Unbalanced tourism: finding the right spot

Tourism in a rollercoaster

Remember COVID: with travel banned for many months, even governments usually paying little attention to the sector suddenly realised how important it was to their economy. They deployed massive financial means to rescue tourism and its millions of jobs. Only a couple of years later, the wind shifted suddenly with the post-Covid “revenge” tourism boom, and the sometimes-surprising destination choices of those “revenge” travellers. “Overtourism” was flagged as straining local infrastructure, damaging local ecosystems or harming local communities.

A double-edged sword

As usual, the truth lies somewhere between those two poles. Tourism is a force for good, bringing people closer and supporting local economies. But it can have a negative effect when communities and ecosystems face unsustainable tourism flows. And the travel and tourism industry is working hard to find solutions to address those issues.

Before looking at solutions, let’s flag the good news: more tourists mean more people having the economic capacity to travel for leisure. More EU citizens taking advantage of the falling cost of travelling, flying on low-cost carriers and staying at short-term rentals. More tourists from so-called “emerging” economies, reaping the benefits of their economic development. With still 29% of EU citizens who can’t afford a one-week holiday every year, it is a positive trend! Those new tourists are not less worthy of enjoying the luxury of travel than we are.

Understanding the real issue: balance, not numbers

You find “overtourism” where there is an imbalance between the number of tourists flowing to a destination and its actual capacity to welcome them. This is why tourism policy experts prefer to talk about “unbalanced tourism”. So to determine whether such imbalance exists on its territory, destinations shall garner the right data, on both sides of the equation. On one hand, how many visitors are coming every day? How many flights are landing in surrounding airports? How many cruise ships are anchoring in its harbour? How many coaches are arriving every day? On the other, is the number of tourists brought through all those means compatible with the capacity of the destination? How many of those coaches can park in the city? How many accommodation beds are on offer? Can the utilities networks or environmental ecosystems cope with that many visitors? Does it lead to overcrowding, imbalance in the housing market or in the shopping offer?

Every destination needs a custom plan

Once this has been made, destinations need to design a tailor-made, holistic strategy to address the specific issues identified, with one goal: a better management of the tourism flows to correct the existing imbalances. Such a strategy shall be elaborated cooperatively by all stakeholders concerned, based on shared objectives. Building consensus may not always be easy as interests may conflict: the souvenirs shop owner, the STR host or the taxi driver may consider tourism much more positively than the pensioner struggling to find a spot on the beach or the parents struggling to find a family doctor. For most destinations and their residents (even those not directly employed in the sector), tourism remains a crucial source of income and driver of economic development which they have no desire to dismiss. The more vocal shall not be the only ones heard!

Managing tourism smartly

Sometimes, destinations will just increase their capacity (the offer), with new public and private investment: new infrastructure, new attractions, additional public services… But in many cases, they will need to manage demand as well, the tourists. It may be a matter of spreading out tourism flows over space, by directing them to less-known areas within the destination (although there is only one Eiffel tower in Paris). Sometimes it is a matter of spreading them out over time by addressing seasonality (although school holiday periods will always be favoured by families)

Finally, in some cases, you will need to aim at less rather than more tourists, moving away from a “growth mindset”. Many tools can be considered: authorisation schemes in natural parks, capping of accommodation offers, capping of the number of flights or cruise ships… There again, only a holistic approach can be effective, as demonstrated by Amsterdam recently: by limiting only the offer of short-term rentals while not looking at the overall accommodation offers, it has seen the number of tourists rising by 12% since 2019, while short-term rentals have decreased by 52% (and hotel fares more than doubling!).

Travel tech’s key role

What could be the role of our industry, travel tech, in addressing unbalanced tourism? By providing transparency to our customers! Tourists hate overcrowding as much as local inhabitants and they love authenticity as much as them! The more transparent information they get on their destination, the more they are likely to act upon it. This is our job! Thanks to first-hand information from travel services suppliers but also peer-reviews, our users can choose what is right for them.

We can also help destinations, by sharing data insights allowing them to build data-driven tourism policies. But data-sharing can be very tricky without the right interoperability framework. The recent STR Regulation is a perfect example of how a harmonisation push on data interoperability at EU level can empower destinations to design and implement data-driven targeted regulations.

A balanced future

All travel and tourism players are now doing their share to find the right spot for tourism, where it will continue to be the engine of local economic development without impacting unsustainably ecosystems and communities. We can find it, altogether!

This Op-Ed has been authored by: