Overtourism is the current rage in the travel, tourism, government and social circles. There are cities being overwhelmed by visitors in particular months and empty in others; there are protests and water being squirted over tourists ( which is sad because tourists cant be blamed for local policies that enable them to arrive!).
That said , I thought it would be interesting to gauge from numbers exactly how bad is the problem of over tourism. I compiled a few numbers (see table) from various sources - the Ministry of Tourism India (2022 data) , UN tourism site, Euromonitor, Statista, ET, TOI, The Guardian, CNN and a few others).
The "T/P ratio" is essentially simply Tourist- to- Population ratio. Just my way to grasp the scale of the issue.
Not surprisingly, western Europe has some T/P ratios that could be called alarming. The point here is that not all these millions are leisure travelers. Quite a large component will be business arrivals too. Still, the numbers are huge in already huge cities. Istanbul, for example, gets 25% more visitors thru its gates in a year than its resident population. London, nearly 2x, and Barcelona, the current hot topic, 37 % more than its population. These are serious enough "overruns" to stress out people, resources like water and sanitation, as well as transport. ( populations are measured differently in different cities - some take in only metro city areas; some the wider metro area including suburbs, but the core purpose of the analysis remains good).
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| numbers in millions. Sources: Euromonitor, Statista, WTTO, UN Tourism Dashboard, media reports, TOI, ET, Guardian, CNN |
India : big on population, low on tourism
Ironically, in the second half of the table, you can see how under-developed India is on the tourism scale. India gets less than 1.7% of global tourism, and its FTA (Foreign Tourist Arrivals) are about 9 mn. Basically, the whole, huge subcontinent of India , one of the oldest and most diverse cultures on Earth, gets less tourist arrivals than any one of the cities in the table!
India has tremendous potential for tourism - both domestic and international. There are some clear concerns, but they pertain to infrastructure, costs, general perception of safety, and that India is destination by itself requiring much time and planning).
There's essentially no concern on overtourism for India! As it is, Indian cities are densely populated. A few million more may not even be noticed!
