On Overtourism

By Tony Wheeler, Co-founder of Lonely Planet.

This is a pre-publication version of the Foreword in: Milano, C., Cheer, J. M., & Novelli, M. (Eds.). (2019). Overtourism: Excesses, discontents and measures in travel and tourism. Oxfordshire: CABI.

Please cite as: Wheeler, T. (2019). Foreword. In C. Milano, J.M. Cheer and M. Novelli, Overtourism: excesses, discontents and measures in travel and tourism, Oxfordshire: CABI, pp. xv - xvii.

Tourist crowds in Barcelona, Amsterdam or Venice, they’re postcard images which dramatically bring home the alarming reality of overtourism – but for me it’s two other images that really under- line the size and scope of the problem. One is of a place where the overtouristed tagline doesn’t take millions or even thousands to come true. Get up towards the top of Mt Everest and 10 people can be a serious crowd and yet today we’ve all seen photographs of a conga line of a hundred or more climbers edging their way towards the highest point on earth.

It’s not necessary, however, to go all the way to the Himalayas to see the everyday reality of overtourism. Any time I need a reminder of how big and how intractable this problem has become I can pull my smartphone out and hit the FlightRadar24 app button. There they are, every airliner in the world that’s in the air at the moment. Swap those little aircraft images for ants and we’d be living in one seriously overcrowded ants nest. It’s easy to see that the sheer numbers of passengers crammed into all those aircraft have to bring some sort of problems with them.

This book examines the Overtourism story from a host of interesting angles, a number of which emphasize that rapidly growing tourist numbers can bring far more problems than just crowds at the entry gates. The chapter on Palma, for example, illustrates how tourist demands skew the shopping possibilities, tourist needs are satisfied while everyday requirements are sidelined. The loss of accommodation possibilities is another growing secondary problem, it’s one thing when hotel projects for tourists override apartment construction for the local population, but when Airbnb reserves those apartments for higher paying short-term visitors it’s inevitable that local anger will escalate.

It’s easy to see overtourism’s problems focused on popular cities and fashionable resorts, but from the Galápagos Islands to the rainforests of Costa Rica it’s increasingly clear that the problem can find its way into the natural world as well. That Iceland and Greenland are both facing – or potentially facing – problems from rapidly expanding tourism underlines that it’s not just a warm climate problem. It’s remarkable how far those tourist tentacles can extend, the Rio de Janeiro chapter looks at how the slums, the favelas, of the Brazilian city have become tourist attractions. Slum tourism in Rio is far from unique, the Academy Award winning film Slumdog Millionaire has been accused of glamourizing the same urban theme park impulses in the Indian business capital Mumbai. Dark Tourism, the urge to visit disaster and atrocity zones from Chernobyl to Tuol Sleng has also become a tourist attraction.

So what to do about having too many tourists? Perhaps we can’t do anything at all? After all China has gone from absolutely nowhere to being the world’s largest tourist provider and when big spending Chinese tourists are lining up at the arrivals desk it’s nearly impossible to say no. But once they’re determined to drop in it is possible to put some effort into directing where they go. When I was involved with Lonely Planet one of the ideas we tried to push was persuading visitors to explore ‘two streets over.’

It’s remarkable how different the story can be just two blocks away from the main drag. That embodiment of international overtourism, Venice, is a fine example. The day trippers and cruise ship drop offs may be fighting their way into St Mark’s Square and potentially queuing up to go through the entry turnstiles to enter the city’s tourist-ground-zero, but only a few canals away intrepid visitors can stroll in to some religious masterpiece and discover they’re the only tourist admiring the medieval artwork.

Two towns away can also bring major changes for the better. One of the virtues of the LCCs, the Low Cost Carriers, those budget airlines which have turned all of Europe into a hunting ground or the next weekend escape, is that while they may have flooded the big ticket destinations with too many tourists, they’ve also opened the doors to numerous second, third or even further down the tiers destinations. There are places that simply had no tourists before, but are now gratefully enjoying their slice of the tourist dollars. I like to point towards the engagingly named, but utterly delightful, Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city and firmly in the shadow of the capital Sofia. It’s a European Capital of Culture in 2019 and deservedly so.

For every crowded metropolis there are probably a dozen places that would dearly love to be making a baby step up from undertourism.

Take India, it’s got a population 250 times that of New Zealand and barely attracts 2-1/2 times as many visitors. Away from the big attractions in India that undertourism is easy to see, I’ve lost track of how many places I’ve visited where I’ve had the distinct feeling I was the first overseas visitor that year.

Undertourism is equally easy to experience at countless Pacific Island destinations and lots of African countries’ tourist offices would love to be suffering at least a little taste of the problem. Of course from crumbling infrastructure to worrying safety concerns there are often very clear reasons why a destination remains securely parked in the undertouristed bracket. It’s remarkable how many countries that complain about their low visitor numbers also inflict an obstacle course of daunting visa regulations on their would-be visitors.

Over and over it’s wise to remind ourselves that many of the problems of overtourism can also be sheeted home to undermanagement. Too often local authorities simply don’t plan ahead or exert control when and where they should. Water shortages, traffic congestion, sewerage problems, electricity supply shortfalls are all problems that can be readily foreseen with an expanding population and if a region is enjoying the increased income flow from expanding tourism it’s completely down to bad management if the authorities don’t ensure that some of that growing income is directed to the problems that come with it.

Yet over and over again that’s exactly what happens, problems arrive with mounting tourist flows, but the rising income that growth brings isn’t directed to solving them. Even worse the money may come in locally, but too often that cashflow is funneled away to some capital city head office, much of it quite possibly disappearing into assorted politicians’ pockets en route.

I’ve seen this failure to think locally and act locally far too often, most recently around the beautiful Komodo Islands in Indonesia. Every visitor to the islands pays a daily National Park visitor charge and remarkably little of it seems to be used locally, the ‘money goes straight to Jakarta,’ the Indonesian capital, one local operator suggested. Indonesian beaches and islands suffer major problems from plastic pollution, from the local population, not from tourists I hasten to add. It would be an easy plan to direct some of that tourist money to cleaning up the beaches and there’s plenty of local labour available to do exactly that. It doesn’t happen.

Authorities do have power despite their denials. There are reports of Caribbean cruise operators menacing their island destinations to ‘keep the costs down or we’ll send our ships to another port, we can choose where we dock.’ In which case the opposite rule can also apply, if Barcelona or Venice feel they are overwhelmed by mega-cruise ships there’s an easy way to persuade them to go elsewhere, charge them more.

Finally remember that time worn truism that what goes up can equally easily come down. As Yogi Berra, that baseball star and cultural icon, wisely put it:

‘Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded’, with many destinations potentially entering into this territory.

Bio - Tony Wheeler: https://tonywheeler.com.au

A trek along Asia's 'hippie trail' in 1972 led to Tony and Maureen Wheeler creating travel publisher Lonely Planet, and to the New York Times describing him as 'the trailblazing patron saint of the world's backpackers and adventure travelers'. Wheeler has been involved with the Planet Wheeler Foundation's work on more than fifty projects in the developing world and the establishment of Melbourne's Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas. Melbourne University Press (MUP) published Tony’s latest book On Travel in 2018. His next book, Islands of Australia (National Library of Australia) will be published in 2019. His enthusiasm for trekking the globe is contagious: it is impossible to read On Travel without scouring for deals, searching for unusual places, and deciding to leave the luggage behind in an escape to the unfamiliar.