“Stay away!”: Amsterdam no longer wants young Britons between the ages of 18 and 35 in the city

Amsterdam is considered, among other things, as a party city, the liberal treatment of drugs and prostitution has been attracting millions of tourists to the Dutch metropolis for years – especially from Great Britain. According to the BBC, one million of the roughly 20 million tourists who visit the city each year are British.

And these are often young, passionately indulge in alcohol and other substances and, in their lack of restraint, no longer know how to behave properly. Amsterdammers have been complaining for years about drunk tourists urinating in public, puking in the street, stripping and fighting.

According to the city council of the Dutch capital, the British are much more often negative than members of other countries. That is why the municipality of Amsterdam is now focusing a ‘digital discouragement campaign’ on young Britons between the ages of 18 and 35.

Young men in Britain are shown online videos of their peers stumbling down the street drunk, being taken away handcuffed, fingerprinted or posing for police photos. Juicy buses are also referenced. The online advertisements should appear on the screens of young Britons as soon as keywords such as ‘stag party’, ‘cheap hotel’ or ‘Amsterdam pub crawl’ are googled.

The fact that the Dutch explicitly target British men in a certain age segment is sometimes interpreted negatively. The anti-ad campaign has been described by critics as discriminatory or based on unfair stereotypes.

However, the phenomenon of the British going wild in the Netherlands is not new, the BBC continues. About ten years ago, former Amsterdam mayor Eberhard van der Laan invited his then London colleague Boris Johnson to see with his own eyes what his compatriots were doing in the Netherlands. Johnson previously described Amsterdam as a “shabby” city.

Van der Laan said of the British guests at the time:

Whether the Amsterdam city council will be successful with the new campaign has yet to be determined – some voices on social media suggest the opposite. In response to the campaign, a young man jokes that it “looks more like a commercial” to him, writes the BBC.

And another ironically notes that he’s generally “mysterious about how 18-35 year old men can be attracted to a city that has legalized drug cafes and tons of brothels.” (con)