Residents of Barcelona demonstrated against tourists in July, following similar protests in Venice earlier this year.
Recently, residents of the Greek island of Santorini were reportedly outraged by a Facebook post urging them to stay home and make room for the thousands of tourists expected to arrive during the peak holiday season.
These are symptoms of overtourism — when tourists exceed a destination's capacity, leaving residents angry and tourists unhappy. Local governments have proposed imposing tourist taxes and entrance fees to make tourism more expensive and thereby limit the number of people who visit.
Some tourism researchers urge people to vacation in rural or poorer countries instead to boost their economies. But overtourism exists in developing countries too. Here's what it looks like:
Travelling around an island bustling with tourists
Bali is the Indonesian archipelago's main tourist destination, accounting for nearly half of the country's international tourists.
Air travel is the most reliable form of transportation, but it is also a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, exacerbating the climate crisis and projected to disproportionately harm poorer countries like Indonesia. Around 15 million tourists will arrive in 2023, close to pre-pandemic levels in 2019.
Bali's tourism-dependent economy (which accounted for 61% of the region's GDP in 2019) was thrown into a near freeze by the impact of COVID-19. But for visitors who spent the lockdown in the cities, the pandemic has given Bali, and especially the island's rural areas, a new lease on life. Penglipuran, a traditional Balinese village in the central highlands, was attracting thousands of tourists every day in July.
Encouraging visits to poorer areas may penalize residents, whose experience will be different from that of people in Venice or Barcelona — wealthier European cities, after all, have better-maintained roads and public transport.
Despite its problems, car rentals are booming in Bali. Photo: Swuerfel / Shutterstock
With tourism steadily increasing, Bali's roads are becoming more congested every year. The vehicle-to-passenger ratio on the island is nearly one to one, but public transport usage remains low. Due to congestion, tourists were unable to get in or out of Bali's airport for six hours ahead of New Year's Eve 2023.
In rural Bali, hilly terrain, a tropical climate, and poor public transport force residents to rely on cars and motorbikes. The resulting noise and pollution degrade rural life. Converting these vehicles to run on electricity will not solve the problem entirely, nor will it ease road congestion, as most of Bali's electricity remains fossil fuel-based.
Tourists want a reliable means of transportation to visit many parts of Bali's countryside. With limited options, many rent cars or motorbikes, but weak traffic enforcement has led to rampant cheating, such as tourists driving without shirts or helmets or even licenses. The local government temporarily banned foreigners from renting motorbikes in March 2023.
Transport on the island is chaotic, but residents have found informal work ferrying tourists for decades, so efforts to ease congestion and chaos with plans for public transport and free shuttle bus services for tour groups have sparked local protests and the anger of car rental companies.
To go or not to go
Unchecked development squanders the mutual benefits that tourism brings to residents and tourists. Similarly, residents and tourists should not be banned from traveling, but should travel responsibly.
Crowds in Barcelona in October 2022. Photo: Mike Workman/Shutterstock via The Conversation
Plans for a rail link between Bali's airport and the island's most popular areas, Seminyak and Nusa Dua, could help ease road traffic in the city center. Local car rental companies could continue to operate in rural areas but would be limited to serving passengers on less-busy roads.
It is important to note that poorer destinations will be dependent on tourism in the long run, and the Bali government is at least exploring options in other sectors such as agriculture and the digital economy.
Poor destinations like Bali are less equipped than wealthier countries to manage the socio-economic and environmental costs of over-tourism, and ultimately, an expanding tourism sector bears the seeds of its own decline: declining environmental quality, dissatisfaction among residents, and ultimately, declining tourist numbers.
Rama Permana is a PhD candidate in Sustainable Tourism at Bournemouth University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
