||| FROM CNN |||


Protests in the streets. Graffiti warning tourists to go home. Local populations dwindling as short-term rentals mushroom and price residents out.

It feels like this was the year that tourism turned nasty – and local communities started pushing back.

Venice has started charging daytrippers an entry fee, while one busy Swiss town has announced it wants to follow suit. Locals have staged protests in Mallorca and Barcelona.

And while it has come to a head in Europe, this is a global phenomenon. A Japanese town overlooking Mount Fuji erected view-blocking barriers in May (then removed them in August). Bali introduced a tourist entry tax for foreign visitors in February. And US national parks are full to bursting – with 13 million more visits in 2023 than in 2022, according to NPS numbers. In peak season, visitors must book ahead to enter.

Increased enthusiasm doesn’t seem to correlate with increased respect for the landscape, however. During the 35-day government shutdown in 2019, visitors did damage to Joshua National Park that would take centuries to rectify, officials said at the time.

The risk, as professor and environmental specialist Emily Wakild wrote for CNN in 2023, is of “loving a place to death.”

“This isn’t something new, or something which has just happened,” says Noel Josephides, chairman of European tour operator Sunvil.

Josephides thinks the current chaos was predictable years ago. He says he feels “ashamed” of what the industry has done to destinations.

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“I’ve lost faith in what our business is about,” he says about the havoc the tourism has wreaked in Europe.

Other veterans agree. The only question is whether we can emerge from it and reset travel to become the beautiful experience we’ve all known and treasured.

‘The industry forgot about local goodwill’

Overtourism to the same destinations and the same locations is making places such as Santorini a "living hell."

Justin Francis has spent his life feeling the uncomfortable effects of mass tourism.

He grew up in one of the UK’s most visited cities, Bath – which he remembers as being particularly popular with Americans when he was a child in the 1970s.

“I remember being astonished at these alien-like people, and how loud they were – shouting to each other,” he says.

“They stood around and blocked the way. I felt invisible.”

It was these early experiences that led Francis to found Responsible Travel – a tour operator working with small, locally owned properties and guides – in 2000.

“Tourism has gone right in many places, but broadly [the industry] has lost the trust of local people,” he says.

“It’s been really, really bad this year,” he says of the protests and overtourism incidents. It’s been brewing for a really long time – it didn’t take a lot of imagination or foresight [to predict].

“The tourism industry forgot about its most precious asset: the goodwill of locals. The edifice collapses without that. It’s been lost in many places and will be hard to win back.”

Francis puts it down to a combination of factors: the growth of low-cost airlines, vacation rentals, social media (which creates stampedes to “in” destinations) and expanding economies – meaning more people can afford to travel.

Now, he says, we’re left with the “stark realization that tourism is an aggressive industry like most others, and needs regulating and controlling.”

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