Rama Permana, Bournemouth University

Barcelona residents marched against tourists in July after similar protests in Venice earlier in 2024. Recently, residents of Santorini in Greece were in uproar after a Facebook post reportedly asked them to stay home and make room for the thousands of tourists expected to arrive during the peak holiday season.

These are symptoms of overtourism, a situation where visits exceed a destination’s capacity, making residents angry and tourists miserable. Local governments have proposed tourism levies or entry fees to make visits more expensive, limiting the number of people who show up. Some tourism researchers have encouraged people to holiday in rural areas or poorer countries instead to boost their economies.

However, overtourism exists in the developing world too. Here’s what it looks like.

Travel on a tourist-swamped island

Bali is a major tourist destination in the Indonesian archipelago that accounts for nearly half of international arrivals in the country. Air travel is the most reliable way to get there, although it is a significant source of carbon emissions, which inflame a climate crisis that is expected to disproportionately harm poorer countries like Indonesia. Roughly 15 million visitors arrived in 2023—close to their level in 2019, before the pandemic.

Bali’s tourism-dependent economy (providing 61% of regional GDP in 2019) was more or less frozen by COVID-19. Yet, for tourists who spent lockdown in cities, the pandemic also left Bali, particularly the island’s rural parts, with a renewed luster. Penglipuran, a traditional Balinese village in the central highlands, attracted thousands of visitors daily in July.

Encouraging people to visit poorer areas can disadvantage residents differently than how people in Venice or Barcelona experience it. After all, roads and public transport in wealthier European cities are better maintained.

The steady rise in tourists means the roads in Bali get busier every year. There is a roughly one-to-one ratio of vehicles to people on the island, while public transport use remains low. Congestion prevented travelers from entering and leaving Bali’s airport six hours before New Year’s Eve 2023.

In rural Bali, the hilly terrain, tropical weather, and poorer public transport mean residents must rely on cars and motorbikes. The resulting noise and pollution degrade the rural experience. Converting these vehicles to run on electricity would not solve the problem entirely if most power in Bali remains fossil-sourced, nor would it cut road congestion.

Tourists want to visit many places in rural Bali with a reliable source of transport. The limited options have prompted many to rent cars or motorbikes, but weak traffic enforcement has allowed misbehavior: tourists driving without shirts, helmets, or even licenses. The regional government temporarily banned motorbike rentals for foreigners in March 2023.

Despite chaotic traffic on the island, residents have found work transporting tourists informally for decades. That’s why efforts to ease congestion and travel chaos by designing public transport for tour groups or free shuttle bus services have met with local protests and the ire of vehicle rental businesses.

To travel or not to travel

Unbridled development squanders the mutual benefits that tourism can have for residents and visitors. Likewise, neither residents nor tourists should be prohibited from traveling; instead, they should travel responsibly.

A railway transport plan that promises to connect Bali’s airport with Seminyak and Nusa Dua, the most popular areas in urban Bali, could help ease road traffic around the city centre. Local vehicle rental businesses could continue to operate in rural areas but restrict their riders to less busy roads.

Poor destinations should be cautious about depending on tourism in the long term. The Balinese government is exploring its options in other sectors, such as agriculture and the digital economy.

Poorer destinations such as Bali are less well equipped than richer countries to manage the socio-economic and environmental costs of overtourism. Ultimately, a swollen tourism sector contains the seeds of its own demise: declining environmental quality, unhappy residents, and eventually, fewer tourists.

Rama Permana, PhD Candidate in Sustainable Travel, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.