We are living in a Golden Age of Travel. One of the great benefits of living in our time is that the accessibility of travel has grown by leaps and bounds.
In 1950 only 1 percent of Americans traveled abroad. Transatlantic jet travel didn’t become available until 1959, and until the mid-1960s most people who traveled to Europe took a cruise ship that took four or five days to cross the Atlantic. Travel has become so much easier, and today 76 percent of Americans have traveled abroad.
How fortunate we are to live in this period, when there is a head-spinning variety of fantastic travel opportunities that are easy and affordable to a broad segment of the population. But, as with any good thing, there are drawbacks to the modern miracle of international travel. The worst of those is overtourism.
In today’s world, the most popular tourist attractions are at times so overcrowded that it detracts from the experience for everyone, the visitors themselves, local residents, and even the local vendors, who theoretically make more money the more customers they have. But sometimes even for them, the overcrowding is too much.
We are now beyond the time when you can just blindly walk up to a popular attraction and be sure you’re going to have a great experience. Overcrowding is an element that must be taken into consideration by everyone involved in travel planning. The phenomenon of overtourism is with us now, but it is possible to navigate around it.
There are two options for spreading out travelers. One is to spread them out spatially by introducing them to new destinations beyond the well-trodden tourist path.
Some city governments in major tourist cities such as Venice, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Dubrovnik have taken steps to try to redistribute travelers to ease the pressure of too many tourists in one place at one time.
Destination marketing organizations are working with tour operators to promote lesser-known attractions in their regions, to take travelers beyond the standard, most popular tourist attractions. It not only helps them avoid crowds, but also helps them to expand their horizons, exploring deeper into the country beyond the top tourist attractions. It is part of a cooperative effort among those in the tourism community to manage the evolving expansion of travelers’ horizons.
The second way to redistribute tourist traffic is to spread it around the calendar. That brings us to off-season travel….
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