by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-Founder, SoolNua Consulting

As founder of Skift, Rafat Ali, for many years, has been chronicling the travel and tourism sector with insider precision and sometimes outsider moral outrage, and in this latest piece, The Great American Tourism Shakedown, he calls out what many U.S. destinations and travel operators refuse to acknowledge: American tourism has become an extraction exercise, not an exercise in hospitality.

Every hidden resort fee, every “suggested” 25% tip on a cab fare, every surcharge at a theme parks is a metaphor for a deeper malaise. America, for Ali, is pricing itself “out of its own welcome mat”. Rafat makes the crucial link: the same economic forces that have hollowed out resident life—housing unaffordability, collapsing health systems, underpaid workers—are the forces that make destinations inhospitable to visitors. Tourists don’t arrive in a vacuum; they step into the lived reality of citizens. If cities are unlivable, then inevitably, they are unvisitable too.

Europe: The Older, Wiser Brother

Rafat’s indictment may sound shocking in an American context, but in Europe his insight is almost axiomatic. For some time now, European cities have understood that the success of their visitor economies depends on the health of their resident economies. This thinking has been embedded in the work of City Destinations Alliance (CityDNA, formerly European Cities Marketing), which has consistently stressed that the city is for citizens first. Tourism, in this vision, is not a parallel track but an overlay: if you create great places to live, you create great places to visit.

Copenhagen and Vienna—two of Ali’s examples—are frequently cited in CityDNA research as benchmarks of this alignment. Copenhagen’s cycling infrastructure, first built for residents, has become one of the city’s most admired tourist experiences, now extended through innovative projects like CopenPay, which rewards eco-friendly behaviors among visitors and locals alike. Vienna’s extraordinary social housing program, housing 60% of residents in high-quality, affordable apartments, doesn’t just preserve community; it sustains the authentic, lived culture that visitors come to experience.

But these are not isolated examples. Across Europe, from Amsterdam to Barcelona, from Helsinki to Ljubljana, destination marketing organisations have shifted toward destination management. CityDNA’s 2018 “Manifest” explicitly declared that DMOs must become “guardian angels of the place brand,” ensuring balance between residents’ quality of life and visitors’ quality of experience.

The U.S.–EU Ideological Divide

The deeper story here is ideological. America’s tourism economy, as Rafat argues, is animated by extraction logic: how much can we get from the next transaction? Europe’s model, born of older, denser societies with long memories of overtourism and urban strain, is guided by stewardship: how can we sustain both visitor flows and civic life for the long term?

Kai Hattendorf, former CEO of UFI, captured this divergence in his recent analysis of U.S. tourism woes. He pointed to surcharges, visa costs, and reputation damage as “self-inflicted wounds” that are already driving international travellers to competitor destinations. Meanwhile, Howard Givner described the U.S. approach as “a masterclass in how to destroy a brand”. The irony, of course, is that the brand at stake is Brand USA itself—diminished by an insistence on short-term gain over long-term hospitality.

Contrast this with Europe, where the language of “carrying capacity,” “resident sentiment,” and “social license to operate” has been mainstream in DMO boardrooms for years. It is not that Europe has solved the problem of balancing tourism and citizen well-being—cities like Barcelona, Venice ans Amsterdam have wrestled with tensions around Airbnb, cruise ships, and mass visitation. But crucially, the debate is open, policy-driven, and citizen-centred. America, by Rafat’s account, is still in denial, pretending that extraction can be a strategy.

Hospitality as a Cultural Value

There is also a cultural layer here. In Europe, hospitality is not only a commercial transaction; it is a civic value, tied to centuries of city life where marketplaces, plazas, and festivals blurred the lines between resident and visitor. When CityDNA advocates for “hospitality begins with citizens,” it echoes this inheritance. By contrast, the U.S. model—particularly post-9/11—has tilted toward fortress mentalities, suspicion at the border, and, as David Adler recently noted, a retreat from the very convenings that make a country globally connected.

Lessons for the Future

The stakes could not be higher. Rafat is right to warn that tourism dies when affordability dies. Europe’s lesson is that affordability for residents is inseparable from accessibility for visitors. You cannot have one without the other. Destinations that invest in housing, transit, green spaces, and cultural infrastructure for citizens create the very environments that delight visitors. Conversely, destinations that hollow out local life in pursuit of visitor spend end up with neither.

America still has extraordinary assets—natural wonders, iconic cities, world-class cultural offerings. But unless it re-aligns its tourism model with its citizens’ well-being, it risks becoming the cautionary tale Rafat describes. Europe, as the older, wiser brother, has already charted the path: sustainable tourism flows from sustainable cities.

And at the heart of it is a simple truth, one that CityDNA and European DMOs have been repeating for years: Great hospitality starts with great quality of life.