before all hell broke lose with fires and landslides. It was resurrected in 2018 and several planning sessions were held which included representatives from county, state, and federal governments and agencies which all have a stake in this area, as well representatives from Monterey County Visitors & Convention Bureau, local chamber of commerce, and local residents.

At a future date, CABS (formerly CPOA) will be sponsoring a community meeting on creating a destination stewardship plan for Big Sur (details will be provided in a subsequent post) and one of the speakers/facilitators will be Costas Christ.

From The Advocate last year: https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/article_b1893c04-7bec-11e8-88b7-57737dce8c38.html

Cities dependent on tourism, such as New Orleans, need to rethink their approach to that industry lest they lose the very people and culture that make them unique and attract millions of visitors, according to an expert who will be talking here Saturday about how to balance attracting travelers and protecting the attributes that make communities unique.

Costas Christ, a consultant and activist on sustainable tourism practices, said the key is to find a balance between luring visitors and protecting the needs of residents and the aspects that make cities unique.

“Tourism should not be about conquering a destination,” he said in an interview. “It should be about enhancing a destination.”

Christ is a leading advocate for sustainable tourism and one of the founding members of the eco-tourism movement that inspired it.

That movement involves a push to get travelers to approach natural attractions in environmentally sensitive ways so as not to destroy them — something that Christ says applies equally well to cities as to the Galapagos Islands.

“Why shouldn’t the entire tourism industry be thinking about its impact on issues such as the environment, on cultural heritage, on local people’s livelihoods?” he asked.

The challenge is to change an entire industry, particularly here in California, so that the emphasis is not on “more” tourists but on better experiences for tourists, making sure  that these experiences are balanced with the needs of the local community and the environment that hosts all. It can and must be done. It is not just a “Sustainable Moment” that must be obtained, it is a “Sustainable Future” for the environment, the community, and the visitor.