Old facades made of light-colored stone, blue sea, small bars: in future, anyone who wants to spend the night here in a trolley case through the picturesque streets of Dubrovnik’s old town should be careful. You have to pay a fine of up to 265 euros if you are caught with luggage on wheels. The mayor of the Croatian coastal town, Mato Franković, has that, according to the online magazine Travel Tomorrow announced at a public meeting. Penalties for rolling suitcases, turnstiles for jetties, tickets for pedestrian zones – cities and communities are becoming more and more creative in how they deal with so-called overtourism, especially since individual places have become world-famous through Instagram.
For Dubrovnik, distress is as typical as it is understandable. Because the city can be seen in the series “Game of Thrones”, in recent years there have been 27,000 guests per day for 42,000 inhabitants. But the streets aren’t always narrow. It adorns old cobblestones, a pavement regularly branded by experts as “the noisiest” and which increases the “clack-clack” of rolling suitcases. Because even the UNESCO World Heritage title was briefly in danger, Mayor Franković made a name for himself as a fighter against overtourism. Only two cruise ships have been able to dock per day since 2019, and restaurants have been allowed to set up fewer and fewer tables outside for years. The suitcase ban is part of a package of measures. In the future, bars will also have to pay fines if their guests are too loud. But they don’t just want to ban and restrict: In the medium term, it is said about luggage, they want to collect it centrally at the airport and distribute it to the accommodations.
In the long term, all pieces of luggage should disappear from the streets
The ban in its current form raises many questions: What about people who cannot carry a backpack? How does the delivery service want to get to the apartment rented via Airbnb? And: will massage studios boom in the future because everyone has back pain after arriving at the hotel?
If you want to shout that it’s discrimination on trolleys, let me tell you: The two-suitcase society is temporary. Medium are noisy Travel Tomorrow No pieces of luggage are allowed on the streets in Dubrovnik, whether carried or rolled.
In the future, travel preparation will therefore not only include measuring whether your own suitcase can still be carried in hand luggage on the plane. But basically to define what a piece of luggage is. Some fully equipped handbags, called “shopper” for reasons, could well be under suspicion in Dubrovnik. Because the city’s central luggage distribution service also means there is a great danger in the future that you will often have a bag with men’s trousers in size 44 placed in front of your hotel room instead of your own bathing suit, a different approach would probably be the simplest: just leave out the packing. Especially since it may simply be cheaper to equip yourself with pants and toothbrushes on the spot when the airlines charge fees for pieces of luggage and at the same time threaten penalties for their possession at the destination. Maybe it’s all a big misunderstanding: Dubrovnik doesn’t want to keep the tourists away – but to promote the local economy in a perfidious, long-term way.