General Article Overtourism: the problem with too much travel

Topic Selected: Travel and Tourism Book Volume: 365
This article is 5 years old. Click here to view the latest articles for this topic.

By Caitlin Casey

In Paris, you’ll find a mass of queues to go up and down the Eiffel Tower; in London, don’t bother hitting up the London Eye unless you’ve booked; in New York, you’ll be barging people out the way to make it to the middle of Times Square. It’s no surprise that popular cities are a tourist’s haven, but places like Phuket and Venice which were once remote and rural have now become packed with picture-taking and souvenir selling just as bad. So, what is this ‘overtourism’, and how detrimental has our travelling become?

You may have heard the word flung about in news articles and it had a steep increase of interest on Google towards the end of 2017; ‘overtourism’ refers to saturated areas of the world where the influx of tourist crowds has become so bad that they disturb the local community and environment.

Many cities throughout 2018 have had to address the overcrowding with some form of limitation to the area. Take the romantic getaway of Venice for example, where the...

Would you like to see the rest of this article and all the other benefits that Issues Online can provide with?

Sign up now for an immediate no obligation FREE TRIAL and view the entire collection