Travel Industry Leaders Say Overtourism Caused by Lack of Planning

With hype for the United Nation's international year of sustainable tourism for development in 2017 encouraging conversations with major travel brands, many leaders within the travel industry feel they're still not doing enough to address issues of overtourism and unsustainable impacts of travel around the world. Attendees of the World Travel & Tourism Council Global Summit in Bangkok this week were asked, "How well does the travel and tourism sector actively tackle the issues of mass tourism and its impact?" The result: more than 50 percent of respondents polled during a Summit session indicated that the industry "isn't doing very well" in addressing this issue. "Badly" garnered the second highest percentage of votes as many respondents were C-suite executives and key decision makers of some of the world's largest and most influential travel companies. Lack of planning by travel brands and government officials has been the biggest misstep in why sustainability and overtourism are increasingly dire concerns of the industry, said Alex Dichter, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company who is currently conducting research on tourism's impact on destinations. Some 1.8 billion people crossing international borders each year within the next decades won't be an issue, said Dichter. "The issue is that while tourists come from everywhere they don't go to everywhere," he said, speaking during the Summit on April 27. Cities such as Venice, for example, have front row seats to the problem. "In Venice, some days there are nearly twice as many tourists as residents," said Dichter. "Clearly in some places where there isn't an actual problem, there's a perceived problem. In Barcelona and Venice, locals are reacting quite aggressively to the influx of tourists.