The tourism free-for-all is over

• Tourism hotspots like Venice, Amsterdam, and Rome are pushing back against too many visitors.
• Tourism industry experts said it's just the beginning of efforts to manage overtourism.

Picture it: After years of fantasizing and months of planning, you finally arrive at the destination you've always dreamed about. Except, it's just not how you pictured it.

You spend three hours in traffic just to pull into Yosemite National Park. The Venice Canal bridges are overrun with strangers scrambling for the same selfies. You can barely see Yellowstone's Old Faithful through the rows of people trying to get a good view. And beneath the Eiffel Tower in Paris, you are dodging tour groups and cheap souvenir stalls.

Even worse than the demystifying effect huge crowds can have on the world's most beautiful places is the impact they can have on the people who actually live there — from smaller things like an inability to get into local restaurants to very big impacts, such as being priced out of their homes or unable to afford to live in the places they actually work.

With tourism quickly bouncing back from the pandemic lows, countries and cities worldwide are ramping up efforts to combat overtourism. Venice, Italy, announced this summer it will start charging day-trippers about $5 dollars to visit the city center. The Amsterdam City Council voted this year to ban cruise ships from docking in the city center. And Greece is now capping visitors to the Acropolis of Athens at 20,000 people per day, with additional hourly entry limits.

Although some of these measures are controversial and can make travel more inconvenient for tourists, experts in the industry say not only are they necessary, but it's likely just the beginning.

"At the end of the day, there's roughly 8 billion people on the planet. In the next 20 to 30 years, there's going to be another billion people on the planet. A lot of those people will travel. Where are they going to go? Well, the same places as everybody else," Alan Fyall, the Visit Orlando endowed chair of tourism marketing at the University of Central Florida's Rosen College of Hospitality Management who studies sustainable tourism, told Insider.

"There's a lot of people with sufficient money and time to travel, so it's not going to get any easier."

The main problem is everyone coming to the same place, at the same time

Tourism worldwide has steadily risen since the 1950s, a trend that's unlikely to slow down. "People now have more access to destinations than they had before," Andria Godfrey, a professor in hospitality and tourism at the University of Southern California, told Insider, adding there are more air routes than ever. "Destinations that before were more remote now have different ways that people are able to travel to them."

International travel especially has become more accessible. Godfrey noted that in some cases flying to Europe is not significantly more expensive than flying to destinations within the US. Americans are also more committed to travel than they were in the past. More and more Americans are prioritizing their discretionary spending on travel, while previously that money was going towards consumer goods. Even when there's economic uncertainty and Americans are focused on saving money, travel is one of the last things they're willing to give up.

"This is something that is probably not going to go away," she said of the rising demand for travel. "We're going to see more destinations having to deal with volume, timing of travel, types of travelers, and traveler behavior."

And it's not just that more people are traveling: they are also visiting different kinds of places. In the US, Godfrey said there's been a huge surge in travel related to the outdoors, especially after the pandemic. More Americans than ever are also traveling to Europe, which has been dealing with overtourism for years. Similar to the strain put on small, historic European cities that weren't built for millions of people, the infrastructure in the national parks is also not equipped to handle too many visitors.

The problem is not necessarily the volume of tourists at any given place, but the fact that they all come at once, and to the exact same locations.

"Instagram is really compounding the problem," Fyall said, explaining that social media is part of the reason so many people want to go to the exact same spot when they visit a destination. "Everybody wants to get that shot."

If destinations could succeed at simply spreading out the tourists — in regards to both the physical spots they are visiting and the time of year they come — it could go a long way in addressing the problems caused by overtourism.

"If you don't control the numbers at a certain time, you will ruin the resource so much that there won't be anything to go see," Fyall said. "That's the reality."

Visitor limits, fees and fines, and development controls are becoming more common

Amir Eylon, president and CEO of Longwoods International, a market research consultancy that specializes in the travel tourism industry, told Insider there are five primary ways destinations are addressing overtourism.

The first two are visitor caps, like what Greece has done at the Acropolis, and reservation systems, like at several US national parks, including Zion, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain. Caps and reservations are also common at more specific attractions, such as popular museums like the Louvre.

The third trend is destinations instituting taxes and fees, like Venice, or even fines. In Rome, for instance, officials vowed to charge tourists caught defacing the Coliseum, which comes with fines of €15,000, or $16,850, or even jail time.

And while fees and taxes may not be enough on their own to lower tourist numbers — is $5 really going to deter the average traveler from visiting Venice? — it can give that location more resources to improve infrastructure or invest in permanent community housing.

"People are going where they want to go," Eylon said. "If it is a quality experience with an aspirational destination, people are going to pay."

Another approach that doesn't involve directly limiting or charging tourists is development caps, which Eylon said are becoming more common, particularly in smaller destinations or resort towns that draw far more visitors than they are built to manage. In 2019, Asheville, North Carolina, instituted a one-year ban on any new hotel developments so the leaders of the town could assess the situation and develop policies for new hotel proposals. The ban was lifted over a year later, with new policies requiring hotel developments to meet certain standards or contribute to a permanent housing fund.

Lastly, there's how destinations market themselves. While for a long time, tourism marketing boards primarily encouraged visitors to come, some are now taking a different approach. Amsterdam, for instance, launched a campaign this year directed at tourists who only want to come to the city to party. The message? Stay away.

Other places have focused on encouraging tourists to behave better, such as Colorado's partnership with Leave No Trace, which is aimed at promoting responsible tourism.

Both the Netherlands and Colorado have also focused on promoting locations beyond their primary attractions — Amsterdam and Denver — to encourage tourists to explore other parts of the country and state.

"There's no one-size-fits-all solution," Eylon said, adding that what works for one community won't necessarily work for another.

Tourism is good for communities — until it's not

One of the biggest roadblocks to addressing overtourism is the fact that, in many ways, tourism is good for communities. In addition to the economic benefits, the things that make places great tourism destinations are often the same things that make them great places to work and live: a variety of restaurants, good infrastructure, great museums, and other attractions.

Surveys done by Eylon's company have found that most Americans believe the positives of tourism outweigh the negatives. Still, there's generally a line, and various stakeholders will have different opinions about how many visitors are too many. Eylon said it's becoming increasingly common and important for tourism boards to not only measure the economic benefits of tourism but to also measure resident sentiments about tourism levels.

Anna Abelson, an adjunct professor at New York University's Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality, said there are some clear indications of when overtourism has become a problem: too much noise, high levels of pollution, and just so many people in an area that it's difficult for locals to simply enjoy their day-to-day lives.

Residents of such locations will often make their displeasure known. In Barcelona, Spain, for instance, there have been massive protests against tourism, and a lot of residents have simply left the neighborhoods they had long lived in.

"They were leaving because certain neighborhoods lost authenticity. It was not really for locals anymore. It was mostly souvenir shops," Abelson said.

The challenge for tourism destinations now is to find the balance between promoting tourism in order to get the benefits of it, while being realistic about where to draw the line and listening to local residents about how they're being impacted.

While tourism management measures can pose an inconvenience to travelers or require them to plan more of their trips in advance, they are the only way to preserve the world's most treasured places.

"We want all generations to come to visit Venice," Abelson said. "But I'm not sure what state they're going to find Venice in when they go."

"To do nothing at this point is not an option."