Overtourism Isn’t a Problem. Bad Tourism Is.

Every few months, a new city announces it’s “fighting overtourism.” Barcelona adds a tourist tax. Venice installs turnstiles. Amsterdam tells bachelor parties to go somewhere else. The headlines write themselves. The opinion pieces follow. And the conversation always lands in the same place: too many people are traveling, and someone should do something about it.

I find this framing lazy. And wrong.

The Myth of Too Many

Tokyo receives 15 million international visitors a year. The subway runs on time. The streets are clean. The temples are quiet. The restaurants are full but not overwhelmed. You can walk through Shibuya Crossing — the busiest pedestrian intersection on the planet — and feel exhilarated rather than crushed. Tokyo isn’t fighting overtourism. It’s managing tourism. There’s a difference so vast it might as well be a canyon.

Singapore. Dubai. Kyoto, even, which gets handwringing think pieces about geisha-district overcrowding despite handling its visitor load better than most European cities handle a Tuesday. These places prove something uncomfortable for the overtourism narrative: the issue isn’t volume. It’s infrastructure, policy, and political will.

When a city complains about too many tourists, what it’s really saying is: we didn’t plan for the tourists we invited. We marketed ourselves globally, courted cheap airlines, incentivized Airbnb, and then acted surprised when people showed up.

The Real Problem Has a Name

Bad tourism isn’t about numbers. It’s about behavior, systems, and the infrastructure — or absence of it — that shapes both.

A cruise ship docking in Dubrovnik deposits 5,000 people onto streets designed for 500. They have four hours. They buy nothing of value. They photograph everything. They leave. The city earns almost nothing from the visit and bears the entire cost. That’s not overtourism. That’s a bad business model that a city chose to accept.

A low-cost airline route opens to a small Greek island. Flights are cheap. Hotels spring up without planning permission. The beach gets a bar, then a club, then a foam party. The water table drops because twenty new hotels are running laundry. The residents who rented their homes now can’t afford to live there. That’s not overtourism. That’s a failure of governance dressed up as an inevitability.

It’s happening right now with an entire wave of beach destinations being “discovered” simultaneously — the same Instagram-driven land rush, the same infrastructure gap, the same surprised faces when paradise shows up on the overtourism list five years later.

An Instagram post goes viral showing a “hidden” waterfall in Bali. Within six months, the trail is eroded, there’s a parking lot where the rice field used to be, and someone has opened a smoothie stand at the base of the falls. That’s not overtourism. That’s a complete absence of site management combined with an algorithm that rewards discovery and has no mechanism for protection.

In every case, the problem isn’t that people wanted to go somewhere beautiful. The problem is that no one built systems to handle them when they did.

The Cities That Get It Right

Japan’s entire tourism strategy is built on distribution, not restriction. The “Visit Japan” campaigns actively promote secondary cities. Kanazawa, Takayama, Naoshima — places with world-class culture and a fraction of Kyoto’s crowds. The bullet train makes them easy to reach. The messaging is clear: there’s more to Japan than Tokyo and Kyoto. And it works. Visitors spread out because the infrastructure invites them to.

Bhutan charges a daily fee that’s high enough to fund conservation and low enough to attract serious travelers. The money goes directly to preservation and community development. It’s not a tourist tax — it’s a tourism model. The result: pristine landscapes, uncrowded temples, and a country that has never once complained about overtourism because it designed a system that prevents it.

Slovenia — a country that could have become another Croatia — made a deliberate choice to develop tourism slowly. Ljubljana is one of Europe’s most charming capitals, and you can still get a table for dinner without a reservation. Lake Bled is beautiful and busy in summer, but the crowds are managed by a network of trails and viewpoints that distribute visitors instead of funneling them to one spot. It didn’t happen by accident. It happened because someone decided it should.

Even within overwhelmed destinations, there are solutions hiding in plain sight. Timed entry at popular sites. Dynamic pricing that shifts demand to off-peak hours. Investment in public transit that connects tourists to neighborhoods beyond the center. Zoning laws that cap short-term rentals. None of this is revolutionary. Most of it is boring. Boring works.

Who Benefits From Blaming Tourists

The overtourism narrative is convenient for a lot of people.

For local politicians, it shifts blame from planning failures to visitors. It’s easier to say “there are too many tourists” than “we approved too many hotel permits and cut the public transit budget.”

For luxury travel brands, it validates exclusivity. If everywhere is “overrun,” then the $2,000-a-night resort that limits guests becomes not just expensive but necessary. Overtourism anxiety is, ironically, great for the high-end market.

For a certain kind of traveler — and I’ll include myself here — it feeds the fantasy of being different. We don’t overtourism. We discover. We find the real places. We’re not part of the problem. Except, of course, we are. Every “hidden gem” I’ve ever written about became slightly less hidden because I wrote about it. The desire to be separate from the crowd is just another form of tourism.

What I Actually Think

People should travel. More people, not fewer. Travel — the real kind, where you’re uncomfortable and confused and eating something you can’t identify — is one of the few things that reliably makes people less terrible. The impulse to see the world is not the problem. The systems we’ve built around that impulse are.

Cruise ships should pay what they actually cost. Airbnb should be regulated like the hotel industry it replaced. Viral destination marketing should come with infrastructure investment, not just a hashtag. Cities should fund public transit at tourist sites the same way they fund it at business districts. Fragile sites need managed access, not Instagram fame.

None of this is exciting. None of it goes viral. None of it makes for a compelling headline. But all of it works. And the places that have implemented these boring, unglamorous solutions aren’t complaining about overtourism. They’re too busy hosting visitors who feel welcome and leave the place better than they found it.

The question was never “are there too many tourists?” The question is: are you building a place worth visiting, or just a place that looks good in a post?

I know which version I’d book.

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