How should undiscovered coastal destinations handle sustainable tourism? Learn tips from Jonathan Tourtellot’s interview with Urdaibai, a Basque magazine. Continue reading
Advice for a Basque Destination
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Overtourism, Airbnb, and the Numbers Problem
Yet another voice in the overtourism discussion, this time from an Airbnb report with a Foreword by Destination Stewardship Center director Jonathan Tourtellot. Also, a re-post of his National Geographic Voices blog on the topic. Continue reading
Controlling Overtourism Requires Destination Councils
At GSTC’s annual meeting, this year in Chile, hot topics included overtourism and the need for destination stewardship councils. Here, a set of recent news and comment on these topics. Continue reading
What To Do About Overcrowded Destinations
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? Continue reading
Two Billion Footprints: Good News Or Not?
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. Continue reading
New Tsunami Hits Phuket: Mass Tourism
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. Continue reading
Casinos: A Bad Bet
Any destination that’s flirting with gambling should heed the collapsing casinos of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and beware. Continue reading
Challenging Hit-and-Run Tourism in Cultural Heritage Sites
Cultural Heritage sites facing Hit-and-Run Tourism need to elaborate targeted strategies in order to balance tourism and heritage conservation, to define limits or find solutions in order to protect natural and cultural heritage and to mitigate negative impacts. In a … Continue reading
9 Tough Lessons from SE Europe
Managing tourists at popular World Heritage sites has long been a focus for Englebert Ruoss, who formerly headed up the UNESCO office in Venice and has now launched a sustainable-destinations initiative called Global Regions. Its new 164-pp publication is SUSTAINABLE … Continue reading
Cruise Numbers Overwhelm Small Ports
Carnival’s latest crises have relatively little impact on destination quality, but their circumstances do. At this writing, Carnival’s third embarrassing malfunction of the year is underway in St. Martin, where the Carnival Dream is stuck with a bad generator. The … Continue reading