The booming travel sector puts in-demand destinations in peril, according to a new report on overtourism from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC)."Some places capture a significant share of the travel and tourism pie, and may be threatened by their own popularity in environmental, social or aesthetic terms," said Gloria Guevara, WTTC's CEO. The report, "Coping with success: Managing overcrowding in tourism destinations", looks at ways that destinations can identify and prevent overcrowding as well as tools to control where it is already a problem. Noting that the UN World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) predicts that international tourist arrivals will grow to more than 1.8 billion by 2030, the report says that those arrivals are very concentrated in certain destinations.
"If travelers spread out evenly across the planet, this influx would be relatively easy to absorb," the report said. "Of course, that is not the case." It notes that France, the most visited country in the world, drew 82 million international arrivals in 2016, while neighboring Germany got less than half that, and Portugal a quarter. Tourism is also uneven within countries, with Paris welcoming triple the number of visitors per capita as the Champagne region.
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