If you recently visited Barcelona, Mallorca or Venice, you’re a bad tourist who should have stayed home. At least that’s what the anti-tourism protests this summer in certain parts of Europe would have you believe.
Already this year, 142 countries are projected to exceed their pre-pandemic tourism performance, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. (That’s out of a total of 185 countries that the organization tracks.) In the next decade, tourism is predicted to grow into a $16 trillion industry that will generate 12.2% of global jobs. But the crowds and rising costs that come with it have locals in many cities feeling weary.
“It’s not that tourism used to be a force for good and now has become a force for evil,” explains Ondrej Mitas, a senior lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Mitas, who specializes in overtourism, says news coverage often describes the phenomenon as a single, unmanageable issue. If you tease it apart into smaller component parts, he argues, it’s easier to find solutions.
In his mind, overtourism is actually four separate problems. There’s the classic overcrowding of popular sites. Visitors disrespecting cultural norms—say, swinging selfie sticks or baring their shoulders in an Orthodox church—is another. Then you have the partiers who get indecent or destroy public property. Last is the most insidious prong of overtourism: when locals do not sufficiently benefit from tourism in their communities, due to unequal distribution of profits. That’s what most often leads to resident-level resistance, as seen in Spain this summer. “That’s a political problem,” says Mitas. “It’s much more difficult to solve.”
There’s reason for Mitas—and the rest of us travelers—to be optimistic.
Solutions for each of these issues are being tested in different destinations around the world, from Copenhagen to Thailand to Hawaii. Here are three such trailblazing initiatives, some new, some years in the making. Though they’re still relatively small, each has the potential to scale around the world—and impact an ever-growing share of travelers.
Redefining a Destination’s “Must-Sees”
In a 2021 experiment run by Mitas and his team at Breda University, 155 visitors to the Dutch province of Overijssel were given one of two digital planning tools to inspire their trips. One group was given an app with the traditional sights marked out, and another was set up with an AI concierge called Travel With Zoey, which recommended the least visited tourist attractions as must-sees, verified by a behind-the-scenes employee.
Travelers from both groups took the recommendations to heart, going to the places they were shown or told about, rather than forging their own paths. In surveys afterward, they showed equal satisfaction with their vacations. “People had an equally good time whether they went to the hot spots or not, and that is pretty important,” says Mitas.
The reality is that most destinations have lesser-visited points of interest that are ready and worthy of receiving more tourists. But as long as most travelers use the same sources to find inspiration—say, Alphabet Inc.’s Google Maps or TripAdvisor—they will be steered toward the same spots.
Of course, nothing prevents travelers from Googling their trips. But the study may convince tourist boards and travel agents that there’s good reason to stray from mainstream recommendations. “Whatever source reaches people with the least friction and makes the experience sound the most fun wins,” Mitas says.
Mitas and the Zoey team are now working with Amsterdam’s and Copenhagen’s tourism boards to re-create the experiment in overcrowded city centers. “We’re expecting that the outcomes will be relatively the same as in Overijssel,” says Rajneesh Badal, Zoey’s chief executive officer. If so, he says, “the next step for us will be to make this part of the toolkit for policymakers and destination management organizations.”
Spreading Tourism Revenue
For the past seven years, nonprofit organization Tourism Cares has been building a “meaningful tourism map,” filled with vetted providers of sustainable experiences around the world—think a weaving workshop with a women’s group in rural Jordan, birding with local conservationists in Colombia’s Otún Quimbaya Sanctuary or a woman-led history tour of Ponce, Puerto Rico.
So far, the map includes 321 impact partners in 22 countries around the world, though it’s primarily meant as a business-to-business tool for tour operators and travel agents who can create entire trips around the experiences and deliver a larger scale of bookings. To build its map, the organization is partnering directly with tourism boards, like those from Colombia and Thailand, which must each identify at least 10 responsible tourism enterprises that are ready to receive an influx of visitors.
The idea started in Jordan, which wanted to see tourism spread beyond Petra, its famed Unesco World Heritage Site; since then, companies such as Insight Vacations, Intrepid Travel and G Adventures have bolstered their itineraries with ceramics, cooking and weaving workshops—all driving business to rural co-ops in small communities such as Bani Hamida, 90 minutes south of Amman.
Among the project’s challenges is the fact that tourism boards aren’t always savvy about identifying local impact partners. But Tourism Cares CEO Greg Takehara says he’s seeing momentum, with a record number of destinations including Panama, Scotland, Ireland, Hawaii and San Luis Obispo adding some 200 impact partners in 2024.
Creating Behavioral Incentives
What does it take to get tourists to make sustainable choices? Copenhagen’s tourism board thinks fun freebies may do the trick. In July it started rewarding visitors for taking simple, climate-friendly actions through an innovative, monthlong pilot program in partnership with 20 local sites. Choosing to bike or take public transportation to a particular point of interest, for example, would get you a free museum tour, kayak rental or locally sourced veggie lunch. Anyone who brings plastic waste to the National Gallery of Denmark can join a complimentary workshop on upcycling it into an art piece. The pilot ended on August 11, and Visit Denmark expects to publish results later in the month.
In Hawaii, a similar campaign called Malama Hawaii has been encouraging visitors to engage with volunteer activities across the island since 2020. In the first quarter of 2024, the Hawaii Tourism Authority says nearly 20% of all visitors statewide participated in these activities, up from 16% in the first quarter of 2023.
The activities include everything from shore cleanups to propagating native plants and feeding animals on a farm sanctuary; since April they’ve been centralized on an online dashboard for easier access. Like Copenhagen, Hawaii is rewarding visitors for participation, offering discounts or free nights at participating hotels for taking part in select activities. Joining a beach cleanup with the Hawaii Land Trust, for example, can get you a free sixth night’s stay at the Grand Wailea on Maui, a Waldorf Astoria resort.
The trend continues to catch on. Take the latest example, in Vancouver Island. Pick up trash along the destination’s pearlescent beaches or Douglas fir-filled forests and bring it back to a designated collection point, and you’ll earn rewards that range from hotel discounts to a free pint of beer. It’s a small step in the right direction for an industry that is often slow to change.
