Travel hot spots are turning overtourism challenges into opportunities

If you recently visited Barcelona, Mallorca or Venice, you’re a bad tourist who should have stayed home. At least that’s what the anti-tourism protests this summer in certain parts of Europe would have you believe.

Already this year, 142 countries are projected to exceed their pre-pandemic tourism performance, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. (That’s out of a total of 185 countries that the organization tracks.) 

In the next decade, tourism is predicted to grow into a $16 trillion industry that will generate 12.2% of global jobs. 

But the crowds and rising costs that come with it have locals in many cities feeling weary.

“It's not that tourism used to be a force for good and now has become a force for evil,” explains Ondrej Mitas, a senior lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. 

Mitas, who specializes in overtourism, says news coverage often describes the phenomenon as a single, unmanageable issue. If you tease it apart into smaller component parts, he argues, it’s easier to find solutions.

In his mind, overtourism is actually four separate problems. There’s the classic overcrowding of popular sites. 

Visitors disrespecting cultural norms—say, swinging selfie sticks or baring their shoulders in an Orthodox church—is another. 

Then you have the partiers who get indecent or destroy public property. 

Last is the most insidious prong of overtourism: when locals do not sufficiently benefit from tourism in their communities, due to unequal distribution of profits. 

That’s what most often leads to resident-level resistance, as seen in Spain this summer. “That’s a political problem,” says Mitas. “It’s much more difficult to solve.”

There’s reason for Mitas—and the rest of us travelers—to be optimistic.

Solutions for each of these issues are being tested in different destinations around the world, from Copenhagen to Thailand to Hawaii. 

Here are three such trailblazing initiatives, some new, some years in the making. Though they’re still relatively small, each has the potential to scale around the world—and impact an ever-growing share of travelers.

Source : https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/visit/travel-hot-spots-are-turning-overtourism-challenges-into-opportunities/articleshow/112460512.cms