If you opened a newspaper or scrolled through your newsfeed this past summer, the images were inescapable. From locals wielding water pistols in Barcelona to protesters chaining off beaches in Mallorca, the message from Europe’s most beloved holiday hotspots was loud, clear, and somewhat uncomfortable for the industry to digest: Go home.

For decades, the travel industry has operated on a simple, unchecked metric of success: growth. More arrivals, more flights, more heads in beds. But as the headlines regarding “bad tourists” and “mass tourism destruction” multiply, the industry is finally being forced to confront the elephant in the room. The damage of mass tourism is often left unmonitored and unchecked, creating a volatile environment where lack of regulation fails to support local communities.

But is the answer really to stop traveling? Or is the problem not the volume of travelers, but the management of them?

At a recent gathering of industry leaders, a different narrative emerged—one that moves beyond the guilt of the “bad tourist” and toward a high-tech, data-driven, and deeply human restructuring of how we explore the world. From the CEO of the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance to the directors of niche tour operators, the consensus is shifting. The era of mass tourism isn’t necessarily ending, but it is being aggressively re-engineered.

Reframing the Narrative: It’s Not Overtourism, It’s Overcrowding

“We might also want to talk about redefining what overtourism is,” suggests Glenn Menzik, CEO of the World Sustainable Hospitality Alliance, an organization representing 55,000 hotels and 7 million rooms globally. Menzik argues that the term “overtourism”—the Oxford Dictionary word of the year in 2018—is a branding disaster that obscures the real logistical issues at play.

Instead, we should be looking at “overcrowding”. The distinction is subtle but vital. Overtourism blames the traveler; overcrowding blames the planning. Many destinations feeling the strain are also fantastic places to live, leading to a clash between housing needs for residents and infrastructure for visitors.

“It’s not all at the feet of tourism,” Menzik notes, pointing out that members of his alliance are opening two hotels a day for the next three years. The sheer velocity of this growth demands a symbiotic relationship between the public and private sectors to ensure infrastructure—water, waste, energy—can handle the load. When that infrastructure fails, or when data isn’t shared effectively to plan for peaks and valleys, the result is friction.

The goal, according to Menzik, is “Net Positive Hospitality”—giving back to the destination more than the industry takes. This isn’t just philanthropy; it’s a survival strategy. “If there’s no destination, there’s nothing to sell,” Menzik says bluntly.

The Art of Getting Lost: Breaking the Instagram Loop

While the big hotels focus on infrastructure, the tour operators are fighting a battle against the “bucket list” mentality.

Carol Savage, CEO of Not in the Guidebooks, specializes in taking travelers away from the hotspots and into the heart of local communities. She argues that mass tourism damage is exacerbated when destinations don’t own their own narratives, allowing social media to dictate the flow of people.

Savage cites a visceral example from a recent trip to Medellín, Colombia. The city, famous for its transformation, has two “Comunas” that were once dangerous no-go zones. One side has been popularized by social media trails for a decade.

“For me, that was just like going to a not very nice Disneyland,” Savage recalls. The area was packed with vendors trying to extract money from tourists, stripping the location of the authenticity it once had.

However, just on the other side of the city, Savage found an entirely different experience—authentic connections with locals eager to share their community, food, and distilleries without the performative gloss of the “Instagrammable” moment.

The strategy here is “dispersal”—taking people away from the 90% of areas where everyone else goes and introducing them to the “under the radar” locations. But this requires a delicate balance. It isn’t about hiding the highlights, but about expanding the map. As Savage notes, “It’s about balance and taking people away from where 90% of travellers go to”.

The Chicken and Egg of Seasonality

If spreading tourists out geographically is one half of the solution, spreading them out chronologically is the other. The industry is buzzing with talk of “shoulder seasons” and “off-season travel,” but Anne De Jong, co-founder of the Good Tourism Institute, warns that it’s not as simple as just lowering prices in November.

“It’s kind of also a chicken and egg story,” De Jong explains. She recalls a trip to Corfu in the low season where everything was closed. “If local businesses would open up their businesses earlier… I might be tempted to visit earlier,” she says. But businesses won’t open without tourists, and tourists won’t come if businesses are closed.

Solving this requires a cohesive destination marketing strategy. You cannot simply sell a high-season product for a lower price in the rain and expect satisfaction. “They really need their own experience and you need to develop that,” De Jong advises.

Savage offers a brilliant case study in rebranding seasonality from Costa Rica. The country successfully rebranded its rainy season as the “Green Season”. Instead of focusing on the wet weather (which might only last a couple of hours a day), the narrative shifted to the benefits: better wildlife viewing, blooming flowers, and a lush environment. It’s a masterclass in psychological reframing—communicating why a different time of year offers a superior, rather than compromised, experience.

The Silent Conductor: Tech’s Role in Traffic Control

Perhaps the most futuristic approach to managing the crush of humanity comes from the urban mobility sector. Gavin Brookin, Managing Director of Tootbus UK, is using technology to surgically remove tourists from gridlock.

London is a year-round business, and traffic around principal attractions like Buckingham Palace can be paralyzing. “We have to take the traffic into consideration,” Brookin says. “We need to be able to provide a journey around the city that is not getting stuck in traffic for three hours”.

Tootbus has innovated by creating “Tootwalks”—self-guided walking tours integrated into their app. When a bus approaches a heavily congested area, drivers and hosts can inform passengers that they are entering a disruption zone. The app then offers a seamless alternative: alight at the next stop, take a 90-minute guided audio walk through the Royal Parks or architectural highlights, and rejoin the bus at a different stop on the other side of the traffic jam.

This is smart tourism in action. It uses AI and real-time data to physically disperse the crowd, turning a potential frustration (sitting in traffic) into an experiential gain (a beautiful walk).

Furthermore, Brookin’s fleet is leading the charge on sustainability. In Brussels, their fleet is fully electric; in London, they are retrofitting 25-year-old buses with electric drive shafts and batteries, effectively recycling the vehicle while eliminating emissions. They’ve even installed solar panels on their depot roof to power the fleet, proving that even unregulated businesses can lead by example.

The Trap of “Cancunification”

However, as the industry rushes to find “the next big thing” to relieve pressure on the old favorites, a danger lurks. During the session, a pertinent question was raised about the risk of “Cancunification”—taking a pristine alternative destination (like Holbox in Mexico) and ruining it by diverting the mass tourism firehose in its direction.

Anne De Jong is firm on this: “Just recommend one other destination to go to instead… doesn’t really work”. Simply moving the herd moves the problem. The strategy must be to create an inventory of the entire destination and spread people out widely, rather than creating a new hotspot that will inevitably buckle under the pressure.

Glenn Menzik agrees, emphasizing that destinations must be “ready” before the floodgates open. “We have to make sure they’re at the right level both from the industry perspective and the public perspective,” he cautions. If the infrastructure isn’t there, promoting a “hidden gem” is simply a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction.

The Data-Driven Future

Ultimately, the solution to the crisis of overcrowding lies in something the travel industry has historically been poor at: data.

Menzik describes the potential of using cell phone tower data to understand real-time movements. While he admits it sounds “scary” to the consumer, for a destination manager, it is “candy”. This data allows managers to see impact in real-time and even send push notifications to encourage tourists to visit different parts of a city, actively balancing the load.

But data alone isn’t enough. It requires trust.

“We have a communication problem like we’ve never seen before,” Menzik admits. Financiers and local communities often don’t trust the tourism industry to do the right thing. To rebuild that trust, the industry must stop talking about GDP and job numbers—which don’t fix the potholes on the street—and start articulating how they are contributing to the community infrastructure.

Conclusion: One Size Fits One

The overarching lesson from these industry leaders is that there is no silver bullet. “In tourism, one size fits one,” says moderator Dolores Semeraro. What works for London’s traffic flow won’t work for a rural community in Colombia or a beach town in Greece.

However, the toolkit for fixing mass tourism is expanding. It includes the “Net Positive” infrastructure of the big hotels, the “Green Season” rebranding of the marketers, the narrative control of the niche operators, and the app-driven dispersal of the tech companies.

The days of passive tourism management are over. As Menzik puts it, we have a privilege to operate in these destinations. The industry is finally realizing that respecting the destination isn’t just a moral imperative—it’s a commercial one. After all, if the destination dies, the business dies with it.