Have we had enough of travel?

Crowds, queues, disgruntled locals, fractured communities, soaring prices… can the problems of overtourism ever be solved?

By Mark Rowe

The El Farol bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is no tourist hotspot. But it lends its name to a game theory scenario that’s pertinent to the phenomenon
of unfettered global tourism.

Once a week, the theory goes, a fixed population wants to go and have fun at the El Farol bar, unless it’s too crowded. Everyone must decide at the same time whether to go or not, with no knowledge of others’ choices. If more than 60 per cent of the population go to the bar, they’ll have less fun than if they stayed home.

The theoretical El Farol quandary is all too real for Mallorca, Barcelona, Bali, beaches in Greece, major museums and cruise ship itineraries. Too many people at the same time – can anyone really be having fun? The local population definitely isn’t.

Travel’s breaking point

In many parts of the world, the volume of tourists sipping coffee or taking Instagrammable pictures has gone way beyond saturation point. Overtourism, as
it’s known, is now so rampant that many communities are pushing back. In April, activists on Tenerife staged a hunger strike against the building of new tourist megaprojects.

In Mallorca (2023 tourism data: 1,232,014 residents, 18 million tourists), signs proclaiming ‘kill a tourist’ have appeared and water pistols have been squirted at visitors. In Greece last year, locals reclaimed beaches from sunbeds and beach bars in a guerilla protest dubbed the ‘towel movement’.

For 250 years, since the advent of the 18th century Grand Tour, tourism has generally been ‘a force for good’, says Guillem Colom-Montero, a lecturer in tourism and communities at the University of Glasgow. ‘Travel was a joy, transformational; you learned to understand the world. The same was also true for the host. This worked until ten years ago.’

The advent of low-cost airlines, booking phenomena such as Airbnb the internet and digital working have ‘caused this model to collapse,’ he says. ‘The scale of mobility is radically different, even disturbing for local communities.’ For the first time in history, ‘tourism has a negative narrative’, he says, the benefits are no longer enough to appease the host population.

‘When you see so many people protesting, so widely, so strongly, it tells you that the balance has been lost. The idea that most people benefit from tourism is no longer so clear.’

Symptoms of overtourism include local people being unable to eat out at affordable prices or being forced to walk on roads around large groups of tourists. Deeper issues include visceral anger about how affordable housing has been gobbled up by the behemoth of Airbnb. In many Spanish tourist hotspots, says Colom-Montero, it takes 17 years of salary to access a property – much higher than the Spanish average.

‘When you talk to local communities, the major issue is housing. I hear tourism compared to a cancer – first it colonised the coast, then the interior and now, thanks to Airbnb, it occupies even the private space, the house.’

‘At the most insignificant level, overtourism makes visiting places less pleasant for those visiting,’ says Adrian Phillips, managing director of Bradt Travel Guides. ‘Most of us would prefer to appreciate St Mark’s Square [in Venice] without having to jostle for space. But overtourism can be more than inconvenient – it can damage the local landscape, put pressure on local amenities, bend and change traditional culture.’

Hotels & the homeless

Overtourism exacerbates the symptoms of wider societal problems. From the shores of the Mediterranean to African wildlife spots, local communities increasingly feel excluded and overwhelmed: rampant construction, environmental degradation and water shortages are imposed without reciprocal benefits.

‘Overcrowding all year round of people and cars, pressure on public services – they have big impacts on both urban and rural landscapes,’ says Colom-Montero. ‘The countryside is blighted with new roads and hotels, the cities are gentrified and lose their identity, traditional shops get replaced by ice-cream parlours, expensive franchise restaurants and bars. Locals feel they lose control over their locality and that tourism officials favour tourists over the people who live there. They feel they are not listened to.’

To this can be added uncomfortable reports from just about every popular tourist destination of culturally inappropriate behaviour, drug taking and drunkenness.

‘The protests don’t surprise me at all,’ says Harold Goodwin, managing director of the Responsible Tourism Partnership. ‘Tourists are always wealthier than waiters or cleaners; the difference between the guest and the host has been exacerbated, the relationship has broken down.

As was said of American soldiers during the war, “They’re overpaid, oversexed and over here.” In Barcelona, the housing problem is obvious when you see that the waiters serving you sleep in their cars. People don’t want their city to become a museum, where everyone is either a tourist or serving coffee to tourists.’

Pushing back against overtourism

Many countries, regional and city governments, and trading blocs such as the EU are now seeking to regulate home-sharing to tackle the Airbnb movement. Barcelona says it will stop all short-term lets by 2028 and the 10,000 city apartments currently listed on Airbnb will return to the housing market; the Scottish government and Florence have moved to restrict or ban short-term licenses.

Amsterdam is one of many cities to ban loud hailers and restrict group sizes, while southern European cities increasingly outlaw the sale of ice cream and alcohol after midnight. Italy this year introduced new entrance fees and group size limitations for Venice, while tourists in Portofino risk being fined if they linger too long taking a selfie.

The Greek island of Santorini (25,000 residents; 3.4 million visitors in 2023) has limited or banned construction in areas under pressure, while elsewhere in Greece, 70 per cent of beaches must be sunbed-free and in Spain’s Costa Blanca, setting up chairs, sunbeds and parasols before 9.30am has been banned.

A poster campaign in Malaga calls on women not to walk around in bikinis and both sexes to wear upper garments ‘out of respect and hygiene’. In Japan, ¥10,000 (£50) fines are in place for anyone taking a photo of a geisha without her consent, and a ‘Mind Your Manners’ English-speaking guide has been created to enlighten visitors about local customs and etiquette.

The Indonesian island of Bali, where by the middle of 2024, international tourism arrivals – 7.75 million – surpassed those of all of 2019, is also seeing pushback against the rampant, unfettered expansion of tourism, with hotlines set up to report inappropriate behaviour by foreigners or who are thought to be selling drugs.

‘People go abroad and behave with licence, abysmally,’ says Goodwin. ‘They think they have bought not just a holiday but the destination. If you wouldn’t do it at home, don’t do it on holiday.’ In September, Indonesia announced plans for a ten-year moratorium on hotel construction on the island.

Addressing short-term rentals is ‘the fundamental game changer’, says Goodwin, but he adds that there are many other micro-measures governments can take. ‘In Barcelona, the government took a bus route off Google Maps so that tourists no longer used it, leaving it free for locals, especially the elderly, who had previously struggled to get on the crowded bus.’

More subtle measures are also being tried. Barcelona is rebranding from ‘Visit Barcelona’ to ‘This is Barcelona’, while Mallorca has launched a new campaign, ‘Diviértete con Respeto’ (Have Fun with Respect), with a theme of ‘Menys Turisme, Més Vida’, or ‘Less Tourism, More Life’.

Portugal’s Algarve has launched a ‘Futourism’ initiative that invites visitors to spend more time exploring local culture and asks them to save the equivalent of six suitcases of water during their stay as a means of highlighting the water pressures posed by tourism and climate change.

‘In the next ten years, the situation will look radically different in our cities,’ says Moreno, who also favours meaningful tourist taxes – way above the typical €2/night tax – along with restrictions on car rentals (Mallorca sees 100,000 car rentals a year) and cruise ships.

IN THE DOCK

Orkney is the number one UK destination for cruise ships. Twenty years ago, just a handful of cruise ships visited every year, but by 2022, this had risen to 170 vessels and 125,000 passengers, while a record-breaking 234 ships visited in 2023, a year that also saw a day when 6,069 passengers arrived in Kirkwall (population: 10,020).

The island council seems happy – port revenues add up to around £3 million a year – but for islanders, cruise ships and the volumes of passengers they bring can be intrusive. Locals struggle to get a seat in a café while the visual impact of legions of cruise-ship passengers disgorged on to Kirkwall’s narrow streets can be negative for both islanders and other tourists seeking the ‘empty spaces, at one with nature’ vibe that is Orkney’s biggest draw.

Cruise-ship passengers have been sighted on their bicycles, riding out in pelotons reminiscent of the Tour de France, slowing local traffic.

This year, the island council has graded visiting liners according to size in an attempt to regulate numbers. However, tour operators have called for transport infrastructure to be upgraded to make it easier for coaches to avoid the narrow lanes that lead to the island’s prime sites, such as Skara Brae and the Ring of Brodgar.

Many islanders oppose this, feeling that two-lane (in each direction) highways would be out of character for the islands.

Fewer flights

Banning, or significantly cutting flights is often championed as a measure that can tackle both overtourism and climate change. Such moves are controversial, but Anna Hughes, director of Free Flights UK, believes it’s essential, and that banning flights shorter than 2.5 hours would be a game changer.

‘The current problems have a lot to do with society and how we feel we have to travel more and more, how the only way we can feel fulfilled if is we are constantly going somewhere,’ she says. ‘If you had to go by train it would take longer and be more expensive, so you wouldn’t do it so often. We can still go to tourist hotspots, but we’d all be visiting them less often, rather than piling on Barcelona or Venice four times a year.

‘The era of cheap flights has enabled us to travel far more easily, but it’s not a sustainable model,’ she adds. ‘Overtourism happens because we keep jumping on cheap flights just because we can.’

Measures to discourage flying could draw on lessons from anti-smoking campaigns, she says, where workplace bans have been accompanied by graphic warnings on the side of packaging. Package holiday documents could carry similar messaging about the detrimental impacts of visits.

However, Goodwin is uncomfortable with wider moves to cut flights per se, which could hit long-haul nations, such as those in the Caribbean, that are heavily dependent on tourism. ‘It really riles me,’ he says. ‘These islands were self-sufficient, then we went and grew tobacco and sugar there and gave them slavery. Then we gave them our tourists and now we’re going to tell them they can’t have tourism?’

Any campaign to ban or reduce flights is facile, he argues, as fuel prices and carbon taxes are already flattening demand. ‘People get uppity at calls to ban flights but they also get uppity when flight prices go up,’ he says, ‘but they are already expensive and getting higher’.

Elite travel – a solution to overtourism?

The counter-argument is that rationing flights in some way would be elitist: overseas holidays would quickly become unaffordable to the poorest. Fewer flights or cruise ships mandated by law to land fewer passengers, would quickly equate to higher prices.

Hotels, too, would respond, knowing they could reach capacity with a captive market. Phillips is uncomfortable about blanket legislation to increase the cost of flights to cap travel. ‘I don’t believe in charging more for long-haul flights – this simply makes travel to places beyond our backyards a preserve of the wealthier, which takes us back decades,’ he says.

‘No-fly holidays effectively ring-fence wealth in the West, denying tourism income to far poorer countries, which can hasten degradation of precious habitat rather than slow it.’

‘Everybody has the right to travel – the increased access to travel for groups beyond the privileged classes is a good thing,’ he says. ‘But people also have a right to determine the character and future of the areas in which they live.’

This, argues Colom-Montero, is an uncomfortable reality but one that bumps up against what he argues is a wider societal need. ‘Elitism is an issue with this scenario,’ he says. ‘People have the right to travel – but this is a moment in the history of tourism where we should be prioritising the wellbeing of local people rather than the right to travel. This is part of the deal.’

Airline assertions that forcing up flight prices is elitist is greeted with snorts of derision by Goodwin.

‘Only Europeans make that point. It’s one of the oldest tropes. Only two per cent of the world flies every year; flying has always been elite. The world’s not fair. Please, can they spare us that sob story? If airlines are so morally troubled by this, they could strip out first and business class, and put more people on the plane. I wonder, why are they so bothered about people’s right to fly? There are people in Cornwall who can’t afford to go to the coast, millions in India who will never go to their nearest city let alone fly from it.’

New horizons

Much of the world remains relatively unexplored, says Colom-Montero. ‘Tourism has become homogeneous. Do we really all want to eat avocado on toast whether we are in Bali or Australia or Skye? Local people protesting against overtourism are reminding us of the centrality of community and place. They don’t like being transformed into a place that gives you the same breakfast the world over. What kind of tourism is that – isn’t the value of tourism in the thirst of finding the difference from us?

‘Everywhere has empty places that are of interest and will welcome tourists,’ he says. ‘Even Spain has empty areas of the interior. The problem is that social media drives us all to go the same places. On Skye, everyone feels they must go to the Fairy Pools for a selfie but there are so many other places on Skye and so many other Scottish islands that are magical and empty.’

This resonates with Phillips. ‘Ultimately, the best way to reduce overtourism is to champion the merits of the many, many wonderful spots away from the most densely visited tourist sites and encourage people to spread their tourist dollars more widely. That needn’t be through penalising certain types of travel – instead, let’s focus on the positives, stress the benefits and the pleasures of trips to the alternatives.’

Is the wonder and joy of exploration enough to trigger a transformation?

Hughes is doubtful. ‘I hope we will be travelling a lot less but there is a lot of resistance to change,’ she says. ‘Campaigning, arguing the case, can only take you so far. Unless we have political leadership it won’t happen. There doesn’t seem to be that leadership so, not to sound too dystopian about it, at the moment, money talks – I think we are screwed.’

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The inquisitive spirit that makes us explore is a reason for being positive, says Colom-Montero. ‘Tourism is inherent in the human spirit. The basis of tourism is encountering the other, the difference, something that is new to you. I’m optimistic – when the phrase “overtourism” was first coined, there was a push back by political leaders saying protesters were “tourism-phobic”. Now those same leaders are saying there is a problem. Overtourism has moved from the margins to the centre and so it’s impossible that we won’t see improvements.’

Goodwin believes the difference between a negative and positive tourist impact on a locality is not necessarily one of scale but of attitude. ‘Is there a basic difference between a cruise ship passenger and a couple wandering around with a guidebook? I’m not sure there is. The right kind of tourist is one who behaves like a guest on the beach, in the bar or hotel. It’s about the way you try and fit in.’ The only way to travel guilt-free, suggests Goodwin, is stay in hotels, hostels or B&Bs.

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‘There are amazing things being done across the world,’ he adds, ‘we know the solutions, we just have to implement them and speed up that process. We will definitely reach that equilibrium in cities, it’s just that things are not improving fast enough.’