Crowded beaches. Expensive rent. Tourist sites with wall to wall people.
When it comes to hypertourism, don’t blame the travelers, said Randy Durband, CEO of the World Council on Sustainable Tourism.
Rather, it’s a “lack of management,” he told “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday.
“I have been involved 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 management.”
From marketing to management
Destination marketing organizations “need to change the ‘M’ in DMO from marketing to management,” Durband told CNBC before the interview.
He added that this shift has begun, but is still in its infancy.
“This is the big wake-up call that the government needs to understand – tourism is a sector that needs to be managed,” he said. “There are ways to manipulate, to control, to add capacity … to deal with 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 raise awareness of what needs to be done at the government level.”
“Masters” of crowd control
But that is not the case for China, he said.
“The Chinese are masters at adding capacity and managing flows,” Durband said. He mentioned it Leshan Giant Buddha as an example.
“Everyone comes for the Buddha, but the municipal government has built a huge attraction next to it … that is dissipating visitors,” he said of the area that now includes a developed park and a grotto full of huge carved figures.
He said Chinese officials also set up a control center with video monitors monitoring visitors at various locations. Of the narrow stairs used to access the Buddha: “They know before the stairs get dangerously crowded,” he told CNBC Travel after the interview.
“I believe that many iconic heritage sites around the world where overcrowding is an issue would benefit from complementary and ideally pre-screening sites that prepare the visitor in such a way that they don’t feel compelled to linger. to the main attraction,” he said.
But, he said, all popular sites need technology to “monitor visitor flows.”
Management of tourist “flows”
He said the small French village of Saint Guilhem le Désert had changed the “flow” of travelers after someone in the town died of a heart attack and traffic prevented an ambulance from providing help.
Residents can drive into the village, Durband said, but visitors are directed to park in a designated area outside the village on weekends and during the summer and then bike, walk or take an electric bus to to reach the village.
The strategy can work even in a city like Barcelona, he said, which receives about 17 million visitors a year. Protesters marched in Barcelona on July 6 demanding the city reduce the number of tourists visiting.
Demand is not going to drop.
Randy Derbad
CEO of the World Council for Sustainable Tourism.
But the city is focused on “flow,” a spokesperson told CNBC Travel last week.
“The measure of the success of tourism in Barcelona cannot be focused on the volume of visitors, but on managing the flow of people so that a social and environmental limit is not crossed,” said the spokesperson of the Barcelona City Council.
Durband said managing visitor flows would be particularly difficult in Barcelona. Unlike other big cities, visitors tend to cluster in the same areas that residents prefer, which increases friction between the two groups, he said.
“Everyone wants to go to the same small area of the Old City, so dispersal would require a pretty substantial strategy to make that happen,” he said.
However, he said it is “absolutely” possible.
“Demand is not going to go down,” he said, citing the 8 billion people now inhabiting the planet and the growing middle class in the Asia-Pacific. “Therefore, capacity must be increased and management approaches to visitor diffusion must be dramatically improved.”