A 2016 travel fling to 41 World Heritage sites inspires admiration and respect for the renowned UNESCO-administered program, but also disappointment and frustration with a bureaucratic, underfunded system. Remedies exist, says Swen Lorenz, himself a World-Heritage-site veteran.
Salli Felton, CEO of The Travel Foundation in the U.K., shows how mass tourism can get out of hand. There’s a solution, she says: Measure success in terms of impacts, not arrivals. The tools for doing so already exist. But does the will to use them?
The upbeat theme for World Tourism Day – “One billion tourists, one billion opportunities” – does, however, raise questions of carrying capacity and quality of the travel experience. Places are getting crowded, as the late Yogi Berra understood. It’s time to move the emphasis from quantity to quality.
Facing congestion in Phuket, whether at the airport, on the roads or on beaches has long been a familiar phenomenon. What is different is that the congestion is mostly caused by the onslaught of mass tourism from Russia and China.
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