Abstract
The term overtourism has generated considerable attention both in academic discourse and public debate. The actual or perceived impact of overtourism on destinations has significant ecological, social, and cultural consequences. However, a crucial question remains unanswered: What does overtourism do to a destination’s tourism industry itself? At the core of this question is whether overtourism is a self-limiting phenomenon or a cumulative one, and how precisely overtourism shapes patterns of quantitative or qualitative decline of a destination’s tourism sector. This article offers a conceptual discussion of the impact of overtourism on a destination’s local tourism sector by refining the latter stages of Butler’s tourist area lifecycle through forms of path decline known from evolutionary economic geography. By combining these two theorical approaches and refining the typology of path decline from evolutionary economic geography to the case of tourism under an overtourism scenario, this article suggests that, in the absence of exogenous changes due to policy interventions or public pressure, under an overtourism scenario, a destination’s tourism sector might contract, downgrade, dislocate, and eventually even disappear. Further research should focus on how to prevent these forms of path decline.
Highlights
Overtourism has become a widely known and debated term [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
By looking at the inner dynamics of the tourism sector in the absence of exterior impulses for change such as policy interventions or wider public pressure, the remainder of this paper focuses on Butler’s scenario of decline [28] (p. 9) and, more precisely, on forms of path decline as defined by Blažek et al [29], i.e., path contraction, path downgrading, path delocalization, and path disappearance, and discusses how these forms of path decline may be related to overtourism, understood as the consequences of tourism development exceeding a destination’s carrying capacity
If we assume that overtourism scenarios lead to societally and ecologically unsustainable forms of tourism further entrenching and reinforcing themselves according to some of the forms of path decline studied, the need for a destination’s tourism sector to upgrade or diversify towards a model that balances economic interests with wider societal and ecological ones [1] becomes even more pressing
Summary
Overtourism has become a widely known and debated term [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Despite the fuzziness of the concept [2] (p. 2), it is clear that the way tourism development has unfolded in recent years in (European) destinations such as Barcelona [3,7,11,12,13], Dubrovnik [4,14], or Venice [3,5,12,15,16] has become problematic. It is not yet understood how overtourism or, more precisely, excessive, unsustainable and/or undesirable forms of tourism affect the course of the evolution of a destination’s tourism sector, notwithstanding the wider aspects of social and environmental sustainability. This article attempts to do so by further refining the trajectories at the end of Butler’s tourist area lifecycle [28] and by drawing on forms of path decline recently identified in evolutionary economic geography [29], focusing these trajectories on problems prevalent in an overtourism scenario. The paper lays out some conclusions for tourism policy and destination management in affected destinations to prevent path decline, and sketches avenues for further research
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