Madison Darbyshire, writing for Bloomberg:

We usually think of overtourism as crowds shoulder-to-shoulder inside the walls of Dubrovnik, or as a picture-snapping-swarm around the Mona Lisa. But it’s better defined as a feeling — the sense in local communities that they have been degraded rather than helped by mass tourism, causing them to turn against it. Traditional food vendors disappear, while grocery shops turn into trinket stalls or places where you can, inexplicably, have your iris photographed. Soulless gelaterias pop up, seemingly on every corner. TikTok can blow up a local trattoria overnight, attracting long lines of tourists while alienating local customers. A rise in buy-to-Airbnb can make an apartment building feel more like a hotel.

…One thing researchers agree on is that once overtourism and overcrowding have taken root in a city, it is very difficult to reverse course. Radical solutions like tracking, cutting the number of flights, raising costs for visas or even charging for entry might be the only answers. Still-higher fares are likely coming. Unless, of course, tourists change their behavior on their own.

The problem, as the report points out, is that everyone wants to go to the same places: “there is only one Paris and only one Venice.” And yet:

The current overcrowding is being caused by a relatively small number of humans. “Only 2 to 4% of the world’s population fly internationally in a year; most of humanity never does.”