Until fairly recently, tourism coverage in the daily papers was limited. It was limited to the travel supplements, which often ran stories about, for example, the 10 best spa hotels in the world. I never understood how anyone could know. When I queried this practice and pointed out how uncritical their reviews of destinations and tourism industry products are, many journalists respond that they rely on freebies. Indeed they do, but the motoring journalists don’t pay to hire the cars they write about either. And they are often very critical.
Overtourism came to the fore in the municipal election in Barcelona in 2015; over the nine years since, the issue has been talked about as a problem for hosts and guests around the world. Overtourism takes many forms and has multiple causes.
Definition: Overtourism describes 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.
As I write this a quick search in Google Scholar returns 22,700 results, a search on Google returns 2,200,000 hits, 403,000 in the first six months of this year. There are now lots of videos on YouTube.
Most of us have sat in traffic jams and complained about the traffic, forgetting that we are a part of the problem.
There is more and more coverage of the issue in the news pages of the popular press. Take a look yourself, and google overtourism news. We do not know much about the impact of this coverage on travel choices – but we ignore this press coverage at our peril.
