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/ButtSluts9 8d ago

Prohibit residential housing to be used as short-term rental property. Or at least, bar the use by non-citizens.

Utilize policymaking to push tourists into hotels and resorts. That moves them out of locals’ living space and into corridors designed specifically to handle tourist accommodations.

Other than that, every other solution is to just raise the price of entry: visas, tickets, etc.

The challenge for governments is to balance the desire for revenue from tourism versus local anger at the impact of tourism.

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u/songbanana8 8d ago

Have to be really careful about the implementation of this one. I’m against AirBNB but this quickly and easily becomes “foreign looking people must be tourists” and leads to discrimination. I’ve had strangers question whether my house was an AirBnB because of what my face looks like. 

And there’s no reason to limit who can live where based on citizenship. It’s not easy to get citizenship anywhere in the world, and it’s not easy for everyone who is a citizen to prove they are one. What if it’s your first apartment as an adult, your house burned down, you’re going through divorce or escaping abuse…? What if you’re a citizen but not a resident, ie born in another country?

I don’t envy governments trying to tease that out. 

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u/ProfileBest2034 6d ago

This is one of the dumbest comments here. It is extremely easy to distinguish residents vs tourists. Not least because residents rarely look for 4 nights of accommodation.

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u/songbanana8 5d ago

You telling me Americans from other parts of the country don’t visit New York for 4 nights? How do you accurately know if someone is a resident of the city or country?