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.