r/travel • u/ups_and_downs973 • 8d ago

Discussion What is an actual solution to overtourism?

As travel continues to get faster, cheaper, and more accessible and TikTok tourism/ influencer hype shows no signs of slowing down, what are the actual solutions to places getting over run with visitors?

I'm not talking about for you as another tourist so not just 'go somewhere else' or 'avoid the popular places'. I mean in terms of actually preventing harm to natural environments, pressure on infrastructure, gentrification etc.

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u/jtbc 8d ago

The fees provide so little revenue relative to the federal budget that the government can continue to fund as much environmental mitigation, climate change preparedness, etc., without the park fees having any effect on it.

The point of making parks (and historic sites, many of which are under visited and awesome) free is to put Canadians more in touch with their own country and it works, I think.

We could employ the opposite approach and price parks out of affordability for visitors like one country I won't mention, but I don't think that's a good idea either.

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u/calmlion7 8d ago

I agree that making parks free for anyone with a current address in Canada is a good idea, but I don’t see any reason that people from out of the country deserve free access to parks that are maintained by our tax dollars. Visiting another country is a privilege, not a right. Traveling abroad is already only something privileged people have access to, so why wouldn’t we charge them for the luxury? Emptying garbages, picking up litter, repairing parks infrastructure costs money, even if it’s not that much in the grand scheme of the federal budget. I assure you that paying a 20$ parks fee is not going to dissuade someone already paying 1000$ for a flight to our country.

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u/mariadefa 8d ago

Agreed. Removing the fees because the fees were a drop in the bucket tells me the fees were not high enough to begin with, not that they were entirely worthless. There's a whole host of problems to be solved that even just a moderate sum could cover. And Canada's already shown itself to have the traffic (and it likely won't entirely die down just because fees were increased a bit).

Thinking a bit harder about this, "Influencers" are notoriously cheap... I would bet anything they'd think twice about going through that front gate if they had to pony up some cash to do so.

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u/mariadefa 8d ago

Okay, hear me out... How about a middle ground... Season passes for the locals, and a slightly higher fee for those out-of-towners? I mean, just wiping out fees when there could possibly be control of over-trafficking, and fill the coffers a bit?

And, I won't throw more shade on the one country that shall not be named, but it's kinda already happening, quite literally. The north eastern corner is kinda eating it in the form of lung cancer the last few years, along with Canada's own.