His answer still resonates with me today. Simply, he said: “No one told me to stop”.
It’s a memory I was reminded of last week amid discussions about overtourism at last week’s World Travel Market London. The term has recently come to describe what those of us in the industry have known for years but done nothing about. Now though, it’s getting serious. Increasing numbers of visitors from across the world are pouring into Mediterranean resorts, and it’s only going to get worse.
It’s an issue which raises a lot of questions: who is responsible for safeguarding the best interests of a destination? Is it the tour operator which sends the clients or is it the country in which they arrive, that should protect its own interests? Should a destination allow its image to be trashed by operators promoting cheap tourism, making their villages and resorts into centres for a sector that promotes drunken and inappropriate behaviour solely for the operators’ benefit?
And should a destination allow low-cost carriers unlimited access to the honeypot areas in its country, enabling them to pour ever more capacity at increasingly lower prices, into the local airports? What about airports – should they be allowed to subsidise low-cost carriers, gifting them the margin to sell at less than cost price?
Similarly, should the cruise industry be allowed to dock increasingly larger ships off islands or ancient coastal cities and disgorge thousands of visitors for just a few hours?
In recent years, there has been a growing awareness about overtourism, with tourist offices of host countries recognising that something has to be done. And yet their political masters continue to think only about numbers. Even at WTM London, it seemed that despite overtourism remaining a hot topic for many of the sessions, there was still too much of a focus by ministers on visitor arrivals – whether reporting increases or for some, decreases.
The time has come for some joined-up thinking across the whole industry. How will infrastructures designed to accommodate a few tens or hundreds of thousands of people manage several million? We need to look at controls; at measures to encourage demand away from the well-known honeypots. This will require resource and coordination and, in some cases, restriction on growth and therefore on profit.
Certainly, from the UK end, all of us realise that there is simply too much outbound short-haul flight capacity – and yet much more is planned. Where will it all stop?
We need an industry-wide discussion about whether a moral or a commercial approach should apply to this conundrum. But who should tell the airlines, the cruise lines, the hoteliers and the tour operators that the time has come to stop?
Derek Moore is chairman of Aito
