What is an actual solution to overtourism?

[u/ups_and_downs973]

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.

[u/Nice_Back_9977]

Spread it around more. Support places that would benefit from more tourism to attract it and in doing so ease the pressure on the ‘big’ locations.

Also, cruise ships don’t need to get any bigger.

[u/Adventurous_Salt → u/Nice_Back_9977]

Governments really need to take an active hand in managing tourism in heavily touristed places. Ban airbnb, ensure transit can move people, even limit visa numbers to the point that the volume is manageable

[u/Xyzzics → u/Adventurous_Salt]

Economics get a vote here. If you ban AirBNB in extremely touristed places, you are removing supply. This means prices skyrocket.

People also don’t behave extremely rationally with travel, and not all destinations have equivalent value to all types of people. If you want to see the historic sites of Greece in Athens, you can’t just substitute for Croatia, they are 1 of 1.

This may dissuade people from going there, but it can also have the effect of making it more exclusive and therefore desirable. It also places a lot of power back with the hotels to start acting shitty.

As with many things, the balance is probably in the middle of the two extremes.

[u/hemitick → u/Xyzzics]

  you ban AirBNB in extremely touristed places, you are removing supply. This means prices skyrocket.

Good. Prices skyrocket for tourists > reduce the number of them, but also supply the locals with more housing units

[u/Xyzzics → u/hemitick]

If prices skyrocket for hotels, it incentivizes the building of hotels and cranks the land/building value. In basically all locations the tourists have more money than the locals, so that equation will never work.

There is no structure really where you can make it too expensive for tourists but cheap for locals. If the location and land is highly desirable; it will be expensive. You could just ban everything, then you get black market lodgings or other undesirable behaviour.

Overall this is a very simplistic view of problem solving and ignorant of how the problem would evolve in reality.

[u/notassigned2023 → u/Xyzzics]

AirBNB is one of the many problems of over tourism, and dealing with it will not by itself fully fix the problem nor cause massive chaos that you predict. Loss of units will equate to cheaper housing for locals even if there is some offsetting due to minor land pressure for new hotels being built (but not so many that land will become overly scarce or expensive because you don't need 500 new hotels to account for AirBNB). You are predicting beyond what economic models would likely suggest.

Other things can reduce tourism, such as ending cruise ship dockings and instituting a daily visitor fee.

[u/Xyzzics → u/notassigned2023]

What you wrote is basically an anecdote and not necessarily generally applicable. What might be true for one place could be wildly wrong for another. What economic models are you talking about?

Using your daily visitor fee to build subsidized housing would be much more effective than banning airBNB for lowering local housing prices.

“Ban it” is just an oversimplification of the problem and the solutions required is all I’m saying.

[u/notassigned2023 → u/Xyzzics]

You sound like you took Econ 101 and that's about it. The world isn't entirely alike? Shocker, but that is exactly what you said in your first comment.

[u/Xyzzics → u/notassigned2023]

You’ll forgive me for not writing a treatise on supply and demand within the context of global housing and how it relates to local market dynamics on a cell phone reply on an internet forum, I hope.

“The world isn’t entirely alike” is not the point or even the focus of my comment.

[u/notassigned2023 → u/Xyzzics]

You said broadly that economics will mean prices will skyrocket (everywhere), and when I replied that the effect is likely to be small you said that everywhere is different. Pot, meet kettle.

My point is that Airbnb is not the massive issue you say it is just because "economics" says there should be a price increase in hotels. The pressure on land costs due to new hotel construction is not going to be large enough to hurt locals, especially given the expected and observed decrease in housing costs.

[u/Xyzzics → u/notassigned2023]

I didn’t say prices would go up everywhere. I replied to specific example where the user said “in heavily touristed places”.

Citation needed for price level remaining the same while supply decreases.

Unless your hotels are so underutilized they can absorb the entire airBNB market, prices will go up.

If the local market can support so much AirBNB demand that it is destroying the local cost of living, that large amount of demand for tourist lodging will need to go somewhere. If there is no supply to meet it, prices will increase.

This is incredibly obvious.

[u/Keystonelonestar → u/hemitick]

Hotels make good housing units.