If you recently visited Barcelona, Mallorca or Venice, you¡¯re a bad tourist who should have stayed home. At least that¡¯s what the anti-tourism protests this summer in certain parts of Europe would have you believe.
Already this year, 142 countries are projected to exceed their pre-pandemic tourism performance, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. (That¡¯s out of a total of 185 countries that the organization tracks.) In the next decade, tourism is predicted to grow into a $16 trillion industry that will generate 12.2% of global jobs. But the crowds and rising costs that come with it have locals in many cities feeling weary.
¡°It¡¯s not that tourism used to be a force for good and now has become a force for evil,¡± explains Ondrej Mitas, a senior lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Mitas, who specializes in overtourism, says news coverage often describes the phenomenon as a single, unmanageable issue. If you tease it apart into smaller component parts, he argues, it¡¯s easier to find solutions.
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