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Overtourism is rarely about how many people visit a place in a year. It is about how many of them are standing on the same spot at the same hour, and a large share of that crowding is drawn by the travel industry’s own pen: identical tour times, identical stops, identical photos, identical check-in rules.
Some of the tools against it, like infrastructure, access rules and the land use fixed in a tourism master plan, rightly belong to public institutions. What interests me more, and makes my own industry a little uncomfortable, is how much we could change without anyone passing a single new rule, simply by spreading tour times, varying the stops, pricing quiet days differently and showing more than one view of a place.
When does a busy place become an overcrowded one?
It happens at the point where the number of visitors in a place, at a given moment, starts to damage both the visitor’s day and the daily life of the residents. The two tend to break together, which is why UN Tourism’s work on managing urban tourism growth looks at how residents perceive the visitors alongside how many of them arrive. When residents cannot park outside their homes, visitors are stuck in the same traffic. When the main street becomes impossible to walk, the shops serving locals start turning into souvenir stands, and the visitor who came to see a real place finds a stage set instead.
The industry’s word for the healthy side of this line is tourism carrying capacity, meaning how many people a place can host well at the same time. I like that small word “well” a great deal, because it moves the question away from how many bodies physically fit and towards how many can have a good day without making the place worse for those who stay behind.
Capacity is also not one number, and it shifts with the types of tourism a place receives as much as with the calendar. A city can welcome millions of visitors a year and feel comfortable, because they spread across neighborhoods, days and seasons, while a small coastal district feels overwhelmed by a fraction of that when everyone arrives on the same weekend and parks in the same lot. A valley where every jeep tour arrives at nine in the morning carries far fewer people comfortably at that hour than late in the afternoon. A historic bazaar on a cruise day and the same bazaar the day after are two different places.
Who draws the morning peak at a famous site?
Look at the visitor count of a popular site hour by hour and you almost never see a flat line. You see a sharp peak with long quiet stretches on either side, and very often we are the ones who drew it.
Group tours leave their hotels together because breakfast ends at the same time. Day tours are sold with the same itinerary because that is how they sold last year. Cruise excursions reach the nearest ancient site together because the ship docks in the morning and has to sail by evening. Sunrise viewpoints fill with minibuses because every hotel in the area offers the same early transfer. In historic old quarters on any coast, the main monuments see waves of groups that begin and end within the same few hours, and the cathedrals, mosques and temples that are also stops for religious tourism feel it most, since services and prayer times leave visitors a narrower window.
That is actually encouraging. A tour operator who moves one program from morning to afternoon reshapes the curve at a site without turning a single person away. A guide who starts on the quieter route and leaves the famous corner for later gives the group a better visit and takes pressure off the busiest point. At well run sites in many countries this already happens: groups enter through their own gate on tickets the agency bought in advance, and experienced guides plan the route around the crowded hours. It requires operators willing to be a little less alike, nothing more. UNESCO’s visitor management guidance for heritage sites treats the timing and spread of visits as choices someone makes, and in practice that someone is very often us.
The guide on the day needs room to make those choices too. When the entrance is jammed, a guide whose operating brief names an approved second route, says who can sign off a small extra cost and explains how guests will be told, can turn the group around in a minute; a guide with none of that waits in the queue with everyone else. Contracts with sites and transport can allow a slot to move without penalty. And if a company judges its staff only by how many departures ran, nobody has any reason to report that a program is spoiling the visit, so the queue simply returns next season.
Cruise days deserve a word of their own, because they produce the sharpest peaks of all. Several thousand passengers come down the gangway within the same hour, the excursion desks on board have sold them a handful of standard tours, and the local operators who run those tours send their coaches out in convoy. The ship’s timetable cannot move much, but the order of the stops can. If one operator starts at the ancient site while another starts at the old bazaar and a third goes to a village nearby first, the same passengers see the same places in a far calmer way, and the guides can actually tell their stories instead of shouting over the next group. It takes a short conversation between the local operators before the season, and a willingness on the excursion side to sell more than one version of the day.
Why does every program stop at the same viewpoint?
Space is the other dimension. Every destination has a handful of famous points that receive most of the visitors and a much wider area around them that receives very few. Next to the valley on every itinerary there is another valley; next to the beach on every poster there is a cove ten minutes away; next to the guidebook neighborhood there is one with the same streets and half the people.
Most of what we call overtourism is a scheduling problem the industry created and can partly undo, because the same programs, the same photos and the same check-in times send everyone to the same spot at the same hour.
Tour operators decide which stops go into a program. Guides decide where the free hour is spent. Reception desks decide what to recommend when a guest asks where to go tomorrow. The brochure in the lobby, the line in the booking confirmation, the map a DMC hands to an incentive group: each of them points people somewhere. Point them all at one spot and you get a queue; point them at three and you get a region. Incentive and congress groups are a particular opportunity here, since the DMC builds their whole free afternoon and can just as easily send forty people to a quiet neighborhood workshop as to the busiest square in the city. And spreading pays. When visitors reach the next village, a breakfast place there finds customers and a modest kind of food tourism starts where there was none, a family renting sunbeds in the cove has a season, and the shopkeeper in the second neighborhood sees new faces, while total spending in the area rises because people stay longer and stop in more places.
Spreading has its limits, though. A quieter place is not spare capacity waiting to be filled; a small workshop or a village square can be overwhelmed by a group that would vanish inside a large museum, so the second stop needs the agreement of the people who live and work there, a guide who knows it and a real reason to go. Recommending it also changes little while the booking system keeps selling the old program. If the quieter afternoon has no departure time, no guide and no transfer attached, it stays a line in a brochure.
Can a Wednesday price empty a Saturday road?
Partly, yes, and accommodation is one of the strongest levers precisely because it sits entirely in private hands.
A hotel that prices weekdays differently from weekends moves some of the weekend crowd into quieter days. A property that offers a one night package to people who would otherwise come and leave in a day turns a day visitor into an overnight guest, which means more spending for the same amount of traffic. Check-in and check-out times matter more than they look: when every bungalow around a lake asks guests to leave at the same hour and the next guests to arrive at the same hour, the single road in and out jams twice a day. Thermal hotels, whose wellness tourism guests are often free on weekdays, have shown for years how well a midweek package can sell. Restaurants have their own version, since taking weekend reservations instead of letting everyone queue at once stretches lunch over a longer window.
I can imagine some hoteliers thinking this is easy to say and hard to live with when the weekend is the only time they really earn. That is fair. Nobody is asking a business to give up its busiest days. A small Wednesday discount or a different check-in rule brings business that was not there before while making the weekend nicer for the guests who come anyway, so it is a sales decision long before it is an environmental one.
What do our own campaign photos send people to?
The best forecast of tomorrow’s crowding, better than any report on tourism trends, is today’s campaign imagery. Destinations, hotels and agencies keep showing the same few viewpoints, the same balloon sky, the same white terraces, the same corner of the old city. Influencer trips are organized to the same photo spots, and the content they produce sends the next wave of visitors there to take the identical picture.
I would not stop showing the famous places; they are famous for good reasons. I would show them beside the less known ones, put the second valley and the second neighborhood into the visual story, and stop presenting a whole region as a single image. Marketing teams in our business spend real energy hunting for a fresh angle on the same view. The same energy could find a fresh view.
The season meeting where residents get a say
Counters, booking data and surveys of residents’ attitudes toward tourism development tell you a lot, but the first person to notice that a place has reached its limit is usually someone who lives there. They see rents rising as flats turn into nightly lets for visitors and monthly ones for digital nomads, the corner grocery becoming a café, the street outside their door unwalkable on a Saturday, their own beach full in August.
In destinations that practice destination stewardship well, that voice reaches the table where the season is planned. Often it happens through the local tourism association, the traders’ association, a residents’ representative and a few hoteliers meeting before the season opens. They agree on where tour coaches will wait so they stay out of the market street, what time music comes down in the evening, which part of a beach stays free of sunbeds for local families. Some points go to the local authority as written requests; many are simply agreements among businesses, and they hold because the businesses themselves gain from a district that still likes its visitors. It is not idealism; a place whose residents turn against tourism loses the very life visitors came for. So when the next one of these meetings sits down, can the people around the table say, with their own counts and bookings in front of them, which hour of the day their district can no longer carry and which of their own programs fill it?