Overtourism is fake news. Here’s why (4/5).
💥 The fourth myth: overtourism creates an impression of permanence. Too many tourists harm the destination. In reality, it’s often about peaks: too many people in the same place at the same time.
👨🏼🎓 Groundbreaking research by my former PhD student Bart Neuts showed that perceptions of overcrowding are real and costly. Yet crowds are not always a problem. Think of a football match, a festival, or in Bruges the Procession of the Holy Blood: tens of thousands of people flock the streets, and yet the experience gains value rather than losing it. Why is this accepted in some contexts, but not in others?
⚠️ On a less philosophical level: locals themselves know the difference. In my Bruges interviews, residents pointed to seasonal peaks, and even agreed on which streets were problematic. Strikingly, these “red flag streets” overlapped exactly with the official “golden triangle” – the very zone policymakers had identified in the 1990s as the only area for tourism development.
➡️ By concentrating visitors into one designated area, policymakers hoped to protect the rest of the city. But an unwanted effect emerged: the chosen triangle became the tourism hotspot, attracting even more visitors and investment. This reinforced perceptions of overcrowding, which in turn made policymakers even more reluctant to spread tourism to other neighborhoods. The result? A downward spiral where concentration fuels pressure, fear blocks distribution, and the narrative of overtourism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
💰 If we recognize peaks as the real issue, solutions become clearer. Martin Soler is right: “the challenge is not demand, it’s distribution.” He suggests AI-based predictive models and smart visitor flows can help. Dynamic pricing could as well. But real redistribution requires investment in the entire tourism value chain – attractions, mobility, marketing – and creating viable offers in off-season or peripheral areas. That’s costly. How many destinations truly put their money where their mouth is?
😲 And yet, perhaps the persistence of “hot zones” tells us something deeper. People flock there because they are… beautiful. Could it be that our universal pursuit of beauty drives us to these places? And if so, shouldn’t urban planning and society at large pay more attention to aesthetics – so that beauty is not concentrated in a few sites, but woven into our daily environments?
Next up (5/5): the focus of overtourism on numbers made us forget it’s mostly about people.
