Too Many People Want to Travel
Massive crowds are causing environmental degradation,
dangerous conditions, and the immiseration and pricing-out of locals.
JUN 4, 2019
Annie Lowrey
Staff writer at The Atlantic
Late in May, the Louvre closed. The museum’s workers walked
out, arguing that overcrowding at the home of the Mona Lisa and the Venus de
Milo had made the place dangerous and unmanageable. “The Louvre suffocates,”
the workers’ union said in a statement written in French, citing the “total
inadequacy” of the museum’s facilities to manage the high volume of visitors.
Half a world away, a conga line of mountaineers waited to
approach the summit of Mount Everest, queued up on a knife’s-edge ridge,
looking as if they had chosen to hit the DMV at lunchtime. A photograph of the
pileup went viral; nearly a dozen climbers died, with guides and survivors
arguing that overcrowding at the world’s highest peak was a primary cause, if
not the only one.
Such incidents are not isolated. Crowds of Instagrammers
caused a public-safety debacle during a California poppy super bloom. An
“extreme environmental crisis” fomented a “summer of action” against visitors
to the Spanish island of Mallorca. Barcelona and Venice and Reykjavik and
Dubrovnik, inundated. Beaches in Thailand and Mexico and the Philippines,
destroyed. Natural wonders from the Sierra Nevadas to the Andes, jeopardized.
Religious sites from Cambodia to India to Rome, damaged.
This phenomenon is known as overtourism, and like breakfast
margaritas on an all-inclusive cruise, it is suddenly everywhere. A confluence
of macroeconomic factors and changing business trends have led more tourists
crowding to popular destinations. That has led to environmental degradation,
dangerous conditions, and the immiseration and pricing-out of locals in many
places. And it has cities around the world asking one question: Is there
anything to be done about being too popular?
Locals have, of course, complained about tourists since time
immemorial, and the masses have disrespected, thronged, and vandalized wonders
natural and fabricated for as long as they have been visiting them. But tourism
as we know it was a much more limited affair until recent decades. Through the
early 19th century, travel for personal fulfillment was the provenance of
“wealthy nobles and educated professionals” only, people for whom it was a
“demonstrative expression of their social class, which communicated power,
status, money and leisure,” as one history of tourism notes. It was only in the
1840s that commercialized mass tourism developed, growing as the middle class
grew.
If tourism is a capitalist phenomenon, overtourism is its
demented late-capitalist cousin: selfie-stick deaths, all-you-can-eat ships
docking at historic ports, stag nights that end in property crimes, the
live-streaming of the ruination of fragile natural habitats, et cetera. There
are just too many people thronging popular destinations—30 million visitors a
year to Barcelona, population 1.6 million; 20 million visitors to Venice,
population 50,000. La Rambla and the Piazza San Marco fit only so many people,
and the summertime now seems like a test to find out just how many that is.
The root cause of this surge in tourism is macroeconomic.
The middle class is global now, and tens of millions of people have acquired
the means to travel over the past few decades. China is responsible for much of
this growth, with the number of overseas trips made by its citizens rising from
10.5 million in 2000 to an estimated 156 million last year. But it is not
solely responsible. International-tourist arrivals around the world have gone
from a little less than 70 million as of 1960 to 1.4 billion today: Mass
tourism, again, is a very new thing and a very big thing.
Business trends have also contributed to turning paradise to
paradise lost. Cruise vacations are vastly more popular than they once were,
with the diesel-belching vessels disgorging thousands of passengers at a time
onto port towns. Supercheap airlines using satellite airports have dramatically
cut the cost of hopscotching around Europe, the Americas, and Asia, encouraging
travelers to take 1 billion flights on budget airlines every year. And
platforms such as Airbnb have increased the supply of rentable rooms in cities
from Rio to Delhi, reducing search friction for travelers, boosting cities’
carrying capacity, and bumping up rents for existing residents—an estimated 4
percent in Barcelona, for instance.
Social media are at work, too, with apps such as Instagram
leading tourists to pitch over cliffs and clog vital roadways in search of the
perfect pic, and sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor making restaurants,
museums, and beaches discoverable and thus ruinable. Overtourism itself is a
media phenomenon as much as it is anything else. The word catapulted into
common use in 2017, with wall-to-wall coverage of the problems in Venice, Bali,
and elsewhere helping to drive the global backlash against tourists as well as
the backlash to the backlash.
As for the backlash to the backlash: Some concerns about
overtourism seem enormously overblown, and many local complaints about visitors
are shot through with classism and racism. The majority of tourist destinations
have no problem with the number of visitors they receive—would it even be
possible for Orlando or Vegas to be over-touristed, logistically or
spiritually? Travelers and their foreign direct investment remain a vital
lifeblood for tiny Italian towns and big American parks and thousands of places
in between. And while many sites are inarguably overcrowded, very few cities
and towns are; the problem is mostly one of beaches and blocks and buildings,
not of neighborhoods or regions.
There’s too much of a good thing in some of these spots, and
mayors and city councils are doing their part to take it away. A number of
places have implemented or expanded or proposed tourist taxes, among them
Amsterdam, Bali, Edinburgh, Ireland, Rome, and Venice. These levies on hotels
and day trips both reduce the number of visitors to a given place and provide
it with revenue to improve infrastructure and defray the damage that tourists
inevitably cause. Governments are also rolling out regulations, such as bans on
tour buses in Rome and gating-and-ticketing in Barcelona. Those kinds of
measures stand to become more important in the coming years, as the global
middle class gets bigger, social media more ubiquitous, and travel cheaper.
These phenomena inevitably mean more complaints from locals,
and more damage and lines and selfies and bad behavior. But they also mean more
cross-cultural exposure, more investment, more global connection, more
democratization of travel, and perhaps more awe and wonder. Even overtourism
has its upsides.
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