Overtourism as Destination Risk

Impacts and Solutions

Anukrati Sharma, Azizul Hassan, Anukrati Sharma, Azizul Hassan

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839097089
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

The tourism industry provides a vital lifeline in helping to develop and enhance the economic growth of cities, states, and nations, but there is growing concern internationally about how overtourism in certain regions is having an adverse impact on a number of tourist destinations.
Overtourism as Destination Risk: Impacts and Solutions presents a range of researcher perspectives discussing current issues in the overtourism debate, including unplanned expansion and construction, environmental imbalance and damage, pollution and deforestation, as well as measures and possible solutions to tackle the problem of overtourism and its spread. This book specifically focuses on Coimbra in Portugal, Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Shimla in India.
This book foregrounds the tourist's responsibility to respect destinations and provides an in-depth assessment of possible risk factors and the conflicted role of the media and marketing organizations as image-makers of tourist destinations. This book is essential reading for academics and researchers from the fields of tourism studies, social sciences, environmental sciences, humanities and relevant disciplines.

Part 1
Introduction

Chapter 1

Contradiction on Delimiting and Limiting ‘Overtourism’

Samik Ray

Abstract

In the post-industrial society, demand escalation for travels and tours led to the mobility of travellers and tourists en masse from cross sections of the society and caused tourism's dramatic growth making enormous makeovers in the national income of many states. Tourism, then, could be perceived by travel mobility paradigm. Increasing tourist mobility contributed to the growth of overtourism phenomenon at different destinations. Overtourism sets to be in opposition to responsible and sustainable tourism. Contradictory approaches towards carrying capacity, commodification and commoditisation set overtourism to be positioned so. The way of establishing control on cultural, natural and spatial capitals overlooking hosts' traditional interests, priorities and intentions like destination's economic development and sustenance also made overtourism placed in contrary to the responsible tourism. Contradictions do exist between overtourism and its counter-reactions and within the reactions. Consumerism and control over host capital in the counter-practices continue differently but in contradicting manners with the same magnitude of profit progression. Instead of mass consumerism, elite consumerism appears turning the mobility of organised mass tour packages to the tailor-made alternative tour packages. The contradictions within paradigms of overtourism's nature, aspects, causes and consequences were thus likely. Contradictions also prevail between uncontrolled or limitless and controlled or within limit mobility and activity; goals and means; growth and effect; control of entrepreneurs on tourism capital and local community involvement, etc. It defines parallel subsistence or continuation of contradictory forces. The dialectical nature of history led to make a synthesis of the existing and newly emerging mobility phenomenon. This chapter will locate how control and decontrol or delimiting and limiting of overtourism co-exist in contradiction and reconcile the contradiction to synthesis.

Keywords Contradiction; control; mobility; narrative; overtourism; understanding

Introduction

In the preindustrial state, pilgrimage; wellness; leisure-recreation linked tour and travel was sociocultural status-driven. Well-planned travelling with family, friend, close associates and acclaimers was common (Ray, 2012). In the industrial society, the emerging nouveau riche with enough surplus income and time sanction became a conspicuous consumer of the organised tour or travel packages. Tour experiences to mountains, seaside and sites of cultural splendours or classical cultural legacy facilitated their upward social mobility. The eventual decline of the manufacturing economy after two world wars marked the emergence of the service economy. Thus the society entered into the post-industrial state. Leisure-recreation linked travel and tour spread at mass scale across the world involving people from cross sections, then. Mass consumerism emerged as a logical extension of the rapid increment of the tourist footfalls. Conversion of space, place, landscape and ethnocultural contents into a commodity was quite common, then. Demand-led quantification of the destination experience and transformation of reality into pseudo image were the most common consequences of mass consumerism.

Indeed, increasing tourist mobility turned to be the indicator of the destination's success in tourism as the growth in tourist footfalls at mass scale directed to enormous makeover in the economy of many places. Consequently, overtourism phenomenon emerged with overall socio-economic controls. It commodifies cultural, natural and spatial capitals of host destination overtly at increased scale ignoring hosts' traditional interests, priorities and intentions. Overtourism or ‘turismofobia’ (Martin, Guita Martinez, & Salinas Fernadez, 2018; Martins, 2018; Milano, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Milano, Novelli, & Cheer, 2019) is a recent phenomenon of tourism-leisure-recreation. This phenomenon rose into prominence in the late twentieth century, though its consequences were felt and observed only in the years of the present decade. It became global by the beginning of the twenty-first century, thus common to all markets. Almost all destinations, from wilderness to metro or mega-polis and well known to little known, perceive its consequences.

Approaches to Defining Overtourism

Overtourism as a term and notion has burgeoned in the recent academic and popular tourism literature and developed while reacting critically to the overgrowth of tourism at most destinations of the world (Koens, Postma, & Papp, 2018; Milano, 2017b, 2017c; Milano, Cheer, & Novelli, 2019; UNWTO, 2018). Most stakeholders of tourism correlate overtourism with overcrowding phenomenon or make overtourism and mass tourism perceptions synonymous. Indeed, crowding or overcrowding perception is a matter of individual's sensibility or perceived response to crowd density (Shelby & Heberlein, 1984) and arises out of lack in privacy feeling, unwanted interactions (Crothers, Kearns, & Lindsey, 1995; Gove & Hughes, 1980; Gray, 2001) and difficulty to access survival resources. Overcrowding could be spatial or spatio-temporal. It may be associated with over-population in a specific area creating pressure on resources with impacts over socio-economic goals (Johnston, Gregory, Pratt, & Watts, 2005). The influx of non-resident daily commuters or increase of tourist footfalls may also cause the overcrowding phenomenon. Thus crowding and overcrowding are not synonymous with overtourism. Mass tourism signifies the arrival of tourists by large groups or at a mass scale to a destination. One can make mass tourism responsible for overtourism when it disrupts the existing system with a negative environmental impact (Koens et al., 2018).

Overtourism is a complex (Koens et al., 2018) phenomenon. No complete, explicit or precise definition of overtourism is available. Many time practitioners and researchers link the overtourism phenomenon to the excessive growth by tourist numbers eventuating to unchecked increase in tourism (Zygmunt, 2019) and affecting the quality of the region (Perkumienė & Pranskūnienė, 2019). Associating this phenomenon with the tourist behaviour, the length of their stay, the volume of tourists and the type of tourism (Lindberg, McCool, & Stankey, 1997) is also common in researches. Indeed, excessive growth perception is subjective and thus varies from one destination to the other. Residents, hosts, tourism entrepreneurs and tourists define the overtourism phenomenon upon the consequential experience of the increase in visitor footfalls at a tourist destination. Primarily, residents experience the overtourism as disruptive changes in the qualitative deterioration of lifestyle, cultural authenticity (Peeters et al., 2018), access to amenities (Milano, Cheer, & Novelli, 2019) or survival resources. In the overtourism situation, the roads become congested with tourist vehicles; rent prices soar dramatically to accommodate holiday rentals; neighbourhood texture turns unknown; draining of vital resource for tourism development surfaces (Dekadt, 1979; Ogrody, 1982) and survival resources become expensive. Overtourism may also be felt as socio-psychological impacts over the residents like the development of irritation (Doxey, 1975) and annoyance against the pressures created due to increased tourist footfalls (McKinsey & Company & World Travel & Tourism Council, 2017; Peeters et al., 2018) and then alienation from the emerging social milieu. Tourists or visitors held the overtourism responsible for the degraded experience (Goodwin, 2017) at the visitation. They find that overtourism mobility makes the wildlife scared, overshadows the locals physically and culturally and bars the visitors from perceiving the authentic meaning of host culture, gazing at the monuments or landmarks well and hearing the lectures of the guide properly at the visitation. Thus both locals and tourists perceive overtourism as the cause of experience deterioration (UNWTO, 2018) and sometimes as the root of conflicts between tourists, locals and entrepreneurs over the use of destination resource. Doxey (1975) categorised the locals' reaction to the experience of increased tourist footfalls into four emotional stages, and antagonism between locals and tourists is the last of those stages. Most entrepreneurs are eager to gain the utmost out of tourism benefits optimising the volume growth. Only a handful of them notices that tourists overweigh the locals and the quality of their life in the overtourism situation (Intrepid, 2018) which is the result of an invasion of tourists (Russo, 2002). Recent studies relate overtourism to overburdened infrastructure, overloaded resources, damage over nature and degradation of tradition, culture and heritage (McKinsey & Company & World Travel & Tourism Council, 2017) and thus to the overall carrying capacity of the destination (Peeters et al., 2018). Attempts to interpret overtourism from the carrying capacity perspective, an inherent part of the sustainability concept, are quite common. Overtourism is, then, defined as a phenomenon or situation, emerged out of the effect of tourism activity that exceeds the carrying capacity limit triggering excessive exploitation of resources (Higgins-Desbiolles, Carnicelli, Krolikowski, Wijesinghe, & Boluk, 2019; Nelson, 2002); environmental capacity degradation (Pearce, 1981; UNWTO, 2018; Williams, 2009) and severe inconvenience to the locals (Butler, 2018). Indeed, ecological, physical, social, psychological and economic capacities together form the notion of environmental capacity. The majority of the tourism practitioners and academics agreed upon the fact that the pressure of very high tourist mobility causes overtourism while crossing the limits of acceptable change (Frauman & Banks, 2011; Lucas & Stankey, 1985), or the carrying capacity limit of the useable and available resources at a location. On the contrary, the disagreement over the determination of strategies to control the tourist flows makes the destination suffer from tourism success (Butler, 1980). Harold Goodwin (2017) describes overtourism as the antithesis of responsible tourism since overtourism, instead of making a place better to live and to visit, worsens the quality of local life and the quality of experience at the visitation.

Method

The chapter used the dialectical investigation method aiming to reveal the truth embedded within the notion and approaches of overtourism. The investigation explores all the possible ideas and counter-ideas, arguments and counters, attempts to discover the layers of reality opening a dialogue between contradictory ideas and arguments before reaching to a new understanding about tourism.

Contradictions

Conceptual Frame

Dmitri Karamazov reveals that contradictions in life ‘live together’ (Dostoevsky, 1912). Contradictions between conscious and preconscious mind and of opposite passions, paradoxical emotions and inconsistent approaches are quite common. It differentiates good and evil or noble and ignoble. Human life and mind are full of self-negation, then. As a result, actions are mostly self-negating. All phenomena of the world are in the unity of opposites thus are self-negating in approach, understanding and course of development. Each opposite manifests a specific understanding of reality. While one represents an understanding, the other will be the alternative or other facet of it, maybe alien to each other. If one of those opposites serves as a thesis, the other will then be an antithesis. When a phenomenon develops and occurs based on incompatible premises, approaches and courses, contradictions in the course of interaction between opposites are logical. While revealing reality, understandings stand in opposition interact, contradict and may come into conflict and struggle to negate each other and eventually give rise to a new phenomenon based on a newly developed premise and new understanding. A new reality emerges, then, contradicting both or either of the opposites or constructing fusion of opposites (Gadamer, 1989; Phillip & Loretta, 2011). Contradictions revive within the new phenomenon, again. Thus contradictions are there within each of those phenomena and between those.

Contradiction Perceived in Post-1950 Tourism Understanding

At the outset, post-1950 tourism rolled with two contradictory understandings linked to reality. One of those emerged out of a narrative developed to portray tourism as the smoke-free and successfully growing industry of post-1950. Its link with reality lay in the world's experience to understand tourism as the most critical driving force of smoke-free economic development and growth, formed at the behest of neo-capital developers. The sense of smoke-free industry may have a link with popular or familiar understanding, i.e., tourism is the only industry where tourists left only the footprints and took back the memories. The perception of success-story has a link to quantitative growth. Hence increase in tourist footfall, aggregate demand of touristic consumption, tourism's contribution to the GDP and the total investment in tourism infrastructure and services; tourism-related employment; economic welfare; income (Stroebel, 2015) and foreign exchange earnings became crucial in the success narrative. The post-1950 tourism features the mobility of new capital for the market across the earth. Norms of holiday experience and tourism-leisure-recreation business happened to be new capital-driven, specifically entrepreneurs' vested interest and expectation-driven. Entrepreneurs established their hegemony over the resources; market; product; tourist choice; profit share undisputedly to ensure business growth, then. They portrayed tourism as people and environment-friendly since it is smoke-free, cares about the leisure recreation of the people who are exhausted under work stress and develops the local economy generating job opportunities. Hence ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Contributors
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Psychology, Community and Environmental Issues Related to Overtourism
• Part 3 Possible Solutions to Stop Overtourism
• Part 4 Overtourism Case Studies
• Part 5 Future of Overtourism and the Post-Covid-19 Era
• Index