9.4 The Downsides of Traditional Tourism

The tourist industry faces a double-bind in that those places most revered by tourists also face the most risk of being harmed by the industry to such an extent that they cease to appeal to visitors. Venice, which has been a favored travel destination since the beginning of the Grand Tour in the late 1500s, has become so degraded by tourists that residents continue to flee the city and UNESCO has threatened to remove it from its list of World Heritage Sites. Once one of the world’s most desirable and luxurious destinations for wealthy travelers, Venice was a Renaissance jewel, appealing to visitors for its stunning architecture and artistic prowess; its remarkable engineering, which enabled it to flourish within an Adriatic lagoon; its value as a thriving center for trade and diplomacy; and its vibrant nightlife.

[FIGURE OF VENICE]

Fast-forward to 1951 and the population of Venice’s historic center reached its zenith at 175,000. By 2025, it had declined to 51,000. Citizens have fled the heart of Venice to escape tourists and the degradation of their city center. Many of those who remain stage protests to reclaim the heart of their city. According to a 2019 article in the journal Sustainability,

The growing friction between the local residents and the tourists is, from one side, the result of a diffused anti-tourism narrative and, from the other side, the result of uncontrolled and unplanned strategies implemented by local administrations, who are more devoted to the promotion and commodification of urban structures that increase the attractiveness of the destination than to devising new strategies to increase the well-being, social cohesion, and job possibilities for citizens. (Bertocchi & Visentin, 2019, p. 4)

Whereas Venice saw the rise of overtourism take place over many decades, Barcelona, Spain, experienced a rapid rise after the government spent $9.4 billion in preparation for hosting the 1992 Olympics. It went from a city marred by industrial decay into a model of urban revitalization. Today, however, the rise of tourism has left many residents deeply unhappy, as tourist demand for lodging has increased home rental prices throughout the city and the overall cost of living. Tourism has also fueled exploitation of the city’s most vulnerable workers who are paid unsustainable wages, increased pollution and environmental degradation, and eroded socio-cultural cohesion, diversity, and financial equity.

The harms caused by overtourism and mass tourism can prove so pervasive and degrading for a destination that one recent study argues that it might be defined, on one level,

as a regime, meaning a complex and deeply entrenched system that exerts control over urban landscapes, economies, and social dynamics in which tourism economics start to be the main source of income, transforming cities into perpetual holiday destinations. More specifically, the overtourism regime can be understood as a multifaceted and self-perpetuating system, that prioritizes economic growth through mass tourism and a visitor economy gradually replacing existing economic activities. (Milano et al., 2024, p. 1318)

Whereas cities such as Venice and Barcelona serve as dramatic examples of urban overtourism, rural areas with remote awe-inspiring settings have likewise suffered due to haphazard or poor tourism development planning. In Nepal, for example,

deforestation has resulted in the felling of thousands of trees for building tourism lodges and provision of hot water, heating and cooking fuelwood has resulted in a dramatic depletion of the country’s forest cover: one trekker consumes five to ten times more wood than a Nepali in a day and a single lodge may consume one hectare [around 2.5 acres] of virgin forest per year for running facilities. (Page & Connell, 2020, pp. 395–396)

One of the most dramatic settings in the world, Nepal’s Mt. Everest has suffered so much from tourism that it has been nicknamed “the world’s highest garbage dump.”

Known in Nepalese as Sagarmatha, or Peak of Heaven, and in Tibetan as Chomolungma (also spelled Qomolangma), or Goddess Mother of the World, Mt. Everest, one of the world’s most sublime vistas has become littered with debris. The lack of infrastructure to handle the vast amounts of waste created by visitors has plagued the region with many of the ills that befall small islands that are overrun by tourists—namely heaps of solid waste and dangerously polluted water. As a recent National Geographic article explains:

No one knows exactly how much waste is on the mountain, but it is in the tons. Litter is spilling out of glaciers, and camps are overflowing with piles of human waste. Climate change is causing snow and ice to melt, exposing even more garbage that has been covered for decades. All that waste is trashing the natural environment, and it poses a serious health risk to everyone who lives in the Everest watershed….

There are no waste management or sanitation facilities in the area, so garbage and sewage are emptied into big pits just outside of local villages, where they wash into waterways during the monsoon season. (National Geographic Society, 2025, paras. 6-7)

Like many decades-old tourist sites, Mt. Everest was not developed with sustainability in mind. Rather the local government and residents have had to work tirelessly in order to combat the harms caused by visitors. In 1998 local Sherpa peoples founded the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee (SPCC), which “manages 120 waste bins and collects 40–50 tons of waste each year from Everest Base Camp alone” (Bansal, 2024, para. 5). According to Tommy Gustafsson, the co-founder of Sagarmatha Next, a waste management educational center and museum, tourism at Mt. Everest generates between 200–250 tons of solid waste annually. Of the many organizations dedicated to cleaning up the waste, Sagarmatha Next offers visitors 1 kg. (2.2 lb.) packs for those willing to pick up litter and haul it down on their return, and Eco Everest Expeditions leads an annual trek devoted to debris removal, including solid waste, excrement, and the remains of deceased climbers.

[BEGIN ILLUSTRATION OF KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR SECTION 9.4]
Key Takeaway
Traditional mass tourism, often driven by economic growth without sustainable planning, has severely degraded famous urban and natural destinations like Venice, Barcelona, Mt. Everest, and Bali, leading to environmental destruction, social disruption, and declining quality of life for local communities.
Significance to Regenerative Tourism
The documented harms of overtourism underscore the urgent need for regenerative approaches that treat destinations as living ecosystems and prioritize ecological health, cultural preservation, and community wellbeing. Overtourism provides cautionary lessons that sustainable tourism must go beyond merely limiting damage to actively restoring and protecting ecosystems and local communities.
Significance to Tourism
Overtourism ultimately erodes the cultural and environmental assets that attract visitors, threatening long-term industry viability. To aid destinations that are overwhelmed and degraded by tourism and to prevent the harms of overtourism from spreading, tourism must shift from thinking of itself as an industry and begin to understand itself as part of a series of interdependent systems requiring responsible planning, local collaboration, and innovative solutions.
[END ILLUSTRATION OF KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR SECTION 9.4]

Countless examples of poorly conceptualized or haphazard tourism development plans exist. Coasts throughout the Mediterranean catering to mass market tourism have become so compromised that their capacity to draw visitors has been undermined. Bali has become so environmentally degraded that its beaches are strewn with plastic, its coastal waters are filled with sewage, its residents lack potable water, and its farmers do not have enough water to keep their crops alive. Each of the 6.3 million tourists to Bali in 2024 alone produced 3.74 lbs. of garbage a day, only a portion of which winds up in waste facilities. The remainder is strewn about the island, which Fodor’s listed as #1 in its places not to visit in 2025.

Whereas new tourism initiatives and destinations can develop strategies that take into account the many lessons learned from the environmental and social harms of mass tourism and poorly strategized or haphazard tourism development, many places that have been degraded due to tourism have begun to react by introducing creative solutions and interventions, such as the waste management experiential and educational museum Sagarmatha Next.

[Begin Illustration comparing Extractive and Ecocentric Tourism]
Feature
Extractive Tourism
Ecocentric Tourism
[End Illustration comparing Extractive and Ecocentric Tourism]

Attributions