Overtourism: From a Buzzword to a Scholarly Debate
The unpreceded growth of tourism in the last decades seems coupled with its negative effects, indeed popular destinations appear to be overrun by tourists beyond the capacity of the tourist areas or the willingness of residents to welcome visitors. The buzzword “overtourism” has attracted the attention of the media, the stakeholder, the residents and even of the tourists themselves. Koens et al. (2018) asserted the popular origin of the term and the lack of scientific grounds, concluding that already existing terms or alternative neutral terms could better support the actions to be undertaken when destinations are faced with extreme tourism pressure. Rooted in the overconsumption typical of our contemporary economies and embedded in the complexity emblematic of our industry, overtourism is not a new concept, but it is one worth of scientific attention. For the purpose of this study overtourism is defined as an excessive presence of tourists that carries negative socio-cultural and environmental consequences for residents, destinations and tourists.
The popularity of the term has been widely documented in the recent literature and addressing overtourism has become a priority for destinations and scholars alike (Capocchi et al. 2019a; Dodds and Butler 2019a, b; Milano et al. 2018, 2019a; Perkumienė and Pranskūnienė 2019). Replacing the extremely negative term “tourismphobia”, overtourism fuzzily describes the issues related to the overconsumption, overcrowding and overexploitation of tourism destinations or attractions. Goodwin (2017) emphasised the advantage of the term overtourism as a label immediately recognizable by tourists and residents and useful to express clear concerns with respect to excess of tourism. Environmental impacts to destinations have long been documented in the literature that dealt with the sustainability of tourism and destinations (Ap 1990; Lankford and Howard 1994; Clarke 1997; Gössling 2002; Dodds 2007; Buckley 2012). That the environment is extensively modified by tourism and for tourism is common knowledge. The negative impacts on natural and social environments and the frameworks for sustainable tourism were widely addressed in literature throughout several decades (Krippendorf 1987; Ap 1990; Lankford and Howard 1994; Clarke 1997; Dodds 2007; Buckley 2012, 2018a, b; Gössling 2002; Gössling and Hall 2006; Gössling and Peeters 2015; Butler 2018). Most authors addressing the issue of overtourism mildly refer to those contributions (Dodds and Butler 2019a, b) and other are attempting a stronger liaison (Oklevik et al. 2019) but much work in this direction is still needed. Overtourism has often been defined from the demand/supply perspective as a capacity problem—excess of demand or lack of capacity—focusing on carrying capacity and limits to growth. In other cases, the actions and behavior of tourists alarmed residents and media which lead to a stimatisation of tourists as destroyers of locals’ quality of life. The literature indeed recognizes that this catchy term has had the ability to bring tourism sustainability debates to the center of public discourse raising the level of pressure on destinations, thus enforcing public and private operators to face responsibilities, undertake corrective managerial actions and plan for tourism sustainability policies. Among the most used definitions of overtourism, the one by Goodwin (2017:1) labels the phenomenon as “destinations where hosts or guests, locals or visitors, feel that there are too many visitors and that the quality of life in the area or the quality of the experience has deteriorated unacceptably”. Goodwin’ definition (2017) focuses on both hosts and guests and their deteriorated daily life or tourism experience. Along the same line, the UNWTO (2018:3) defines overtourism as “the impact of tourism on a destination, or parts thereof, that excessively influences perceived quality of life of citizens and/or quality of visitor experiences in a negative way”; thus focusing on tourism excessive and negative influence on citizens’ perceived quality of life and on visitors’ perceived experiences. In their work, Milano et al. (2019a:1) focused on the negative effects of overcrowding on residents lifestyle and well-being, defining overtourism as “the excessive growth of visitors leading to overcrowding in areas where residents suffer the consequences of temporary and seasonal tourism peaks, which have enforced permanent changes to their lifestyles, access to amenities and general well-being”. Namberger et al. (2019:455) used the term overtourism to describe “the excess of tourism, which can be answered with the demand for limits to growth or degrowth”. As for Dodds and Butler (2019a), they took a more systematic approach in studying overtourism and while not proposing a new definition they noticed the constant presence of residents’ dissatisfaction in the overtourism definitions and debates. Similarly, Visentin and Bertocchi (2019:20) defined overtourism as “an occurrence of far too many visitors for a particular destination to absorb over a given period”, recognized that the quantification of overtourism is subjective and relative to each destination with respect to its number of residents, tourists and tourism businesses. While the number of tourists is certainly a significant factor in the definition of overtourism, a scrutiny of the literature offers a view that goes beyond the mere numbers, portraying improper behavior and actions undertaken by visitors that undermine the quality of life of residents and often undermine the experience of other tourists.
The debate is now fully documented with several case studies addressing different sizes and typologies of destinations and some authors discussing the possible managerial solutions to the problem (e.g. Seraphin et al. 2018; Becken and Simmons 2019; Goodwin 2019; Jamieson and Jamieson 2019; Oklevik et al. 2019). The tourism industry is also responding to the call for more balance but with varying effects: some destinations seem to struggle to identify ways to solve the problem despite the growing public debate, others are undertaking extreme actions and some—forced by the excessive visitors’ numbers—have decided to close to tourism attractions (Hess 2019; Dodds and Butler 2019c).
Overtourism Enablers and Impacts
Past literature describes and examines some of the most common enablers of overtourism (Dodds and Butler 2019a; Milano et al. 2019b). Most widely accepted facilitators of overtourism, and their consequences, can be grouped into three categories: (1) lack of a systematic approach to managing tourism destination flows; (2) disagreement on priorities from the stakeholders side; and (3) development of a new mobility coupled with technological progress.
The lack of a systematic approach to managing tourism destination flows has been documented in most case studies that deal with overtourism (Dodds and Butler 2019a). Destinations that can be reached with multiple transportation modes for example via land, sea and air are certainly more difficult to control and imposing a limit to the number of visitors that wish to arrive at the destination is an almost utopic objective for tourism management organisations. The reality of most destinations’ organizations is that even the simplest tourism statistics—arrivals and overnight stays—are known only afterwards and are often incomplete (Volo 2004, 2018; Aroca et al. 2013) thus preventive actions to limit overflows are therefore of limited scope. Destinations’ organizations should make better use of historical data and industry data and develop new tools to correct exisitng statistics (Volo 2018) in order to better estimate the flows, the seasonal peaks and related overcrowding periods. Furthermore, most destinations have failed in understanding that tourists are competing more and more with residents for the use of capacity within a destination. In some destinations, it is the imbalance between tourists and residents that exacerbates the sharing of the same space (Milano 2018; Milano et al. 2019b). Similarly, Dodds and Butler (2019a) pointed out at the competition for space—whether urban or rural—and for attractions, amenities and public and private services. The responses and perceptions of hosts have also been widely studied in tourism, but the discourse on overtourism brings back the need to develop alternative multi-dimensional approaches to understand the antagonism often displayed by some hosting communities (Sharpley 2018). Urban areas across the globe (Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Prague, Venice) seem to have been the first to raise the issue of overtourism with public evidence of anti-tourism protests (Dodds and Butler 2019a), yet the public management of overflow of tourists was known long before the effects of overtourism. Management in fragile destinations –small islands, heritage sites and naturally delicate areas—has also been debated long before the advent of overtourism. Islands for their natural geographical characteristics have long attracted the attention of scholars (Conlin and Baum 1995; Bardolet and Sheldon 2008; Volo and Giambalvo 2008; Scheyvens and Momsen 2008), ...