SC leaders could learn a thing or two about tourism from Barcelona residents with squirt guns | Opinion

Hold your fire, South Carolina, your water pistol may become another tourist attraction.

Maybe you saw in the recent news that protesters in tourism-soaked Barcelona, Spain, squirted visitors eating in a street-side café with brightly colored water pistols while chanting, “Tourists Go Home!” Others marched in the Barcelona streets carrying a banner that said: “Mass Tourism Kills the City.”

You too might see the world through Picasso glasses if you were host to 26 million visitors a year, as is the Barcelona region.

Coverage in the Washington Post says that fed-up Barcelona residents are specifically pushing for an end to Airbnb-style, short-term rentals in the city within five years. The “Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Degrowth” also wants an end to tourism promotion with public dollars.

Locals say extreme tourism has astronomically driven up the cost of housing for everyone in Barcelona.

This pushback against “overtourism” apparently got a head start in Venice, and the issue of how to better handle roving throngs of tourists has been grappled with worldwide for some time now.

We, in South Carolina, should take note.

On Hilton Head Island, the number of tourists and the type of tourists have been argued about for decades. But remember that tourism is the state’s leading industry, ahead of manufacturing and agribusiness.

Tourism has an annual $29 billion economic impact statewide, according to the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism.

The Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce says some 2.6 million visitors come annually, with a $1.4 billion economic impact on Beaufort County. Myrtle Beach attracts 19 million annual visitors, followed by the famously-hot Columbia region with 16 million and Charleston with 8 million.

The saturated peninsula in Charleston is the most likely place for squirt guns to come out. But the sweltering tourists would probably smile and demand that protesters come back with Super Soakers.

Tourists are an easy target on Hilton Head, where many complaining residents forget that they, too, came first as mere tourists.

Also overlooked is the degree to which tourists are paying for themselves. On Hilton Head, tourists wholly fund the extravagantly expensive routine schedule of beach nourishment through a 2% tax on overnight lodging. Such steady funding to maintain the heart and soul of the island is the envy of communities on eroding waterfronts worldwide.

Tourists pay another 2% tax on overnight lodging called the accommodations tax that funds tourism marketing and arts and some nonprofits. Hilton Head tourists also contribute heavily to a 2% “hospitality tax” on prepared food and beverages, which gin up $5 million annually for public safety projects and capital improvements such as bike pathways.

Tourists also kick in a big chunk of the short-term 1% sales taxes that voters have approved over the years to fund roads, bridges and green space. Tourists are also the reason a small town like ours can have high-end amenities, including fine dining, the arts and nice hotel ballrooms for community gatherings. And, so far, we’ve built this economy without a single wax museum, neon Pedro, albino alligator, trained seal or Ferris wheel.

One of the things Barcelona residents want officials to do is tax tourists even more. Here, it seems the squirt guns could be aimed more at the homies than the “tourons.”

It is us who invite the world to come without offering so much as adequate parking space. We approve motels disguised as monster homes for weekly rentals in what once were quiet neighborhoods. We change zoning to enable more timeshares. We annex rural land at the behest of developers who then strip it bare and stack in tens of thousands of new homes while all the streets get clogged.

Barcelona can teach S.C. leaders a lot. Plan better for the tourist onslaught. And listen to them. Plan better for the residents. And listen to them.

Or, be prepared for water pistol shots that will be heard around the world.

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com .