What the protests against Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez were really about

If you were in Venice last week and not on Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez‘s 200-person guest list, you may not have known the glamorous celebrations were going on. But that didn’t stop local Venetians from protesting against the event.

That’s because the demonstrations weren’t only about the third-richest man in the world.

They were about pushing back against the idea of Venice as a theme park and playground for billionaires — rather than as a living city that’s home to 50,000 people in the historic center who are fed up with the impacts of mass tourism.

“He wanted to use Venice as a background,” Tommaso Cacciari, a Venetian activist and a leader of the No Space for Bezos movement, told Business Insider of the billionaire Amazon founder. “We used him to speak about the real problems of Venice, and it worked, and we are very glad about it.”

The protests in Venice have made headlines around the world this month as the city, which welcomes 20 million visitors annually, prepared for private jets and megayachts to arrive, carrying A-listers like the Kardashian-Jenner clan and Bill Gates.

In the weeks leading up to the wedding, protesters gathered in a Venetian town square and along the iconic Rialto Bridge, holding signs that read, among other slogans, “No space for Bezos” with an image of a rocket ship — a nod to his rocket company, Blue Origin.

“Rumours of ‘taking over’ the city are entirely false and diametrically opposed to our goals and to reality,” Lanza and Baucina, the event planner coordinating the wedding, said in a statement released earlier in June. “Before the recent news of protests arose, we had worked for there to be minimal negative impact or disruption to the lives of Venetians and the city’s visitors.”

Protests continued during the wedding celebrations last week, with demonstrators gathering in Piazza San Marco. One protester scaled a pole in front of Saint Mark’s Basilica before being carried off by police.

While protesters made the Bezos-Sánchez wedding a focal point of their demonstrations, overtourism has been a prominent issue for Venetians for years.

Activists in Italy have regularly staged anti-tourism protests, BI has previously reported, including targeted demonstrations against companies like Airbnb. The palpable frustration felt by locals over overcrowded streets, environmental damage, and rising living costs has dissuaded some tourists from returning to visit the city.

Alan Fyall, the Visit Orlando endowed chair of tourism marketing at the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management, told BI the Bezos-Sánchez wedding protests showed how fed up Venetians are with overtourism in general.

Fyall said the number of wedding guests was not necessarily the problem. But given the persistent problems of overtourism and the high cost of living, locals “see it as a little bit crass.”

“The protesters said something like, ‘This is feeding into the image of Venice as this tourism haven,'” Fyall said. “It all comes back to the bigger problem.”

Cacciari said the goal is not to do away with all tourism, especially since many Venetians rely on the income from foreign travelers, but that a better balance needed to be struck.

“I don’t like the slogan ‘Tourists go home,’ for example. No, tourists are welcome as long as there is a balance,” Cacciari said. “But if the measure is broken, it’s not the tourist’s fault. It’s the one who runs the city’s fault.”

City officials had welcomed the wedding. “We are happy and honoured to welcome Jeff Bezos and his consort Lauren Sánchez,” Mayor Luigi Brugnaro said, according to Reuters.

In an attempt to dissuade mass travel, the city has implemented tourist taxes, charging day-trip visitors about $5 to enter the city center on certain days, and limited tour group numbers to a maximum of 25, as well as restricted the use of loudspeakers. They’ve also instituted restrictions on cruise ships. But despite those efforts, overtourism concerns have remained.

Fyall said the persistent nature of the protests shows that the city has not yet fully addressed its residents’ concerns. Until it does, we can expect to see more protests like the ones targeted at Bezos.

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