Overtourism: Blessing or Burden?

Year 2021, Volume: 8 Issue: 1, 309 - 319, 15.06.2021

Yiğit Sebahattin Bozkurt , Onur İçöz

Abstract

Overtourism is relatively new concept and/or phenomenon in tourism literature and getting more importance as tourism is growing in especially traditional tourism destinations such as Amsterdam (Netherlands), Paris (France), Antalya (Turkey), Venice (Italy), London (UK) etc. The most obvious outcomes of overtourism are dramatically rising prices, decreases in service quality, longer queues, heavy pressure on carrying capacity, congestion, intensive traffic jam and so forth. Due to these undesired consequences of overtourism, most public authorities are trying to find solutions for their destinations including limiting the number of visitor or even prohibiting the visits for a while. Therefore, in order to find effective solutions, this phenomenon and potential reasons should be better understood by all the parties involved. For this reason, in this study, it has been tried to determine how the concept of overtourism is perceived by different layers of the society. In order to do this, a qualitative research was designed and a semi-structured interview was conducted as the data collection instrument consisting of 13 open-ended questions. The target groups were identified as previously selected from different occupations or professions. Interviews were conducted with a total of 54 people through face to face appointments or filling internet based questionnaires. A content analysis of the statements on the questionnaires was performed and the data were transformed into the codes. The major findings of the research revealed that there is a great consensus about what overtourism is and how important it is specifically in terms of its negative impacts on the society and environment. It is expected that this consensus among the participants will eventually contribute to public authorities to find effective solutions for overtourism.

Keywords

Overtourism, Sustainability, Content Analysis, Carrying Capacity

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