The Hague braces for summer tourist crowds as heat drives arrivals
Heat waves are pushing summer visitors toward The Hague’s cooler coast, where Scheveningen already handles about 10 million visitors a year and rising crowd pressure.
Cooler sea air is pulling more summer visitors toward The Hague as heat waves sweep across Europe, and city leaders are preparing for the strain that brings. The pressure falls heaviest on Scheveningen, where a 2024 Smart City Den Haag case study said the beach area draws about 10 million visitors a year, from daily visitors and foreign tourists to inhabitants and locals.
That volume has turned Scheveningen into a live test case for how a city balances tourism income against livability. The case study said the area faces risks of overcrowding, traffic jams and more incident reports, with crowd-management work involving the municipality, police, APCOA car parks and sports-related stakeholders. The tourism pull is not limited to the shoreline, either. The Hague’s convention bureau highlighted major congresses and events in 2024, adding another layer of foot traffic to a city already managing its role as both diplomatic center and seaside destination.
To stay ahead of the crush, The Hague has been testing crowd measurements and a Crowd Safety Manager system designed to support planning and control of crowd events. Smart City Den Haag says the tool uses predictive models, real-time data and a digital-twin-style approach to anticipate problems for large groups heading to the beach or the city centre. A 2019 POLIS Network paper said the city had been developing its own Urban Traffic Management Centre since 2000 and had already built recreational traffic information systems for Scheveningen to handle more than 10 million visitors a year.
The local challenge sits inside a broader tourism picture. Statistics Netherlands said Dutch hotels, campsites and holiday parks hosted 52.2 million guests in 2024, including 21.31 million from abroad, and reported the same 52.2 million total in 2025, with international guests rising to 22.3 million. For The Hague, that wider flow matters because the city is drawing visitors not only for its beaches and events, but also as a cooler alternative when the continent’s interior heats up.
That leaves The Hague with a familiar policy tradeoff: welcome the spending, or risk letting popular districts become unmanageable. Scheveningen’s crowded promenade and the city centre’s event calendar now sit at the center of that calculation, as climate change keeps reshaping where summer tourists go and how much pressure cities can absorb.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
