AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
You can have too much of a good thing. I’ll never forget my dismay on returning to Florence decades after my first visit, to find the streets congealed with crowds and queues for entrance to everything from galleries to churches. It’s the kind of experience which made me vow not to return, unless in the depths of Winter.
Tourism is very big business, worth more than $1.4 trillion globally last year. For many places it offers life blood in income – witness the outcry from rural tourism interests here when the Aer Lingus work to rule threatened the flow of incoming overseas visitors. But in some tourist hotspots a welcome is no longer on the mat.
Last month locals in Barcelona, fed up with crowds and unaffordable rents, fired water pistols on tourists (maybe welcome given the heatwave) and waved placards telling them to go home. Welcome to Overtourism. It’s not tourism per se that is the problem, but the way that too many tourists end up in the same place at the same time so that the situation becomes unsustainable. Hyper tourism affects both locals impacted by high prices, quality of life and lack of affordable accommodation while the tourists’ experience can be ruined by overcrowding, transport, high prices and other problems.
According to a French study by satellite survey firm Murmuration, 80% of visitors home in on just 10% of tourist destinations. The impact gets critical for small places, like the scenic village of Hallstatt in Austria, where locals, fed up with 10,000 visitors a day descending on a population of 800, blocked visitor access. Pity the residents in Ile de Brehat, off the coast of Brittany with a population of 400, where they have limited visitors to a maximum of 4,700 at weekends or the Greek Island of Santorini where 11,000 cruise ship tourists descended on the island in one day last month.
When you get tourists complaining about too many tourists that’s overtourism, something we are seeing signs of here in Ireland according to Professor Jim Deegan, Economist and head of the National Centre for Tourism Policy at Limerick University. “We need to be careful about how we manage our resources, with overtourism very much a management and development issue.”
Professor Deegan cites the example of Dubrovnik, Croatia where capacity to bring in big cruise liners was developed, the logistics hadn’t been thought through and the city, now a top tourist hot spot, has become a victim of its own success and is seeking to limit tourism numbers.
“You have the tourism paradox where expert consultants are brought in to encourage people to come to x and, then if it’s a success, it’s going to be spoiled. It’s relative to the size of the population and, if locals are negatively impacted, it’s a problem. We need to question who the destination is being developed for, whether it is for locals or visitors or those who have property rights.”
Pricing is one way to control the problem and the obvious thing is to spread numbers out over the day or over the year or encourage people to go elsewhere, suggests Professor Deegan.
Kilkenny City is among the top visitor attractions in Ireland – are the numbers causing problems? I asked Kilkenny County Councillor Michael Delaney (FF) of the Village Shop Tullaroan, a combined convenience shop and pub serving meals on the scenic route between Kilkenny City and Cashel. “In Kilkenny we have a great tourism team who keep things moving,” he says. “The tourism problems that have come up in Kilkenny involve parking for tour buses, where passengers want them to stop as near as possible to attractions like Kilkenny Castle and accommodation, where three of the budget price hotels have closed down.
“The big hotels can charge what they want and you could go to Spain for their prices.”
My own suggestion to avoid overtourism? One way is to encourage travel companies, social media and advertising to promote different destinations to spread visitor numbers around. I have always enjoyed the roads less travelled and out of the way destinations.
But I am not going to tell you where I am going on holiday: the place might get spoiled if word gets out.
