Is overtourism really suffocating?

Over-tourism will cause inconvenience for locals to travel, as well as excessive pressure on tourist attractions!

At the end of 2017, the World Travel and Tourism Council released a report entitled "Coping with Success: Crowding Management in Tourism Destinations" to face the common problem of overcrowding in world tourism development. Coincidentally, at the same time, the German IPK international tourism consulting agency released a report titled "Boom or Bust?" on behalf of the International Travel Fair Berlin (ITB). "Where is Tourism Going?" World Tourism Trends Report, this report has a special topic called "Overtourism: International tourism needs to develop new strategies to manage". Therefore, many tourism-related media have pushed the title of "over-tourism" into the headlines. It seems that this issue indeed deserves the attention of the tourism management department and the industry.

The report of the World Travel and Tourism Council is more comprehensive about "overtourism", but as an organization of industry leaders aiming to promote tourism development, the vocabulary used in the report is "crowding in tourist destinations". It describes a phenomenon; while the IPK report uses the term "overtourism". Obviously, the latter highlights a trend, but both reports point out the seriousness and seriousness of this problem.

The challenges posed by “crowding” to the development of tourist destinations include “alienated local residents, diminished tourist experience, overloaded infrastructure, damage to nature, and damage to culture and heritage. Threats" and other five aspects, and proposed measures that should be taken to address these problems, including "easing the number of tourists over time, evacuating tourists to different locations, adjusting prices to balance supply and demand, and adjusting accommodation supply capacity and restrictions "Accessibility and activity frequency", etc., but emphasized that this phenomenon must be treated with long-term thinking and long-term planning, rather than mechanical responses and one-size-fits-all countermeasures should be used with caution. When elaborating on the impact of "over-tourism", the IPK report particularly emphasized that "over-tourism" not only directly affects tourist destinations, tourist attractions, local infrastructure and residents, but also affects tourists themselves.

Obviously, this explanation is more comprehensive. According to the report, according to a 2017 survey of 29,000 international tourists from 24 countries in the world by the World Travel Monitor, 25% of the respondents admitted to feeling "overtourized" in their travel destinations. The report analyzed that about 9% of the world's tourists (about 100 million people) do feel that the quality of their outbound travel has been affected. Among them, families traveling with children and young people under the age of 34 feel this impact the most. From a regional perspective, Asian outbound tourists are more sensitive to the phenomenon of “crowding”.

Some of these locations are so popular that mayors and city councils do their part to cool them down. Many places have begun to collect tourism taxes, or expanded the scope of collection, or proposed to start collecting taxes, and the government is also promulgating relevant regulations. Collecting taxes actually treats the symptoms but not the root cause. In this regard, some experts have proposed some new methods, hoping to fundamentally solve the problem of over-tourism.

In terms of publicity, relevant departments in many popular tourist countries will provide effective guidance to tourists. For example, the British government will issue brochures to foreign tourists at the customs, recommending them to visit some relatively unpopular attractions, hoping to play a certain diversion effect. Within the UK, telecommunications providers will also send text messages to foreign phone numbers to remind you of the congestion levels at popular locations to avoid over-stressing attractions.

Not only that, some countries have also made great efforts in science and technology. For example, Australia is building an intelligent network for tourists. In the future, it can rent a smartphone to tourists when they enter the country, and use various information updated at any time on the mobile phone to recommend dynamic routes to tourists. This prevents tourists from adopting the same tourist route, which can not only help tourists avoid crowds, but also help the city ease traffic and reduce the impact of tourism on local people.

So please don’t travel blindly!