Overtourism was the buzzword of 2024. This summer looks to be just as crowded and chaotic

By Blane Bachelor, CNN

(CNN) — Higher visitor fees. Bans on cruise ships, new hotel construction and vacation rentals. Widespread protests, including highly publicized incidents in Barcelona when residents sprayed tourists with water pistols.

Throughout 2024, various efforts by tourism authorities — and frustrated locals — to curb the sheer number of visitors in the world’s most popular destinations continued to grab headlines. But as the demand for travel shows few signs of slowing, overtourism is poised to remain a critical challenge for visitors, residents and affected destinations, experts say.

“The whole industry needs to be a lot more proactive,” Paula Vlamings, chief impact officer of global nonprofit Tourism Cares, a pioneer in promoting sustainable tourism, tells CNN Travel. “‘How do we conduct business? How do we market these destinations, and how do we serve the local communities that are being impacted?’ All that really needs a sustainable strategy going into the future, because more and more people are coming through the floodgates and coming into these destinations.”

While some progress has been made — a growing desire among travelers to seek out lesser-known destinations, for example, and local governments recognizing the need for more robust planning — experts also warn there’s a long way to go.

In other words: Don’t expect crowds to disappear any time soon, especially in perennially popular European hubs like Paris, Barcelona and London — and especially during the summer high season.

“There are some positive things, perhaps, that have happened because of the crisis, if you want to call it that, last year,” says Audrey Scott, of Uncornered Market, a Berlin-based sustainable tourism consulting firm that she co-founded with her husband in 2007. “But I still think 2025, just because of the sheer demand, is going to be a year where many of these popular places are still going to face some of the same challenges for tourism.”

Plenty of regulations, still lots of tourists expected

Since the pandemic, travelers have been subjected to an ever-growing array of regulations, fees and other measures aimed at stemming the tourist tidal wave.

European cities including Venice and Amsterdam have introduced higher tourism taxes and banned cruise ships in their historic centers in recent years. Authorities of one overrun town in Japan, whose popularity has skyrocketed among tourists since it fully lifted its pandemic travel restrictions, erected a barrier in spring 2024 to prevent tourists from snapping selfies with Mount Fuji. Short-term rentals have come under fire, too, with tourism hotspots including New York and Barcelona implementing or announcing bans on Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms.

In summer 2024, tens of thousands of locals expressed their growing frustration in anti-tourism rallies and demonstrations across Europe, including Spain, the Netherlands and Greece. Critics contend that higher visitor numbers contribute to increased housing costs, community erosion and crowded public transportation, among other negative consequences.

Even so, the masses just keep coming. In 2024, Europe’s tourism numbers reached new heights, with foreign arrivals surpassing 2019 figures, with a year-on-year increase of 12% since 2023. Portugal, which also has struggled with overtourism challenges, saw a 26% increase in arrivals in 2024 — and its popularity shows no signs of waning, as the country continues to rank high on lists of best countries to visit.

There’s little reason to expect the tide to recede by summer 2025, which could shape up to be as chaotic and saturated as the 2024 season. In Spain, tourism was projected to grow by 5% in 2024 — that’s more than double the rate for the overall economy – with more than 90 million visits expected from overseas tourists.

Meanwhile, milestone year-long events in Amsterdam and Rome — the 750th anniversary and the Catholic Jubilee celebration, respectively — will undoubtedly bring more visitors to these already crowded capitals (a projected 35 million in Rome alone).

Tourism experts also note that tackling overtourism challenges is a complex, long-term process. “This is something that has been developing for years, and you can’t change the infrastructure in terms of more transportation, more water resources, more waste management, in the course of a year,” Scott says.

From destination marketing to destination management

As tourism organizations struggle with the seemingly paradoxical dilemma of attracting visitors and their money — which underpins many economies — while figuring out how to manage the resulting crowds, many are overhauling their strategies.

Perhaps most notable is the shift from a destination marketing approach — in other words, bringing in more tourists — to one focusing on destination management that balances the needs of the destination and its residents while creating a positive visitor experience.

According to travel industry news site Skift, many destination leaders have changed their acronym from DMO to DMMO to reflect their emerging role as a “destination marketing and management organization.”

Similarly, Barcelona — which, along with Amsterdam, Scott describes as a “poster child” for overtourism challenges — changed its tourism tagline in August 2024 from “Visit Barcelona” to “This is Barcelona.”

“It’s about asking, ‘How can our destination support these visitors that are coming, make sure they have a great time, and also do so in a way that’s not depleting our resources and it’s actually benefiting the place, the local community, not only economically, but also in terms of supporting local culture?’,” Scott explains. “And especially with the increased focus on sustainability, this management part is becoming more and more important.”

Many destinations also aim to better educate and inspire tourists both before and during their stay in order to create a more positive experience for travelers and residents. Perhaps the most brash recent example: Amsterdam’s so-called “stay away” online campaign, which it launched in spring 2023 and aimed directly at “wild,” hard-partying British males coming to the city in search of sex and drugs.

Copenhagen, meanwhile, opted for a more subtle approach with its CopenPay, a sustainability-inspired program offering tourists perks like discounted museum entry or a free coffee in exchange for taking the metro or traveling via bike.

Launched in the summer of 2024 as a pilot program, CopenPay will return in 2025, with many more businesses expressing interest in participating, according to the website.

Vlamings says this kind of cross-collaboration is a crucial component of effective, balanced strategies that benefit both tourists and destinations. She offers an analogy of a three-legged stool of “community, industry and government” — all of which “really have to start working more closely together, and they have. It’s been a very fragmented industry up until now, and I don’t think we have the luxury of doing that anymore.”

Advance planning and forecasting also are paramount, Scott says. “We work with a lot of emerging destinations, and the question we always ask [our clients] is, how many tourists are enough? And on top of that, what can you do now in preparation for that increased number?”

Sharing the love

While overtourism undoubtedly means serious challenges for destinations grappling with it firsthand, it can present lucrative opportunities, too. Some lesser-visited cities and regions are increasingly positioning themselves as “destination dupes,” a term popularized in 2023 by online booking giant Expedia that refers to alternate destinations easily accessible from popular hubs that offer their own distinct, authentic experience but with far fewer crowds. The concept grew into one of the most talked-about travel trends of 2024.

The Belgian city Antwerp, for example, has been gaining steam as a standalone destination for gastronomy, culture and fashion — with a fraction of the tourists in hotspots like Belgium’s Bruges and the Netherlands’ Amsterdam, which are both within about a 90-minute train ride.

In October, the city’s leading five-star hotel, Botanic Sanctuary Antwerp, housed in a UNESCO-protected 17th-century monastery, welcomed guests for a longer stay than they originally planned — thanks to crowds in Amsterdam, Sven Klockaerts, the hotel’s marketing and partnerships manager, tells CNN Travel.

Feeling overwhelmed in the Dutch capital, the guests, a US family with elementary school-aged children, stayed there only one night and opted to extend their time in Antwerp, changing their reservation at Botanic Sanctuary Antwerp to a full week and taking several day trips from the hotel, Klockaerts says. “They canceled their stay in Amsterdam and came earlier to us,” he explains. “We [as a hotel] see it as a huge compliment, and it’s also great for the city, that we become this little hidden gem for the US market.”

Tourism organizations are looking to disperse travelers, too. Take, for example, Destination Canada’s Tourism Corridor Strategy Program: Launched as a pilot in 2023 by the country’s national tourism marketing organization, the initiative created “travel corridors” designed to promote areas and regions beyond well-known coastal provinces home to popular cities like Montreal, Québec and Vancouver. In 2024, four additional corridors were added for a total of seven.

Small signs of progress

Although overtourism will continue to present major challenges for the foreseeable future, tourism experts and insiders say they’ve noticed improvement on several fronts.

Local and regional governments, for one, are dedicating more resources to tackling the problems. Scott says her clients are increasingly seeking strategies that focus as much on residents’ quality of life as bringing in tourists. As an example, she points to the mission statement that Uncornered Market helped develop for its client Destination Karakol, a town in eastern Kyrgyzstan: “to create a strong, vibrant tourism industry that makes Karakol a better place to live for local people.”

Nearly a decade later, the mission statement is still in place, Scott says: “It’s heartening that those values have continued to this day and are still guiding them.”

Across the globe, Lake Tahoe, which has been swamped with visitors since the pandemic, is already seeing a positive impact from the comprehensive Lake Tahoe Destination Stewardship Plan that it announced in June 2023, Andy Chapman, president and CEO of Travel North Tahoe Nevada, told CNN Travel in an email.

The 143-page plan, which was signed by “an unprecedented consortium” of tourism, land management and non-profit organizations, has helped spark a collective movement to make Tahoe a more sustainable destination for tourists and residents alike, Chapman said. To combat traffic congestion on the area’s two-lane roads, for example, solutions like vanpools and parking programs are “gaining traction,” and Chapman also noted “a high demand among property managers for newly developed behavior guidelines that help short-term renters understand what is required when they rent a home here.”

Next up for tourism leaders: implementing and improving methodologies for gathering data to track progress. “Overall, there is a groundswell taking shape,” Chapman said. “We see this and know that we are making progress. Now we need to find ways to actually measure it.”

At the traveler level

While tourism organizations and local governments are essential in establishing balanced tourism models, experts remind travelers that they, too, play a pivotal role in minimizing the negative consequences of overtourism.

That’s not to say they need to, for example, abandon a lifelong dream to see Rome’s Colosseum in person. However, tourists who make even small tweaks to how, when and where they travel can still fulfill their wanderlust without compounding the challenges of overtourism.

Visiting in the off-season, for one, often means fewer crowds and lower costs. In industry lingo, this relates to seasonality — in other words, a destination’s peak season, off-season and low season, the latter two of which many tourism organizations are nudging more travelers to consider.

“I do think that destinations have learned lessons from last year and are trying to proactively take measures to better disperse travelers, whether it’s to less visited places, less visited neighborhoods within a city, or incentivize them to go in the off-season,” Scott says.

Wherever — and whenever — tourists decide to go, and however crowded (or not) the destination may be, Vlamings says “there are opportunities to shift” — whether that means staying at a family-owned bed and breakfast or choosing a small, locally led tour. To that end, Tourism Cares launched in 2023 its Meaningful Travel Map, which helps travelers discover locally led lodging, tours and services in dozens of destinations around the world, including Hawaii, Thailand and Scotland, all newer additions.

“It’s not just taking people off the main path — it’s also when you’re on the main path, being conscious and intentional about where you spend your money and who you interact with,” Vlamings explains.

Finally, one of Scott’s favorite definitions of sustainable tourism — “tourism that makes the place better for local people to live,” she explains — can also serve as a helpful tool throughout every part of your journey.

She says, “Whether you’re a travel company or destination or even a traveler when making decisions, ask yourself: How does this make things better for the local people who live here?”

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