Overtourism and Touristification

By Michael Kolatchev, Principal Consultant of Rossnova Solutions and Lina Kolesnikova, consultant of Rossnova Solutions.

Tourism is one of the important sources of revenue for many countries. For years, tourism has been strongly encouraged by these countries, attracting massive investments from states themselves and from private sources. Multiple places have been re-built and become prosperous thanks to tourism and tourists. Revenue and taxes generated by the tourism industry run into the billions, if not tens of billions, placing the industry among the major cash cows in countries previously considered less prosper.

Are we witnessing the end of this incessantly growing industry, rarely interrupted in the past, and only by major socio-political and natural disasters? In the wake of the global Covid pandemic that halted travel worldwide, tourism re-bounded in about two-three years to its pre-pandemic level, as estimated by the World Economic Forum travel and tourism study released in May 2024. Could this be due to mass tourism reaches its limits, at least, in its non-organised sector?

On 6th of July around three thousand protesters rallied against mass tourism in Barcelona (Catalonia). More than 140 organizations gathered under the slogan: “Enough is enough, let us introduce restrictions on tourism.” Neighbourhood associations, social movements, environmentalists and housing activists were among the groups that organized the march in the downtown. Protest organizers voiced public frustration that the “massive” influx of tourists “exacerbates” social inequality, housing affordability issues and the environmental crisis. They demanded measures be taken to reduce tourism ahead of a summer season 2024. During the demonstrations, some protesters fired water pistols at tourists, who were dining outdoors. At the end of June, the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Colboni, informed the public that municipal authorities were considering abandoning all tourist apartments in the city by the end of 2028, amid rising prices for renting and purchasing apartments in the city. We are talking about approximately 10,000 tourist apartments that could lose their status.

Similar actions took place in the Balearic and Canary Islands. In another Catalan city, Girona, more than 400 people demonstrated, also demanding restrictions on tourism. And this happens not only in Spain. Residents of Athens held a “funeral feast” for the old city areas, crowded by tourists. The Japanese authorities constructed a fence to spoil the view of Mount Fuji hoping to reduce the flow of tourists, who disturbed life of a small local town. And in the historical center of Seoul, a tourist curfew will soon be introduced, and tourists will be able to get there strictly from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Overtourism and touristification
In 2017 the word overtourism hit the headlines and we have seen civil protests since then.

Overturism is a percived disturbance and concern of local habitants over quality of their lives and the places they live or work in, caused by tourism and visitors. We may say that tourists and their impact might already be beyond the current capacities of destinations places. Canary Islands, for example, have population just about two million people, while in year 2023 alone islands welcomed almost 14 million visitors. Venice has population of c.50 000 people, with c.20 million people coming to see the “City of Canals” every year. Here, it seems, we are talking about reaching physical limits to the ability of popular tourist destinations repeatedly taking same quantity or more visitors each year.

There are several reasons for overtourism. First of all, the growth of cheap flights and cruise lines making short and non-organised private trips easy and affordable. Secondly, the Internet and particularly social networks contribute a lot to desire to visit certain places with all these “X the most beautiful places to visit” and similar lists and travel bloggers who promote trips for good financial profit from tourist industry. In some way, tourism has replaced some previous signs of prosperious living in people’s minds, almost certainly, among both younger and more mature population. Third, increase prosperity in new regions in the world. In the past, tourism was largely limited to a thriving “gold billion” in North Americas and Europe. We are now welcoming a high number of new travellers, for example, from growing Asian countries, notably, China and India. This has dramatically changed numbers of people in travel.

Tourism is always regarded as a win-win story (good for locals and for visitors alike). However, this is no longer true, as evidenced in many places. According to protesters in Spain, the influx of tourists is worsening the situation in terms of social inequality and housing prices. In Barcelona and Madrid, for example, rents in June 2024 increased by 18% compared to 2023.

Raising costs and fewer choice are not the only problems linked to overtourism. Here comes the problem of touristification. Touristification means that places and spaces are increasingly oriented towards tourists and visitors rather than local inhabitants, because it is tourists and visitors who bring the bulk of revenue. Places begin to loose their authencity and natural charm as they re-build and orient towards satisfying the demands of tourists, again, usually at the expense of local residents. In many places we see that towns, islands, certain districts are transformed into “tourist Disneylands” trending towards artificial reconstruction of them to produce best postcard look (or photo look). In such circumstances, going forward is a lose-lose situation, for both local inhabitants and tourists.

Overtourism is a complex issue that shows how unmanaged chaotic developments and initiatives in otherwise well appreciated and peaceful industries, can bring instability even to otherwise stable and prosperous societies.

Overtourism is still a tourism. On the one hand, tourism brings money to local economies. It is an important source for most areas which are popular tourist destinations. Hospitality, art, transport, and many other sectors benefit from it. Can one call tourism an evil? No, that is clearly not the case.

On the other hand, mass tourism brings impacts. Some of these impacts are not always positive. Two aspects are of particular importance. First, the economical aspect. With more tourists, who are usually spending more during tourist trips than they do in their regular life, local businesses may achieve higher margines by serving such newcomers. Besides of the higher prices as such, the margin is higher because most businesses do not need to establish long-lasting reputation and relationships with those visitors, most of whom will come and go, and will rarely ever return. This is opposite to how local businesses would need to invest heavily in their reputation and relationships with local population which is and will be present in their geographical area for a long while. Businesses are rarely conducive to social cohesiveness, instead they tend to gravitate to those clients who generate higher margins, and as a result, local population may feel (and rightly so) disadvantaged.

The second, even more important aspect is risk and security. Like other “mass activities and gatherings”, tourism results in population instability (i.e., a large part of population is only present for a short time and is quickly replaced by the next wave of newcomers).

Authorities have hard time managing a geographically restricted mass events like sport or culture festivals. With tourism, the geographical area is often much larger, for example, including entire cities, many of which have more than a million people.

In the security (and risk) domain we can recall that there are four usually cited categories of activities: deterrence, prevention, detection, and response. Deterrence and detection become more complicated with the mass of people moving in and out, with different cultures, mindsets or habits. Still, these activities remain largely activities by dedicated organisation, and, thus, could be run on comparably the same usual rails.

But when it comes to prevention and response, security requires a lot of education. Such education and even minimum awareness and loyalty to agreed local security routines cannot be expected from thousands and millions of visitors coming in and then out within few days. With rapidly changing mass of people, it is very difficult to penetrate the mass to the extent where one might think of being aware of what this mass brings, and to be able to run targeted preventive (and deterrent) actions.

Similar situation with response. To properly manage the response, it is often essential to ensure information gathering and information exchange. Can you imagine this being easy in a multi-cultural and a multi-lingual environment where, in case of crisis, most people (being visitors) do not think of the local needs, current or future, but rather focus of fastest possible escape (“leaving the problem behind”).

So, what to do with it?

As a matter of mental exercise, let us enlarge the tourist area from a city to the whole country. As soon as you consider the problem at that level, you may realize that there are multiple mechanisms which might be employed such as

• regulating the number of visas issued to enter the country,
• regulating the procedures, required time and pricing for visas,
• availability of better preventative controls due to advance availability of information on planned visits,
• opening and closing some borders and border control points, etc.
• adding non-intrusive “by-the-way” controls into presence of visitors in the concerned territories,
• adding, if not, and dynamically managing local taxes on visitors towards promoting desired visitors’ behaviour (for example, stay two nights rather than staying one night)
• introduce elements of smart cities, for example, consider dynamically prioritising tourist traffic (e.g., on foot) over local traffic (e.g., cars and trucks) during certain hours and places, and do the opposite in other hours or places.

Can such mechanisms work for tourism? Well, to some extend only.

Concern about overtourism is not intended to stop tourism. The objective would rather be to establish a capacity management capability. As at the national level, customers (tourists) should be segmented– for example, according to length of their stay and the purpose of their visits. Next, consider measures that would prioritize desirable and acceptable behaviours of the preferred segment(s) rather than disfavouring undesirable and less desired behaviours and segments.

Once capacity management is in place, security related capabilities must also be re-examined. Tourism, in a way, is a double-edged sword. With a mass of tourists, criminals can come and create risks and harm tourist destinations and have a detrimental impact on the local population.

With mass of tourists, the risk of terrorist attacks increases as well. The reasons for such attacks might be, for example, locally driven, e.g., reaction to negative impacts of overtourism, or terrorist mindset-driven, like is the case with other mass gatherings such as sport events at stadiums, cultural events at concert halls, or pilgrimage to places of worship.

Tourists are, by far, more vulnerable comparing to regular local population, because locals would usually know better what to do and where to go if something goes wrong (as well as what NOT to do and where DO NOT GO). Tourists, on the other hand, will have a different culture, speak different languages, and their situational awareness will generally much lower than that of locals. This is particularly true for long established tourist destinations with short-stay mass tourism.

Protests counter tourists are an increasingly common occurrence in European cities. Authorities will have to decide what to do next: limit the influx of visitors at the expense of the budget or find new ways to interact with guests, and to manage mass of visitors in a balanced way for tourists and locals.