City Destinations under Pressure

This 51-minute panel at ITB Berlin brought together urban planners, tourism officials, a technology entrepreneur, and a B2B events platform founder to dissect the mounting pressures on city destinations — overtourism, retail decline, housing displacement, and loss of local identity — and to debate practical policy, design, and technology responses. Jose Antonio Donaire Benito from Barcelona's tourism authority opened with a frank accounting of the city's scale and its consequences: 17 million tourists annually, 7 million day-trippers from the Costa Brava coastline, and 4 million cruise passengers, together producing housing unaffordability, saturated iconic sites, and — most critically in his framing — a 'symbolic defeat of the local centre,' the feeling among residents that parts of their city no longer belong to them. Barcelona's policy response is built around what he calls the three Bs: Beds (a 2017 moratorium on new hotels and tourist apartments, with a 2028 deadline to eliminate all 10,000 short-term rental units and return them to residential use), Births/cruises (cutting cruise terminals from 7 to 5, reducing daily passenger capacity from 36,000 to 31,000), and Buses (a new real-time management system dramatically reducing coach parking in the city centre).

One month before the panel, Barcelona approved the highest tourist tax in Europe at €15 per person per day, with broad stakeholder consensus on how to spend the revenue — particularly on a programme to restore local commerce, replacing souvenir shops with bookstores, grocers, and furniture shops in eight designated 'high-pressure areas.' A symbolic campaign, 'Kids Playing,' reclaims iconic public spaces like La Sagrada Família and Las Ramblas by filling them with resident children. Dr.

Tillman Prinz, Secretary General of the Federal Chamber of Architects (representing 140,000 architects and urban planners in Germany), reframed the problem: the session before had shifted from 'overtourism' to 'under-management,' a distinction he endorsed strongly. He argued that the ideal of the European city — mixed-use, ground-floor retail, offices above, residences on top, 24-hour life — remains the correct model, citing Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin as a living example, despite acknowledging its total gentrification. He called for more architects and urban planners embedded in public administration and cited Copenhagen's 30-year commitment to cycling infrastructure as the exemplar of long-term political vision.

Prof. Dr. Roman Egger, formerly of Salzburg University of Applied Sciences and now running Smart Visions, offered a technology perspective anchored in caution: technologies are enablers, never solutions, and the historic failure of AI-driven visitor management has been data interoperability, not algorithmic quality.

He noted that Anthropic's MCP (Model Context Protocol), introduced roughly six months before the panel, functions like a USB standard for data transfer, and that Google and Microsoft's subsequent 'Web MCP' standard — announced around 10 February — could allow AI agents to retrieve real-time visitor counts and contextual data directly through public websites without bespoke API integrations, potentially solving the interoperability problem that has blocked real-time crowd management for decades. Saskia Klinder, founder of MeTreat (a B2B platform handling more than 1,000 corporate events annually), grounded the discussion in the realities of corporate travel procurement: accessibility by direct or single-stop flight is the primary selection criterion, ahead of culture, price, or sustainability. She noted Hamburg anticipates more than 30 new hotel openings in five years, driven largely by low-budget brands, and observed that Mallorca's new direct US-Palma flights are already shifting its visitor mix toward higher-spending Americans while replicating overtourism pressures.

She flagged Cape Town as an emerging flash point for workation-driven demand spikes in January and February. The panel converged on several structural tensions: limiting numbers is necessary but not sufficient; political short-termism undermines long-range urban planning; and the industry must shift from volume metrics to quality and identity metrics. The Helsinki Central Library (Oodi) was cited as a model of co-created third space: residents were asked what they wanted, resulting in shared kitchens, music studios, tool-lending (including drills and plotters), all free to use — a genuinely public resource that tourists and locals share equally.