Overtourism: It’s not the tourists — it’s local ‘lack of management,’ says sustainability expert

Crowded beaches. Expensive rent. Tourist sites with wall-to-wall people.

When it comes to overtourism, don’t blame the travelers, said Randy Durband, CEO of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council.

Rather, it’s “lack of management,” he told “Squawk Box Asia” Monday.  

“I’ve been in travel and tourism for 40 years, working on committees and trade associations in Europe, North America and Asia,” he said. “Governments around the world traditionally just didn’t think they had a role in managing.”

Destination marketing organizations “must change the ‘M’ in DMO from marketing to management,” Durband told CNBC before the interview.

He added that this shift has started, but still in its infancy.

“This is the great awakening that needs to take place, that government needs to understand — tourism is a sector that needs management,” he said. “There are ways to manipulate, to control, to add capacity …  to tackle the problem.”

He pointed to several examples of places where this is already being done well.

“We see good management of protected areas and national parks,” he said. “But so much needs to be done just to create awareness that what needs to be done at the government level.”

But that isn’t true of China, he said.

“The Chinese are masters at adding capacity and managing flows,” Durband said. He cited the Leshan Giant Buddha as one example.

“Everyone comes for the Buddha, but the municipal government built an enormous attraction adjacent to it … that disperses the visitors,” he said of the area that now includes developed parkland and a cave full of enormous carved figures.

He said Chinese officials also created a control center with video screens that track visitors at various locations. Of the narrow staircases used to access the Buddha: “They know before the staircases are dangerously full,” he told CNBC Travel after the interview.

“I think that many iconic cultural heritage sites around the world, where over-crowding is an issue, would benefit from supplementary, and ideally preliminary sites to view, that prepare the visitor in such a way that they don’t feel compelled to linger at the main attraction,” he said.

But, he said, all popular sites need technology to “monitor visitor flows.”

Managing visitor flows is a strategy that is fast-gaining ground to mitigate overtourism. Rather than curbing tourism levels, the approach is premised on controlling the concentration of visitors — be it seasonally or within a given day.

While tourist strongholds like Walt Disney World have been employing this tactic for years, the concept is now catching on with local governments.

He said that the small French village of Saint Guilhem le Désert changed the “flow” of travelers after someone in the town died from a heart attack and traffic prevented an ambulance from rendering aid.

Residents can drive into the village, Durband said, but visitors are directed to park in a designated area outside of the village on weekends and during the summer, and then bicycle, walk or take an electric shuttle bus to reach the village.

The strategy can even work in a city like Barcelona, he said, which receives some 17 million visitors a year. Protestors marched through Barcelona on July 6 demanding that the city reduce the number of tourists who visit.  

But the city is focused on “flow,” a spokesperson told CNBC Travel last week.

“The measure of success of tourism in Barcelona cannot focus on the volume of visitors but rather on managing the flow of people so as not to exceed a social and environmental limit,” the Barcelona City Council spokesperson said.

Durband said managing visitor flows will be particularly difficult in Barcelona. Unlike other major cities, visitors tend to congregate in the same areas that residents prefer, which increases friction between the two groups, he said.  

“Everybody wants to go to the same small area of Old Town, so the dispersion would require a quite substantial strategy to make that happen,” he said.

Still, he said it’s “absolutely” possible.

“Demand is not going to go down,” he said, citing the 8 billion people that now inhabit the planet, and a growing middle class in Asia-Pacific. “So capacity needs to increase, and management approaches to disperse the visitor must improve dramatically.”