A Swiss Alpine village has become the latest small and picturesque destination to seek solutions to overtourism, following a bumper year for the country’s sector in 2023, with a record 23.9 million overnight stays.
Lauterbrunnen, a valley in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland region, has less than 3000 residents but every year sees many thousands of arrivals. The area’s stunning scenery includes sheer cliff faces and 72 cascades, including one of Europe’s longest unbroken waterfalls, the Staubbach Falls, 297 metres high and described by Goethe in the late 1700s. The village community is also overlooked by various mountains including the Jungfrau, a peak put on the Grand Tour map by Byron’s 18th century dramatic poem, Manfred, which inspired countless landscape paintings and is closely associated with the idea of the sublime in nature.
“Employees in an amusement park”
But less sublime, locals say, are the effects of overtourism, such as chronic congestion, littering and soaring rental prices. Even the patience of the village priest has been tested to its limits. He told Swiss radio last year that residents are being made to “feel like employees in an amusement park.”
To combat these problems, an entry fee is being considered, according to reports in local newspaper Berner Zeitung. A working group has already put forward a comprehensive plan for how it could work, including the possibility to pay by smartphone app. Mooted at a cost between 5 and 10 Swiss francs, the fee would apply to daytrippers arriving by car.
“The exception would be guests who have booked an offer such as a hotel or an excursion or who arrive by public transport,” Lauterbrunnen Mayor Karl Näpflin said, according to Swiss Info.
Do fees reduce overtourism?
If the entry charge is introduced, it will not be until next year, as the infrastructure is not yet in place to make it happen this summer, and discussions are ongoing about exactly how checks would take place in such a natural environment. Just how the entry fee for car arrivals would reduce the sensation of being in a theme park, counteract crowding on public transport or solve high rent prices is also unclear.
Numerous other destinations around the world from Mount Fuji to Menorca have brought in tourist levies after struggling to balance the needs of residents with their tourism-oriented economies. But results fresh from Venice’s experiment with entry fees seem to be showing that such charges do not work to reduce tourist numbers. After the introduction of the “tourist contribution” at the end of April, 70,000 visitors were recorded in Venice on 19 May 2024, an ordinary spring day. That’s 5,000 more than on 2 June last year – a public holiday.
