The heavy summer travel season is once again heating up issues among residents in tourist-dense destinations, prompting protests across Europe and raising questions about how destinations can manage the increasingly pressing issue of overcrowding, from the Louvre Museum in Paris to Venice and beyond.
The World Travel & Tourism Council aims to initiate a new conversation by outlining steps that any destination can take to address its challenges creatively: the report is titled “Managing Destination Overcrowding: A Call to Action from the Travel & Tourism Private Sector.”
The travel industry is expected to grow in the near future. Providing actionable ways for destinations to combat overcrowding now and address the issues that overcrowding creates for residents (pollution, increased housing prices due to a lack of inventory, etc.), destinations can tackle the problem at home, ensuring tourists remain a welcome and integral part of the destination’s economy and cultural fabric.
The biggest encouragement from WTTC is that governments around the world, both municipal and federal, should reinvest tourism dollars into solving travel-related issues. Governments earn about $3.3 trillion from travel and tourism businesses each year.
“Travel & Tourism brings huge benefits including jobs, investment, and deeper cultural understanding. But growth needs to be managed carefully,” said Julia Simpson, WTTC President & CEO. “We’re encouraging all decision-makers to think ahead, work together, and focus on long-term benefits for residents and visitors alike. This isn’t about stopping tourism, it’s about making it work for everyone.”
Additionally, specific destinations can analyze their own issues and create action plans focusing on uniting stakeholders, creating a defined destination strategy for the future, gather data to diagnose the problems facing the destination; monitor the issues and stay proactive; reinvest in infrastructure both touristic and local, with transparency; and empower locals with a voice and help them understand how tourism could benefit their community.
The report states that while tourist taxes, which have become a popular way for destinations from Iceland to Hawai’i to combat the negative impact of overtourism, often fall short of solving the problem. First, they don’t actually reduce the number of people traveling to the destination.
Secondly, the report states that very few tourist tax dollars are being reinvested into supporting infrastructure or tourism: in the U.S., only 5 percent is being reinvested in tourism. Hawaii’s newest tourism tax is certainly heading in the right direction, as it directs funds to mitigate climate change and to enhance conservation.
While tourist taxes can be beneficial when they’re directly funding tourism or conservation initiatives, they’re not the overall solution to the overtourism crisis.
The report provides several real-life examples of how destinations are getting creative with plans to combat overtourism, from Iceland’s tourist tax going directly to help the environment (instead of funding other non-tourism-related projects) to the partnership between Dubrovnik and CLIA to better engage residents in tourism management.
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