👉 When a destination becomes so successful that its own popularity starts working against it.
📘 What is Overtourism?
Overtourism describes a situation where a destination receives such a high volume of visitors that its physical, social or environmental capacity is overwhelmed, creating negative effects for both residents and the tourist experience itself.
Key features:
- It isn’t simply about “lots of tourists”: it involves an imbalance between tourism demand and a destination’s carrying capacity (infrastructure, services, public space, housing).
- It tends to concentrate in certain periods of the year (peak season) or in very specific areas within a destination (historic centres, iconic beaches, cultural landmarks).
- It creates tension with the local population: rising housing costs, overloaded public transport, the disappearance of local shops, or deterioration of heritage sites.
- It also affects the tourist’s own experience, who faces queues, crowding, inflated prices and a lower perceived quality of the destination.
- It has led some destinations to introduce demand-management measures: tourist taxes, capacity limits, restrictions on short-term rentals, or seasonality campaigns.
For the hotel sector, overtourism isn’t just a reputational or social issue: it has direct implications for pricing, the relationship with the destination, and the medium-term sustainability of the business itself.
✅ Why does Overtourism matter?
- It shapes the destination’s reputation and, by extension, the brand of hotels operating there, especially with travellers increasingly sensitive to sustainability.
- It can lead to regulation that directly affects hotel business: tourist taxes, licence caps, restrictions on new openings or on short-term rental housing.
- It forces a rethink of pricing and segmentation strategy, in some cases prioritising higher-spend, lower-volume tourism over sheer mass volume.
- It drives seasonality-spreading strategies, distributing demand across the year to ease pressure on specific peaks.
- It’s directly linked to emerging trends such as coolcations or the rise of secondary destinations, which partly emerge as a response to saturation in traditional hotspots.
- It affects a hotel’s comp set, since saturation in one destination can push part of the demand towards alternative, less crowded areas or cities.
💡 Practical example
A hotel in the historic centre of a highly touristic city notices that, during summer months, street and access-point congestion is generating guest complaints about noise, queues to reach nearby landmarks, and general overcrowding in the area. At the same time, the local council announces an additional tourist tax and restrictions on new short-term rental licences in the neighbourhood.
Aware of overtourism’s impact on both the guest experience and the hotel’s online reputation, the Revenue Manager adjusts strategy: promoting shoulder season (spring and autumn) more heavily with attractive rates, prioritising higher-spend, longer-stay segments over single-day tourism, and paying particular attention to online reputation management against possible negative reviews linked to area-wide saturation.
🔄 Disambiguation
Overtourism vs Occupancy: Occupancy is a hotel-level metric measuring the percentage of rooms sold; overtourism is a destination-wide phenomenon that can occur even when hotels aren’t at maximum occupancy, if the saturation happens in public spaces or infrastructure.
Overtourism vs Coolcations: Coolcations are a destination-choice trend driven by climate; overtourism is a saturation problem affecting a destination, and the two sometimes feed into each other, since the search for cooler alternatives can also be a search for less crowded ones.
Overtourism vs Seasonality management: Seasonality management is a strategy for spreading demand across the year; overtourism is precisely one of the problems that strategy aims to mitigate, by reducing the concentration of visitors during peak-season spikes.
In summary: overtourism reflects the limits of a destination’s carrying capacity in the face of its own success, forcing hotels to rethink pricing, segmentation and their relationship with the destination in order to protect both the guest experience and the long-term sustainability of the business.
