Crowded tourist destinations are in the spotlight in 2024
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Crowded travel destinations have led to increased debate on one of the most controversial travel issues of the year. In many popular tourist destinations, locals are trying to reclaim towns or local infrastructure is too often strained under the pressure of too many crowds.
Current events and supporting data suggest that there are many crowded tourist destinations where it might be best to rethink your travel plans, and many of them are on the “no list” of Fodor 2025, which suggests 15 places you might want to think twice before booking.
Overcrowded travel destinations: European places where locals are fed up with overtourism in 2024 (but not tourists)
This year has been the largest year of media coverage at popular European tourist sites against perceived overtourism, beginning early in April 2024, when Barcelona removed a bus route from a tourist map because it was overrun with tourists heading to the city's second most visited site, Antoni Gaudí's Park Güell. One local joked that the next step might also be to take the park off the map.
Site after site has announced plans to reduce tourism, from Lake Como in Italy touting the idea of an entry fee, to residents of the Canary Islands in Spain planning a hunger strike, and Amsterdam announcing banning new hotels, only giving the green light to a one-off approach, a single entry and only if there was a perceived lasting improvement over what existed before.
During peak season in July 2024, things have reached in front in many European locations. Locals sprayed tourists with water guns in Barcelona, waving “Go Home” banners, and the mayor announced plans to ban Airbnb by 2028. Really fearing wildfires and water shortages caused by the climate crisis, the Greek island of Santorini has banned construction. Water shortages are responsible for a 50% decrease in wine production on the popular tourist island, putting the local wine economy at an all-time low. Shortly after, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced plans to restrict cruise ships from 2025 to some of the most popular Greek islands.
In France, the island of Bréhat in Brittany, in the north of France, has reintroduced a morning quota to control overtourism. It was Florence's turn soon after, when a tourist caused an uproar by performing lewd acts on a statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and excess, with locals shouting that the ancient city was more like Disneyland and that arrests should increase against the uprising. sea of visiting tourists.
Many European cities have considered tourism caps, as was introduced in Japan with Mount Fuji, and the new tourist entrance fees in Venice proved to be successful enough to continue and expand throughout 2025.
Popular tourist destinations were also submerged across the Channel. St Ives in Cornwall, known for its artistic ambiance, home to painters, artisans and fishermen, has lost its seasonal balance. Empty like a ghost town in winter but overwhelmed with wall-to-wall tourists in summer, its infrastructure is creaking under the pressure.
After being appointed by The New York Times as one of the best places to visit In 2024, Bannau Brycheiniog National Park in Wales, long considered a secret favorite of locals and its predominant sheep population, has been invaded. Just 30 miles north of the Welsh capital, Cardiff, authorities have been forced to bring in extra buses and tour guides to cope with the 4 million visitors. Additionally, park officials had to ask the mass of arriving influencers to create content to adhere to “campaign morals” and not strip in the waterfalls to take selfies or treat the park like a beach. Many arrived in the national park known for its changeable climate and isolated spots in flip-flops and swimsuits.
Indeed, in many places the response has been as much about asking tourists to behave as about reducing their numbers. Spain launched a campaign ask visitors (especially British) to act as they would at home, to put on their clothes when not on the beach and not to sing loudly in residential streets early in the morning if they would not in their own country.
The animosity in these places is as much economic as practical, whether it is the waste left by tourists leaving cruise ships, the disrespectful behavior of Batchelor evenings (highly denounced in Prague), the reduced access to local sites for locals or lack of access. toward affordable housing, as homeowners choose to rent potential units nightly rather than year-round to increase their income.
Europe is the continent that is warming the fastest. The environmental impacts of tourism are therefore very real, and many cruise operators are now doing so. choose heading to the Caribbean rather than Europe, partly due to overpopulation.
Fodor’s “No List” distinguished 5 places:
- Barcelona
- Majorca
- The Canary Islands
- Venice
- Lisbon
Fodor defines them all as places in Europe “where the locals don’t want you.”
Crowded Travel Destinations 2025: Fodor's Perennial 'No List' of Crowded Places
Fodor's has placed three top travel destinations for 2025 on a no-go list for tourists to visit next year: Bali, Koh Samui and Mount Everest. In most cases, there is an urgent need to ensure adequate waste management for the millions of arrivals.
Bali, Indonesia: lack of waste management puts a strain on residents' quality of life
Bali is almost back to pre-pandemic traveler levels: 5.3 million in 2023 compared to 6.3 million in 2019, and the 2024 numbers probably look higher in the end.
The problem is waste management infrastructure, where the island is literally filled with waste: it generates 303,000 tonnes of plastic waste every year, but only 7% is recycled, in what NGOs on the ground call an “apocalypse plastic”. Natural areas are disappearing and water is polluted, mainly by industry, mining, agriculture, aquaculture and domestic wastewater.
Koh Samui, Thailand, victim of the success of the White Lotus?
The island of Koh Samui is only 95 miles wide but welcomed 3.4 million visitors in 2023, an increase of 10-20% in 2024.
Tourism Authority of Thailand expects 1.56 million foreign travelers to visit the country throughout 2025, an increase of 16% from 2023, and Chase Travel is already reporting that bookings for 2025 are up 22% over one year.
Again, the problem is one of waste disposal. Notably, 180 to 200 tonnes of waste are added daily without appropriate means of treating them; a large portion of it remains in a large landfill with no long-term solution. The problem will likely explode after the third season of The White Lotus airs (tourism to Sicily jumped 50% after the second season was set on the Italian coast).
Mount Everest: uncontrolled climbing permits disrupt fragile ecosystems
Mount Everest has long faced a problem of overtourism, but with the main obstacle to climbing now being money rather than skill, anyone who pays can go, asking locals to carry all the equipment and taking all the risks.
58,000 people visit it each year and visitors to Sagarmatha National Park, which contains Mount Everest, have doubled in the past 25 years.
The problem is that travelers generate 1,742 pounds of poo and other rubbish every day, with authorities struggling to dispose of them. Currently, there are no limits on climbing permits, which threatens this increasingly fragile ecosystem.
Overcrowded travel destinations in 2025: destinations starting to suffer from overtourism
There's another category of places on Fodor's “no list” for 2025: those where destinations are starting to suffer from overtourism. There are seven places on this list:
- Agrigento, Sicily, Italy
- British Virgin Islands
- Kerala, India
- Kyoto, Japan
- Tokyo, Japan
- Oaxaca, Mexico
- North Coast of Scotland 500
Agrigento will be Italy's capital of culture in 2025 and is suffering a serious water crisis, the British Virgin Islands may have too many cruises for local resources to keep up, and Kerala has suffered landslides devastating impacts and environmental degradation due to overdevelopment.
Fodor reports that the term “Kankō kōgai”, or “tourist pollution”, entered popular culture to explain the unease over the uncontrolled increase in tourist numbers in Japan, where numbers are reaching unprecedented levels, mainly because that tourists take advantage of the weak yen.
The people of Oaxaca, Mexico believe that their local culture and customs are being commercialized, with English overtaking Spanish as the dominant language and one of the most scenic road trip routes in Scotland. The North Coast 500 through the North Highlands is crowded and lacking in facilities, leading visitors to go wild. camp, leaving behind “campfire burn marks, trash, disposable grills and even human feces in their wake.”
Many of these places on Fodor's list that appear to be suffering from overtourism have recently topped travel lists for 2025. The Canary Islands and Japan were both named to Bloomberg's Where To Go In 2025. And Japan, Spain and Greece featured prominently in the CNTraveler report. 2024 Readers' Choice Awards for the Top 20 Countries in the World.
The issue of overpopulation is complex, often because these regions depend on the economic prosperity that tourism brings. However, many have infrastructures that cannot cope, particularly with the waste produced. But it is also a question of local access to local resources, which has hit a wall in many major European cities, with growing and growing local protests. Laws aimed at restricting visitors are increasingly likely to control overcrowded tourist destinations by 2025 and beyond.
