🟧 Overtourism destinations

Can you avoid the summer crowds?

Santorini (source)

Kyle Chayka: At last count, three of my friends have been traveling in the Dolomites in the past month, per Instagram evidence. By NYT standards, that’s enough for a trend piece. A year ago, I had never heard mention of them as a millennial destination. Now I’m familiar enough with the spiky peaks and Scotland-esque green valleys that I can identify them on sight. Of course, the Italian alps have always been compelling to travelers and perhaps hut-to-hut hiking is a pastime appealing to thirtysomethings in my demographic. But the sudden fad is interesting to observe. Different places seem to become fashionable every year, at different points in the year, the same way there’s always a new hot clothing brand (Dolomites = Loewe, in this case). As in fashion, classics get revived for a new season. Just observe TikTok’s obsession with the French Riviera in 2023.

Overtourism is everywhere. Pick a popular place, and you can probably find an article about it. This month, NYT reported that it’s ruining Barcelona, sparking protests with locals shooting squirt guns at tourists. It’s plaguing Kyoto, where residents are harassing tour guides. Santorini in Greece is having the “worst season ever” per CNN because cruise ships of visitors abandon the city by nightfall and don’t spend enough money: It’s both too crowded and economically unfeasible. Venice, the original overtourism victim, has a new fee for visitors as if it were an amusement park ride. Icelandic geography is getting trampled. Lisbon restaurants are offering lower prices to actual Portuguese.

In Barcelona, the deputy mayor said this of tourism: “We have to understand that the demand is unstoppable. The only thing we can do is control the supply.” A fascinating statement: There is no end of people wanting to visit Barcelona, so they must stop some percentage of people from being able to visit Barcelona. The city government does this by raising tourism taxes and banning Airbnbs, theoretically limiting tourists to the available number of officially licensed hotels and rooms. Barcelona had Google Maps remove a public bus route running to Parc Güell so that tourists wouldn’t destroy its usefulness for locals. (If the tourists can’t see it on their phones, does it even exist for them?)

This all leads me to wonder: Is there any way to truly prevent a place that is remotely appealing from being overrun? A destination must resist fashionability. Overinvesting on an ephemeral surge of tourism makes it even less economically sustainable, because when the surge passes, the excess revenue runs out and jobs disappear. It’s possible to stay off the touristic grid but only so long as some TikToker doesn’t blow up your spot. Like an obscure Japanese ryokan or a rural Aman resort, a destination could also be so expensive as to be inaccessible. (No one is that mad if the tourists are all extremely wealthy.) The ultimate resistance to tourism might be ugliness. If your city is unappealing enough, no one will want to go there. But then it might conversely become appealing for that very fact? See ‘90s Berlin. Tourism has become value arbitrage: Invest in an undiscovered place early so you don’t have to go there when it’s overrun.

One solution as a traveler is to intentionally visit a place during its off-season. Everywhere has one, it just might not be as perfectly appealing as Marseilles in July. But geography isn’t a ripening fruit that’s only good at one moment. The world is large and almost any corner of it holds something interesting. One memorable experience of our trip through Provence for me was stopping at a generic highway rest area (aire de service) to charge our glitchy electric car and walking inside to successfully order an espresso to go from the cafe’s grumpy staff in my terrible French. I had as much fun there as at some of the wineries. I’m not likely to intentionally plan a tour of international rest areas, as opposed to the Dolomites, but I might actually really enjoy that. It would be so generic as to be unique.

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