A Hundred People in One Alley

The word overtourism suggests a quantity problem: too many people, in a world that should have fewer of them travelling. Nearly every measured case is something narrower and more tractable. The visitors are not spread evenly across the country, the year, the week or the hour — they are concentrated into a few streets on a few days, and the concentration, not the total, is what breaks things.

The shape of the curve

Look at almost any celebrated destination and the same distribution appears. A large majority of visits fall inside a small minority of the territory. Peak-month arrivals routinely run several times the low-month figure. Within a day, the load on a viewpoint or a bridge can vary by an order of magnitude between nine in the morning and one in the afternoon.

And the afternoon peak is set by when the tour coaches and the cruise tenders arrive rather than by anything the visitors individually chose. That is the crux. The peaks are not the aggregate of independent preferences. They are produced by a handful of scheduling decisions — ship berthing times, coach itineraries, the opening hour of the one famous thing, the shape of the flight timetable, the departure time of the day trip from the nearest large city — made by a small number of operators.

A distribution set by twenty decisions can be changed by twenty decisions. That is not true of a total set by the travel intentions of well over a billion people, and it is why the framing matters rather than being a semantic preference.

A hundred people in one alley at eleven is a crisis. The same hundred spread over four hours and three streets is a good afternoon for the neighbourhood.

What actually works

Timed entry, applied to the specific chokepoint rather than the city. It is arguably the most effective intervention on record, and it works because it converts a queue into a schedule without reducing the total admitted — the site takes the same number of people and stops taking them all at once. Its cost is spontaneity, which is a real loss and one worth naming rather than waving away: a city you must book is a different kind of place from one you can wander into.

Pricing the peak rather than the visit. Higher fees at the busiest hours and months, lower ones outside them, at a differential large enough to move a decision. Almost every destination currently does the reverse by accident, offering off-season discounts too small to shift anyone and charging a flat rate at the moment demand is highest — which is, in market terms, choosing to be crowded.

And making the second-best thing reachable. Concentration persists where the alternative requires a car, an hour and prior knowledge. Where a regional train runs every twenty minutes to a town half as famous, the load spreads on its own without anybody being asked to behave differently. Transport policy is tourism policy, and it is the version that does not require persuading anyone.

What does not

Asking people to travel responsibly. Campaigns exhorting visitors to go elsewhere, visit in shoulder season or respect the neighbourhood have been run for years in several countries and have never demonstrably moved a measured distribution, because the individual decision is made against information and incentives that the campaign does not change. A poster does not compete with a flight price.

Caps on total arrivals, unless the cap binds at the chokepoint. A city-wide ceiling that still permits the same coach schedule reproduces the same alley at the same hour with slightly fewer people in it, and has meanwhile excluded somebody from a city on a Tuesday in November when it was empty.

And discouraging visitors in general, which tends to remove the independent, longer-staying, higher-spending traveller first — they have alternatives and are reading the coverage — while leaving the packaged day trip, which is booked further out and is less responsive to anything, entirely intact.

The part where we implicate ourselves

It is worth a travel magazine saying the obvious thing about its own position. Coverage concentrates attention by construction: a list of the ten best anything is a machine for producing a queue, and a photograph of an empty viewpoint is an invitation that guarantees it will not be empty. Every publication in this field has done this, including this one.

The defensible response is not to stop writing, which would simply move the attention elsewhere. It is to write about the fourth-best thing with the same seriousness as the first, to be specific about when as well as where, and to name the cost of a place rather than only its appeal. Whether we manage that is a fair thing to hold us to.