Professional Certificate in Rebalancing Tourism

Rebalancing Tourism

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COURSE BROCHURE

PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATE IN REBALANCING TOURISM

Overtourism is the opposite of Responsible Tourism; it is its converse. Responsible Tourism is about using tourism to make better places to live in. It is about using tourism to benefit local communities, grow their economies, and contribute to the conservation of their built, natural, and lived cultural heritage. Overtourism describes destinations where hosts or guests, locals or visitors, feel that there are too many visitors and that the quality of life in the area or the quality of the experience has deteriorated unacceptably. Overtourism was already identified as an issue before Covid. During the pandemic, residents were reminded of what their place, their home, was like before it began to suffer from overtourism.

As we shall see, there are multiple causes of overtourism, and the problem can only be addressed after analysing the causes. There are now many ‘solutions’; they, too, vary from place to place and require a ‘whole of government’ or ‘joined-up government approach’. This course addresses both the evolution of the problem, its causes and the management strategies available to local governments and businesses, in destinations and source markets to control tourism and mitigate its negative impacts whilst continuing to harvest the positive benefits of tourism.

The course consists of videos of lectures, interviews, and conversations, written course material, and links to further reading and resources. It has been designed to offer a solid introduction to addressing overtourism and encourage you to explore in greater depth, now or in the future, those areas of particular interest or utility to you and the people in your community or you work with.

This course has been constructed by Professor Emeritus Dr Harold Goodwin, who pioneered Masters courses in Responsible Tourism Management at Greenwich, Leeds Becket and Manchester

Metropolitan Universities. Harold’s background is in adult and continuing education, and in his second career in universities, where he taught at the postgraduate level. This continuing education course deals with the issues at the postgraduate level but does not require a university degree to succeed in it.

This course on overtourism comprises five units, each expected to take two weeks to complete, over a period of ten weeks. A fixed schedule of seminars are designed to support the completion of the course. However, you can take the course at any time and at any pace without timing your studies to match the online seminars.

How much time you spend each week on the course will be determined by how much interest each unit sparks and, therefore, how much supplementary material you pursue. The core material in each of the five units is expected to take around two hours.

UNIT 1

What is the overtourism problem?

Boissevain published Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism nearly twenty years ago, and around the same time Faliraki declined rapidly, damaged by unmanaged tourism. Since then, many destinations have experienced rapid and unsustainable growth in tourism numbers. Overtourism is a consequence of the fact that destinations are finite and made by the natural and built heritage of the place and the living culture of the place. Without a living community, the destination becomes a museum. How big a problem is overdependence on tourism?

UNIT 2

Analysing the cause of overtourism

Overtourism describes the negative experience of residents, tourists and day visitors. These groups are composed of individuals who will have a spectrum of views from everything is fine”, through “it is still a great experience” to “it's not like it used to be” and I’m never going there again”. Groups of residents experience the negative impacts of tourism differently: low wages, homelessness, crowding and drunken, loutish behaviours. Destinations are common pool resources, and there is extensive literature on the problems of managing them, popularised by Hardin as “the tragedy of the commons.” Are tourist traps positive or negative? Is price the best way of restricting numbers?

UNIT 3

What can the tourism industry do to mitigate overtourism?

The tourism sector, accommodation, transport, activities and attractions, are all dependent upon a well-managed destination. Tourism businesses in destination and source markets have different degrees of responsibility and potentially different ways of working with communities and their governments to make tourism better. Here, the social anthropology of tourism and the language of “hosts and guests” is particularly relevant and useful.

UNIT 4

Managing overtourism in destinations

Overtourism arises when the place – its cultural and natural heritage and its residents – is over-used by tourism. How can the balance be redressed? There is now a very extensive number and range of management strategies which have been developed and tested in addressing the causes and consequences of overtourism in destinations around the world. We shall review those management interventions and consider whose responsibility it is to reduce the negative impacts of tourism and enhance the positive.

UNIT 5

From Theory to Practice

The ideas are the easy part – how can the ideas be applied to ‘make tourism better’? In this last unit, we look at some examples of where real efforts have been made to mitigate overtourism and consider how successful different management approaches have.

Certification

The concluding unit is designed to enable you to think through how you can apply the ideas you have learnt during this short course. How can you make a difference and make tourism better? Before issuing a Professional Certificate, we ask that you submit a short report two weeks after the end of the course that records your key learnings and how you plan to apply your learning. We have developed a proforma report format to enable you to do. You may or may not wish to share this with your employer or the group(s) you work with. For an additional fee, we can arrange for further feedback on your report through an individual tutorial and/or ongoing mentoring.

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