Many tourists expect an immersive and authentic experience just like locals when traveling. However, residents of some tourism destinations feel the disappearance of the unique sense of these places characterised by their hometowns, under the prevalence of crowds, souvenir shops, rowdy bars and tour buses, for the reason that local facilities are under enormous pressure.
The overwhelming business attracting tourists such as bars, clubs and souvenir shops actually is a burden for locals. Overcrowding and rowdy tourist behaviors promote unique sense of destinations disappearing and leads to waste management pressure and overcrowding.
What does overtourism look like?
Overtourism can be defined as “the excessive number of visitors causes overcrowding in areas where temporary tourism peaks occur, which have altered their lifestyles”.
Take an example for Barcelona, it is one of cities with the rapid growth of tourism. Specifically, there were 30 million overnight visitors in 2017 according to the Destination Barcelona estimation, while resident population there is 1,625,137.
It’s a claim that overtourism is damaging the landscape, beaches or infrastructure, and forcing residents out of the property market. It is a complicated problem but often oversimplified, which has an impact in multiple ways. For instance, thousands of passengers were delivered daily by the international cruise industry to destination ports. While cruise activities lead to visual and physical pollution.
As cities transformed to cater for tourists, the global tourism supply chain booming, property speculation is increasing and costs of living is rising. Whereas it leads to the increasing price of rural consumption, and creates some local farmers who have been poor new life stress. As a result, development of rural tourism is no good for improving the life of the local residents.
Amsterdam is going to take actions such as banning short-term rentals and control cruise passengers numbers to prevent this. Things are worse if the destinations cities are not ready to deal with overtourism. Italian sociologist Marco d’Eramo claimed that 15 destinations were visited by 57% of international tourists in 2007, compared to 98% of that in 1950, which indicates the rapid growth of global tourism development beyond established destinations.
How to deal with overtourism? Despite the increasing protests, the tourism industry has not stopped promoting tourism. Cities, beaches and other landscapes continue to be invaded by tourists who don’t care about urban sustainability.
In fact, tourism brings employment and economic benefits to the local. But overtourism occurs when there is no limitation for the number of tourists. But some drastic actions have been taken by destinations to control the impact of overtourism. Overtourism is a shared responsibility. City administrators should put the welfare of locals priority, then take the destinations capacity of tourists into consideration. The global travel supply chain is the major driving force, which balances the development of tourism products, the travel experience and the interests of local residents. Tourists also need to make reasonable travel choices.
