Residents of Amsterdam have taken a pioneering step to express their frustration with the city’s overtourism problem.
Locals have launched legal action against the council, which they say is not doing enough to curb unsustainable visitor numbers.
The Dutch city has been straining under the impact of mass tourism for years, and the council has pledged to clamp down.
Authorities have also launched campaigns to steer its tourism model away from the stag parties, pub crawls, drug use and sex work for which the city has been renowned.
But residents say little has changed for them.
Amsterdam residents take legal action against council over mass tourism
A group of Amsterdam residents filed a lawsuit on Monday against the municipality.
The citizens’ initiative “Amsterdam has a Choice” raised €50,000 from locals and is supported by 12 other residents’ organisations.
The legal action has been taken to denounce the municipality’s ineffective tourism management, the group says.
In 2021, the council passed a bylaw that capped the number of tourist overnight stays in the city to 20 million per year. Despite this, there were 22.9 million overnight stays last year, and the figure will likely be even higher for 2025.
The residents argue that authorities are not complying with their own legislation and are not doing enough to combat overtourism.
“Overnight stays have been exceeding the agreed 20 million for three years without the municipality taking effective measures,” said Jasper van Dijk, one of the residents who filed the lawsuit.
The group acknowledges that the city council has already brought in measures to tackle visitor numbers.
The tourist tax has been increased, and the number of river and sea cruises entering the city each year is set to halve. There is also a moratorium on new hotel construction.
But despite these efforts, tourism is still growing, albeit more slowly than in previous years. The number of overnight stays in 2024 is a three per cent increase on the previous year.
Between 23 and 26 million overnight stays are projected for this year.
Amsterdam should increase its tourist tax
Amsterdam has already raised its tourist tax to 12.5 per cent, making it the highest in Europe.
But the residents behind the lawsuit say it needs to be increased once again.
“Amsterdam could use the significant additional revenue from the increased tourist tax to buy properties to help with the housing shortage or to rid the city of the street litter created in part by mass tourism,” Van Dijk said.
“If the municipality implements this substantial increase in tourist tax, it will generate more revenue than the combined costs of all the plans from the previous Amsterdam coalition agreements.”