A POPULAR Brit holiday destination has announced a change that will impact thousands of tourists after locals called them a “plague of locusts”.
Amsterdam made the decision to to ban cruise ships from the centre of the city to crack down on high tourist numbers and cut pollution.
GettyAmsterdam have announced a new change that will impact thousands of tourists[/caption]
APThe popular holiday hotspot have banned all cruise ships from the city centre[/caption]
The announcement comes after the Dutch capital launched their Stay Away campaign in March in an effort to deter people – especially young British men – from choosing the city as a party destination.
In February, the council also banned people from smoking cannabis in the streets of the city’s famous red-light district and ordered bars and restaurants to shut by 2am on Fridays and Saturdays.
Centre-right party D66 said cruises are incompatible with its sustainability ambitions with the ban set to result in the closure of the city’s central terminal on the River IJ, near Amsterdam’s main train station.
D66 politician Ilana Rooderkerk, who compared cruise passengers to a “plague of locusts” in an opinion piece last month, said Amsterdam would “sail better” without cruise ships.
“Cruise ships in the city centre also do not fit in with the task of combating mass tourism,” she added on Twitter.
Her party also said that plans to build a new bridge between Amsterdam’s southern district and the Noord district would be impossible if cruise ships were to keep docking in the city centre.
Alternative sites for cruise ships around Amsterdam have been considered, but there are no final decisions at the moment on where it would be placed.
Mayor Femke Halsema also moaned about cruise ship passengers in an interview with Dutch media in November.
She said that they didn’t benefit the city’s residents because they only visited for a “couple of hours”, ate at “international brands” and had “little time” to visit museums.
And speaking to Bloomberg last year, Halsema said: “Amsterdam welcomes 22 million tourists per year, and that’s a little bit too much.
“It’s not a form of tourism we welcome or don’t welcome – it’s a form of behaviour. What we do not welcome is people who come here on a vacation from morals”.
In a video produced for the Stay Away campaign in March, two officers are seen arresting a drunk man while warning them against visiting the city for a “messy night.”
It ends with: “So coming to Amsterdam for a messy night? Stay away.”
The city council said they still want to accept visitors to the city but this campaign was specifically aimed at “nuisance tourists who want to visit Amsterdam to “go wild”.
They said the campaign is being targeted at British men aged between 18-35 – but have plans to extend it to other European countries.
People searching for “stag party Amsterdam”, “cheap hotel Amsterdam” and “pub crawl Amsterdam”, will be shown warning advertisements.
But Amsterdam is not the first European city to ban cruises from its city centre with Venice putting a cruise ban in place in April 2021.
This comes after Majorca applied for a ban on all cruise ship arrivals in 2020.
