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Overtourism: How to be a responsible tourist - The Global Story podcast, BBC World Service
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Hello, I'm Lucy Hockings. From the BBC World Service, this is The Global Story.
2024 is expected to be a record-breaking year for tourism, with more travellers going on holiday
than ever before. Barcelona, Paris, Hawaii, or Bali, they're all beautiful destinations
that attract tourists from all over the world, but they are also struggling with overtourism.
Too many visitors in one place can have a negative impact on those who live there, and
it's also causing lasting environmental damage. So today we're asking how does this relentless
rise in global tourism impact the people who actually live in these sought-after locations?
And with me today is seasoned BBC TV travelogue presenter Rajan Datar. You
have been travelling now, I think Rajan, for 20 years or more, can I call you a lifelong roamer?
You could try calling me a lifelong roamer, I think I'd prefer to say, because roamer implies
that I'm just drifting, whereas I think I'm doing it for work, well I know I'm doing it for work.
Hello and welcome to The Travel Show from Bruges in Belgium.
This is Uzbekistan. Look at this, simply stunning.
So Raj, 2024 is going to be a huge year in tourism. The numbers are expected to be massive.
What kind of numbers are we talking about though? We are talking about $11.1 trillion contributed
to the global economy by tourism, according to the Tourism trade body, the World Travel and
Tourism Council. We're talking about an industry that is the third largest in the world. In total,
330 million people are employed in tourism and ultimately we're talking
about a billion and a half tourists. It's maybe markets that people aren't
expecting as well. I mean, India, China, they're travelling extensively as well,
saving up for these holidays of a lifetime. So the big change was in the early part of
this century when the Chinese started exploring the world, that has now been overtaken by the
Indian outbound market, which is incredible. We're talking about a population of 1.5 billion people,
so that if even 0.5 per cent of them travel or have the money to travel,
that is still a huge number of people coming into the market, adding to, by the way, adding
to what is already a huge market. Was there a moment on a particular
trip where you thought I'm becoming really concerned about overtourism?
Before the pandemic, tourism was reaching an all-time high then, and there were murmurings,
actually, and louder than that from certain destinations, that 'hang on,
we're being crushed here, we're being overwhelmed by the amount of tourists'.
But I thought the pandemic also meant that people weren't travelling as much.
Straight afterwards, they had what they call 'revenge tourism'. People,
actually quite a lot of people certainly in the West had saved up quite a lot of money during
Covid and they hadn't spent it on travel, they hadn't spent it on anything and there was this
real suppressed feeling of 'I need to get out', because for a lot of people tourism has become,
travel has become a virtual human right. What are some of the cities,
the destinations that you would say are being a bit crushed at the moment by too many people?
Barcelona is the one that I really had personal testimony of being there and seeing it change
and I went first before the Olympics. Since then it's been relentless. Local people,
and we did a story for The Travel Show that I work on,
we did a story about locals complaining quite a time ago, it could 10, 12, 15 years ago,
we did that story because it was brewing. There was a huge amount of resentment. The short-term
rentals were rising. In other words, they were more and more available for the holiday maker,
which pushed up prices, which marginalised... If you're a young local person living in
Barcelona, you can't find a place to rent? You can't find a place. And this is the
common thread, by the way. It's the edging out of local people.
Pricing out of locals. Pricing out precisely.
I mean there's been these big protests in the Balearic Islands recently that has sort
of dominated some of the headlines and really brought attention to this issue.
What are some of the challenges they're facing there? Because that's an industry where they
also need young people to work, they need waiting staff, they need bar tending staff. Absolutely.
People to work in the hotels. I think there was a story on the BBC
website not too long ago about for example a chef who worked in a local hotel or restaurant who was,
or is forced to sleep in his car. I call it feeling like extras in your own movie,
you know it's not, it's suddenly a city that you love or an area that you love
is completely taken over and obviously local customers get squashed because tourists want
their thing. They want what they're used to, a nice latte, food wise, probably,
you know, there's some demanding tastes from tourists and if they can afford it, guess what,
there'll be a restaurant for them there. It's sort of this notion of international
good taste, isn't it, that exists everywhere now, that can kind of muscle out things that are local.
What about Austria? You had, I know, an amazing trip to Hallstatt.
It's a little town, 800 residents. It's called a beautiful lake. I mean
it's picture postcard perfect. It's just beautiful. 800 residents and they
have it during peak season 10,000 guests a day. Only 20 per cent of people who live there actually
work in tourism there and so therefore they're not all directly benefiting. There's one particular
scenic spot where you can get such a perfect selfie with the lake in the background that
the locals or the mayor in fact tried to block it for a while. That policy, it's catching, that
policy was taken up on Mount Fuji not so long ago, where they did the same thing, they stopped people
from taking pictures of Mount Fuji from just in front of a convenience store because it was...
This is Fujikawaguchiko Very well said, yes.
Our correspondent Shaimaa Khalil actually went there.
You've probably seen this on your Instagram or TikTok. This is the famous Mount Fuji Lawson,
the social media money shot for millions of visitors, but it's not going to be around for
long. Residents here in Fujikawaguchiko are fed up with tourists behaving badly,
all to get the perfect shot of the convenience store with a snow-capped
volcano. As a desperate measure, the local authorities are building a barrier to block
the view. You can get a picture of Mount Fuji from many places but social media has become
a big pull for this particular spot. Well if I didn't have social media I
wouldn't come here I wouldn't even know that it existed this place.
So that's obviously been a big problem in Japan as well for people who live near Mount Fuji but
in Hallstatt, how much of the money made in Hallstatt goes back into the community?
Not very much money in some of these places stays in those places. The local authorities will say,
'yes, we're reinvesting money that we get from parking or whatever into local facilities and
resources', but actually a lot of it isn't. That's called leakage, by the way, where a
lot of the money that is made in these tourist centres actually doesn't stay within the economy.
Can I ask you about the environmental damage that is done to some of these places,
like somewhere like Bali? Yeah.
There's really big issues around water scarcity. In many destinations, water is a big issue. I
mean, I've talked to somebody who's in Kenya where quite often you'll get tourists in luxury hotels
pretty well competing with locals for water when there is scarcity. Guess who wins, the
luxury hotels. Local farmers in Kenya and in other places are very suspicious of tourism because it
actually can get in the way of them doing their job. And sometimes, like in Kenya, where you have
safari tourism, it actually means that some farmers were evicted from their own farms so
the land could be used for roaming animals. It's fair to say that there are some places
that are doing well. They have come up with some solutions and they're working.
There are two sides to this. One is what the local municipality does. The other
one is what we can do as individuals. So let's just start with what places can do.
So in Venice, for example, they have introduced this five euro admission fee.
It's not much five euro. It's not much five euro. And I
did talk to the deputy mayor in charge of tourism and he said 'well the point isn't actually this
at this stage to charge people and make money out of it and dissuade them'. It's more for them to
realise when the peak days are and when to avoid it. They're collecting data by doing this because
you have to actually go online and do this. And Raj, with that data that they're collecting
in Venice, is the idea they'll then encourage people to come midweek?
Exactly that. And it spreads the burden.
Not just midweek, but in what they call the shoulder season.
Exactly. So spring and autumn for
us in the West. And that is another way of trying to shift the weight of tourism. There is an issue
with that, which I feel that you're about to come to, which is school holidays. And that, obviously,
unless that changes, unless most of the West certainly stops having school holidays in July
and August, at about the same time, then we're always going to get that crush around that time.
What about the move to encourage people to go to similar destinations that are nearby?
We went to Slovenia, and we went to a place called Bohinj, and there, it's quite near Lake Bled,
which is near Ljubljana, which is coming there at the moment It's actually building up.
I mean we I went in April and there are quite heavy crowds there. So he's worried
about even if there's spillover from Lake Bled or even from places, other places,
that they're going to get crushed as well. So yes, you can definitely spread the love,
you can have dispersal, but it's not necessarily going to be the answer either if the next place
along also then suffers in the same way. And I guess Raj that climate change is
also having an impact on where people are choosing to go? Southern Europe at
the moment in the summer particularly is so hot. In Greece, in Greek islands as well, in Italy in
Rome and in other destinations you had people actually being evicted not evicted but being
evacuated from the islands that they were staying in, for example Rhodes, because of wildfires,
because of actual danger to people. People were, you know, the heat levels are getting horrendously
extreme, which means that people are now looking to do what's called 'cool-cationing', which means
they're going to more, to cooler northern climes, Slovenia is one example, northern Europe again.
And that is becoming more attractive. And this is not going to go away. This is climate change.
And so this is going to completely shift the map of where people will go in the future.
Raj, what kind of travellers do these cities want? Is it the sort of luxury traveller, the
high spending traveller, and they want backpackers to stay away? How does that kind of formula work?
Well, the mantra is high value, low volume, that's the big mantra in the tourism industry right now.
Now, what does that mean? I think they want it to mean yes, stays more than two or three nights.
Yes, maybe takes public transport to come in. Yes, eats locally. Yes, respects local culture.
I mean, you're describing quite a few backpackers here.
Yeah. Well, here's the thing. Interestingly, I talked to a professor of tourism quite recently,
and he said, 'you know what?' He did a whole survey, and I think it was in Cyprus. 'The
budget traveller, the backpacker, actually, in so many ways, make sure that there is less leakage,
the term I used before, that most of the money stays within the country and the local
economy because they will stay in cheaper places, they will take public transport,
they will stay longer and they will not use up the environment in such a way or
they will not destroy the environment in the way that sometimes a luxury traveller can do'.
Did quotas work? If you've got an attraction as opposed
to an actual destination then you can impose quotas much more easily. Yes, quotas can work
and they will be more and more common I think. I think going back to your thing about solutions,
raising prices on things, on attractions can probably be one technique. I mean there's
something that that makes me feel a bit bad about that because it means that people, you know...
It's not accessible for some people. Yeah, it's not accessible for people and so
it's outpriced. They're talking about 5,000 euro private tours of the Acropolis now. Now
great if you can afford it, but if you've come all the way from, I don't know, Japan wherever
and you're not on a huge budget and suddenly you realise you can't go there because of the crowds
and you haven't got 5,000 euros. I'm not sure if that's good.
Are we reaching peak tourism? There's no reason why it shouldn't
go up. The issue is more whether they start taking measures to limit the number of people travelling,
certainly to certain destinations. I think people anyway with selfie culture,
and we haven't really talked about that, but it's so important selfie culture that with that people,
especially young people, are looking to go to new places.
I was in Venice recently and the Rialto Bridge you had to queue for quite some
time. Do you think that the selfie culture, there can almost be an adverse reaction to
it as well? People are like the Rialto Bridge, 'I've seen that too many times'.
I think that's definitely the case. I think that's particularly true of younger travellers. They will
want something that's different to what their mates have done, you know you've seen one picture
of Rialto Bridge and the view and with you on it and so what, it's like people aren't going to be
massively impressed. It slightly reminds me of back in the day when I was a kid and they used
to have Super 8 movies where they would show you know 'guess what they went to Austria,
they went to the Alps and they went to...' and people have to crowd round and watch it. But then
travel was much much rarer, today If everyone's travelling, you've got to get the unique shot.
It's the bragging rights to something. It's the bragging rights, absolutely. I mean,
I went to Uzbekistan recently. I think that will become a big tourist place
soon because it's uncharted territory. It's somewhere where people haven't been before.
And this idea of dispersal that you've talked about, we might be looking at dispersal literally
from Western Europe all the way across to the Stans or to Central Europe and the Caucasus.
I can see that happening. Definitely, definitely, yep, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, yep, the
Stans, I mean, these places have got magnificent histories and culture and architecture. Yes,
go there, and they've got, I think, would love you to be there. The problem is, here's the problem,
suppose you've come from a long way away, you've spent ages saving up this money for this trip of
a lifetime. You're there for two weeks, you come to Europe, you've got a Schengen
visa maybe. Of course you're going to go to the Eiffel Tower. Of course you want to see
the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Of course you want to see Venice. And who are we to stop them?
And who are we to stop them? That brings me, I think, to our final thought. You and I have both
travelled a lot. It would be hypocritical of us to say, at any point, you know, you can't travel.
It is the most enriching, wonderful, amazing experience. It's managing it going forward,
that seems to be the big challenge. I'd be a hypocrite if I said to younger
people who haven't travelled much anywhere in the world or to people in emerging economies
who only now can afford to travel, 'look, don't travel because you're killing the world,
you're ruining the earth', how can I say that? I mean, even for me, Raj, I'm from the bottom
of the world, from New Zealand. We are raised to believe that you must go out and see the rest of
the world. It's part of growing up. It's part of living your life. It's a cultural expectation.
And I'm not going to deny that. It's absolutely true. It is fantastic. Travelling the world is
brilliant for all the obvious reasons. You grow as a person. It has so many different beneficial
effects on people, on culture, on relations between different cultures and, you know,
I wouldn't knock it. So I suppose what I would say is please travel, please travel. But just
watch how you travel, the way you travel. Just be slightly more conscious of the host community.
It's to have respect. Much more respect. You are a guest.
You're not entitled to this. You're a guest. But do travel. It is life changing. You just
don't meet anyone who wouldn't say 'it changed my life, my perspective, so many things from travel'.
And we both are some of the luckiest people on the planet.
Indeed. Raj, it's been great to have you. Thank you so much.
Great to be here with you, Lucy. Thank you very much for having me and good luck on your next
journey. And you know what to do now. I do. I'll have my checklist.
Thank you for watching. If you want more episodes of The Global Story,
you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode
and do let us know what you think about today's episode in the comments section below. Goodbye.
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