Asia-Pacific Tourism CEO Points to Bad Management — Not Overtourism — as Key Problem
Skift Take
Words as a means to define problems and trigger solutions are important. The label overtourism crystalizes a problem and serves as a call to action. We'd agree that a lack of capacity management is a big part of the problem, but the latter characterization hardly spurs the urgency the issue requires.
Is overtourism the big problem in destinations from Thailand to Bali where locals vie with tourists for elbow room in their own communities and have to deal with endless traffic jams and mounds of garbage?
Not so much, in the majority of cases, argued Mario Hardy, the CEO of the Pacific Asia Travel Association, who said the issue isn't too many tourists, but instead poor tourism management.
In an interview with Skift at the association's 2018 travel mart in Langkawi, Malaysia, Hardy said the problem mostly is "poor management of tourism product offerings." He prefers to identify the issue as "the disproportionate growth of tourism," or the challenge of tourism dispersal.
These don't exactly roll off the tongue.
To the communities being overrun with hordes of often-unruly vacationers, beer cans or selfie sticks in hand, the various labels, including overtourism or "the disproportionate growth of tourism" may be a distinction without much of a difference.
