Opinion and commentary on the European tour market — markup economics, operator dynamics, and what the data says about how tourists actually spend.
Two operators control 28% of all Last Supper tours in Milan. Only 1,720 visitors per day. What happens when extreme scarcity meets market concentration — and what tourists can do about it. Leonardo’s Last Supper is a 15-minute experience. You enter a climate-controlled room in Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie with 39 other people, you…
I run five travel sites that collectively track 505 tour products across Europe’s most visited monuments. I have spent 16 months watching prices, ratings, and reviews update biweekly through automated monitoring. And after all that data, I can tell you the single most expensive assumption in European tourism: that paying more gets you a better…
The Colosseum sells a ticket for €18. The average tourist pays $174. That is a 9.6x markup. Leonardo’s Last Supper sells a ticket for €15. The average tourist pays $161. That is 10.7x — the highest markup of any major monument in Europe. These are not estimates. They come from our analysis of 505 tour…
