The tourism free-for-all is over

28.10.2023 - 16:09 / insider.com

Picture it: After years of fantasizing and months of planning, you finally arrive at the destination you've always dreamed about. Except, it's just not how you pictured it.

You spend three hours in traffic just to pull into Yosemite National Park. The Venice Canal bridges are overrun with strangers scrambling for the same selfies. You can barely see Yellowstone's Old Faithful through the rows of people trying to get a good view. And beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris, you are dodging tour groups and cheap souvenir stalls.

Even worse than the demystifying effect huge crowds can have on the world's most beautiful places is the impact they can have on the people who actually live there — from smaller things like an inability to get into local restaurants to very big impacts, such as being priced out of their homes or unable to afford to live in the places they actually work.

With tourism quickly bouncing back from the pandemic lows, countries and cities worldwide are ramping up efforts to combat overtourism. Venice, Italy, announced this summer it will start charging day-trippers about $5 dollars to visit the city center. The Amsterdam City Council voted this year to ban cruise ships from docking in the city center. And Greece is now capping visitors to the Acropolis of Athens at 20,000 people per day, with additional hourly entry limits.

Although some of these measures are controversial and can make travel more inconvenient for tourists, experts in the industry say not only are they necessary, but it's likely just the beginning.

"At the end of the day, there's roughly 8 billion people on the planet. In the next 20 to 30 years, there's going to be another billion people on the planet. A lot of those people will travel. Where are they going to go? Well, the same places as everybody else," Alan Fyall, the Visit Orlando endowed chair of tourism marketing at the University of Central Florida's Rosen College of Hospitality Management who studies sustainable tourism, told Insider.

"There's a lot of people with sufficient money and time to travel, so it's not going to get any easier."

Tourism worldwide has steadily risen since the 1950s, a trend that's unlikely to slow down. "People now have more access to destinations than they had before," Andria Godfrey, a professor in hospitality and tourism at the University of Southern California, told Insider, adding there are more air routes than ever. "Destinations that before were more remote now have different ways that people are able to travel to them."

International travel especially has become more accessible. Godfrey noted that in some cases flying to Europe is not significantly more expensive than flying to destinations within the US. Americans are also more