Abstract
Overtourism problems, anti-tourist movements and negative externalities of tourism are popular research approaches and are key concepts to better understand the sustainable development of tourism destinations. In many of the overtourism narratives, Venice is considered to be one of the most relevant cases of overtourism and therefore has become a laboratory for studying the different conflicts that emerge when tourism numbers continue to grow and the quality of the tourism flow continues to decline. This article is therefore focusing on Venice and on one of the possible solutions to mitigate the negative impacts of tourism represented by the concept of a tourist carrying capacity (TCC) in an urban destination. The aim of this paper is to discuss alternative methodologies regarding the calculation of the TCC, and to apply a fuzzy instead of a ‘crisp’ linear programming model to determine the scenarios of a sustainable number of tourists in the cultural destination of Venice, looking for the optimal compromise between, on the one hand, the wish of maximizing the monetary gain by the local tourism sectors and, on the other, the desire to control the undesirable effects that tourism exerts on a destination by the local population. To solve the problems related to tourism statistics and data availability, some uncertainty in the parameters has been included using fuzzy numbers. The fuzziness in the model was introduced on the basis of questionnaires distributed among both tourists and residents. By applying the fuzzy linear programming model to the emblematic case of Venice, it was shown that this approach can indeed help destinations to understand the challenges of sustainable tourism development better, to evaluate the impact of alternative policies of overtourism on the sustainability of tourism, and hence, to help design a strategy to manage tourist flows more adequately
Highlights
The Italian city of Venice has become an emblematic example of a destination struggling with what is frequently called overtourism
According to the last formulation of the tourist carrying capacity (TCC) problem obtained at the end of the previous section (FTCC) in view of our Venice case study, the fuzzy parameter c1, c2, c3 we considered are: c1 = (190, 210, 230), c2 = (140, 160, 180), c3 = (45, 60, 80)
The simulations suggest that the optimum number of visitors to Venice per day is equal to 52,111 people, of which 15,500 are tourists sleeping in hotels, 22,000 are people sleeping in other forms of accommodation and 14,611 are day trippers
Summary
The Italian city of Venice has become an emblematic example of a destination struggling with what is frequently called overtourism. For example, Van der Borg [1], over the past 25 years, the number of arrivals of tourism has quadrupled. The number of day-trippers was estimated to be around 5 million in 1988. The number of excursionists is judged to amount to almost 22 million per year, almost five times as many as at the end of the 1980s. The quality of the visitors is considered to have changed dramatically. These changes are influenced by a number of fundamental developments in tourism, some of which have happened on a global level, others on a European or even an Italian level, such as:
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