why do some countries discourage tourism

What is overtourism and how can we overcome it? 

The issue of overtourism has become a major concern due to the surge in travel following the pandemic. Image:  Reuters/Manuel Silvestri (ITALY - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT)

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• Overtourism has once again become a concern, particularly after the rebound of international travel post-pandemic.
• Communities in popular destinations worldwide have expressed concerns over excess tourism on their doorstep.
• Here we outline the complexities of overtourism and the possible measures that can be taken to address the problem.

The term ‘overtourism’ has re-emerged as tourism recovery has surged around the globe. But already in 2019, angst over excessive tourism growth was so high that the UN World Tourism Organization called for “such growth to be managed responsibly so as to best seize the opportunities tourism can generate for communities around the world”.

This was especially evident in cities like Barcelona, where anti-tourism sentiment built up in response to pent-up frustration about rapid and unyielding tourism growth. Similar local frustration emerged in other famous cities, including Amsterdam , Venice , London , Kyoto and Dubrovnik .

While the pandemic was expected to usher in a new normal where responsible and sustainable travel would emerge, this shift was evidently short-lived, as demand surged in 2022 and 2023 after travel restrictions eased.

Have you read?

Ten principles for sustainable destinations: charting a new path forward for travel and tourism.

This has been witnessed over the recent Northern Hemisphere summer season, during which popular destinations heaved under the pressure of pent-up post-pandemic demand , with grassroots communities articulating over-tourism concerns.

Concerns over excess tourism have not only been seen in popular cities but also on the islands of Hawaii and Greece , beaches in Spain , national parks in the United States and Africa , and places off the beaten track like Japan ’s less explored regions.

What is overtourism?

The term overtourism was employed by Freya Petersen in 2001, who lamented the excesses of tourism development and governance deficits in the city of Pompei. Her sentiments are increasingly familiar among tourists in other top tourism destinations more than 20 years later.

Overtourism is more than a journalistic device to arouse host community anxiety or demonize tourists through anti-tourism activism. It is also more than simply being a question of management – although poor or lax governance most definitely accentuates the problem.

Governments at all levels must be decisive and firm about policy responses that control the nature of tourist demand and not merely give in to profits that flow from tourist expenditure and investment.

Overtourism is often oversimplified as being a problem of too many tourists. While that may well be an underlying symptom of excess, it fails to acknowledge the myriad factors at play.

In its simplest iteration, overtourism results from tourist demand exceeding the carrying capacity of host communities in a destination. Too often, the tourism supply chain stimulates demand, giving little thought to the capacity of destinations and the ripple effects on the well-being of local communities.

Overtourism is arguably a social phenomenon too. In China and India, two of the most populated countries where space is a premium, crowded places are socially accepted and overtourism concerns are rarely articulated, if at all. This suggests that cultural expectations of personal space and expectations of exclusivity differ.

We also tend not to associate ‘overtourism’ with Africa . But uncontrolled growth in tourist numbers is unsustainable anywhere, whether in an ancient European city or the savannah of a sub-Saharan context.

Overtourism must also have cultural drivers that are intensified when tourists' culture is at odds with that of host communities – this might manifest as breaching of public norms, irritating habits, unacceptable behaviours , place-based displacement and inconsiderate occupation of space.

The issue also comes about when the economic drivers of tourism mean that those who stand to benefit from growth are instead those who pay the price of it, particularly where gentrification and capital accumulation driven from outside results in local resident displacement and marginalization.

Overcoming overtourism excesses

Radical policy measures that break the overtourism cycle are becoming more common. For example, Amsterdam has moved to ban cruise ships by closing the city’s cruise terminal.

Tourism degrowth has long been posited as a remedy to overtourism. While simply cutting back on tourist numbers seems like a logical response, whether the economic trade-offs of fewer tourists will be tolerated is another thing altogether.

The Spanish island of Lanzarote moved to desaturate the island by calling the industry to focus on quality tourism rather than quantity. This shift to quality, or higher yielding, tourists has been mirrored in many other destinations, like Bali , for example.

Dispersing tourists outside hotspots is commonly seen as a means of dealing with too much tourism. However, whether sufficient interest to go off the beaten track can be stimulated might be an immoveable constraint, or simply result in problem shifting .

Demarketing destinations has been applied with varying degrees of success. However, whether it can address the underlying factors in the long run is questioned, particularly as social media influencers and travel writers continue to give attention to touristic hotspots. In France, asking visitors to avoid Mont Saint-Michelle and instead recommending they go elsewhere is evidence of this.

Introducing entry fees and gates to over-tourist places like Venice is another deterrent. This assumes visitors won’t object to paying and that revenues generated are spent on finding solutions rather than getting lost in authorities’ consolidated revenue.

Advocacy and awareness campaigns against overtourism have also been prominent, but whether appeals to tourists asking them to curb irresponsible behaviours have had any impact remains questionable as incidents continue —for example, the Palau Pledge and New Zealand’s Tiaki Promise appeal for more responsible behaviours.

Curtailing the use of the word overtourism is also posited – in the interest of avoiding the rise of moral panics and the swell of anti-tourism social movements, but pretending the phenomenon does not exist, or dwelling on semantics won’t solve the problem .

Solutions to address overtourism

The solutions to dealing adequately with the effects of overtourism are likely to be many and varied and must be tailored to the unique, relevant destination .

The tourism supply chain must also bear its fair share of responsibility. While popular destinations are understandably an easier sell, redirecting tourism beyond popular honeypots like urban heritage sites or overcrowded beaches needs greater impetus to avoid shifting the problem elsewhere.

Local authorities must exercise policy measures that establish capacity limits, then ensure they are upheld, and if not, be held responsible for their inaction .

Meanwhile, tourists themselves should take responsibility for their behaviour and decisions while travelling, as this can make a big difference to the impact on local residents .

Those investing in tourism should support initiatives that elevate local priorities and needs, and not simply exercise a model of maximum extraction for shareholders in the supply chain.

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National tourist offices and destination management organizations must support development that is nuanced and in tune with the local backdrop rather than simply mimicking mass-produced products and experiences.

The way tourist experiences are developed and shaped must be transformed to move away from outright consumerist fantasies to responsible consumption .

The overtourism problem will be solved through a clear-headed, collaborative and case-specific assessment of the many drivers in action. Finally, ignoring historical precedents that have led to the current predicament of overtourism and pinning this on oversimplified prescriptions abandons any chance of more sustainable and equitable tourism futures .

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Why are some countries more successful tourist destinations than others.

by ESSEC Knowledge Editor-in-chief , 04.10.12 Follow

With Peter O'Connor and Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi

Tourism can be very important to a country’s economy, particularly in less developed regions, where it can drive growth. Tourism also tends to have important impacts on the environment and society at large.

Many researchers have examined the consequences of tourism, but fewer have looked at the other side of the coin: the way economic, social and environmental factors can drive tourism – or hold it back. The few studies that have examined the issue have usually used the various factors to arrive at a ‘score’ reflecting a particular country’s attractiveness as a tourist destination.

We wanted to look at this topic more deeply – not just how economic, social and environmental factors affect tourism, but also how they affect each other, both positively and negatively. To do this, we used a mathematical technique called structural equation modelling, which uses a set of linear equations to analyse the relationships between a set of variables.

Choosing the variables

Building on the work of earlier researchers, we first developed a set of variables covering four aspects of a tourist destination: its economy, its infrastructure, its natural environment and its society.

To measure the economy, we used five variables: consumer price index, purchasing power parity, trade volume, foreign direct investment and industry value added. These reflect the way lower local prices or better exchange rates entice tourists to visit, and how a country’s tourism tends to benefit when its businesses are doing well.

To assess environmental issues affecting tourism, we used three measures: population density, carbon dioxide emissions and the number of environmental treaties ratified. The environment is important because people obviously prefer to visit places with unspoilt natural surroundings.

To analyse infrastructure, we used seven variables reflecting a country’s road network, sanitation standards, electricity supply, number of vehicles, Internet access, landline phone network and mobile phone network coverage. All these factors improve the tourism experience by providing easier travel, drinking water and better communication.

Finally, society in a tourist destination was reflected in variables covering education, life expectancy, ownership of TVs and PCs and newspaper readership. Social issues are relevant because local populations can react to tourism in different ways – embracing it or rejecting it.

Causal relationships

Having determined our variables, we tried to predict the most likely causal relationships between these four areas and tourism.

For example we thought that a strong economy could have both positive and negative effects: higher local prices could discourage visitors, but growth would develop infrastructure and improves society, both of which could help tourism indirectly. As infrastructure develops, tourism should increase – but the environment might suffer.

Similalrly social differences between tourists and their ‘hosts’ could either help or hinder tourism, depending on the local quality of life and people’s attitudes towards making sacrifices for the tourist dollar. Social progress could also affect the environment – the more ‘advanced’ the society, the more enlightened its attitudes towards sustainability. And the more pleasant the environment, the more the tourist industry is likely to benefit.

Improving the model

We tested our hypotheses using data for 162 countries. First, we tested and refined the data, and quickly discovered that there was too much overlap between our society and infrastructure concepts , so we combined them both under infrastructure. We found that electricity coverage was actually more relevant to the environment than to infrastructure, so we reassigned it. And three variables (population density, foreign direct investment and industry value added) were not significant, so we dropped them.

We ended up with a new, simpler model reflecting economy, infrastructure, environment and tourism that worked much better. When we analysed our data using this model, we found that some of our hypotheses were supported – but some were not.

Surprising results

According to our results, a better economy has no direct influence on tourism. This challenges the idea that lower local prices or favourable exchange rates encourage people to visit a destination.

However, the economy does have a direct, positive effect on both infrastructure and society – and these two factors, in turn, affect tourism. This is in line with the findings of earlier researchers, who found that better infrastructure encourages tourism. In fact, our model shows that infrastructure is the single most important factor – more than either the environment or the economy.

This finding challenges an earlier theory called ‘social exchange’, which argued that a more deprived society would be more willing to suffer some inconvenience in order to gain tourists’ business. In our model, the more developed the society, the more supportive it is of tourism.

We found that a well-developed infrastructure does indeed cause harm to the environment, as we expected. But a more developed society does not necessarily result in environmental improvements, and a better environment does not seem to drive more tourism either.

Real-world applications

Previous studies have looked at the way these areas affect tourism, without considering how they interact. Our study has taken a first step towards uncovering the causal relationships between the key factors affecting the tourism sector, and showing how they actually affect tourism. By using real-world data and subjecting it to rigorous analysis and refinement, we have shown how tourism can be investigated in a more scientific, empirical way.

Our study has many potential applications. Policymakers who are aiming to promote tourism in their respective countries can use it to make more informed decisions about allocating resources to different areas of development. For example, while higher local prices might be seen as negative, it’s important to realise that a stronger economy drives infrastructural and social improvements that indirectly encourage tourism.

Similarly e xternal trade is important, because it helps drive economic growth and infrastructure improvements. Electronic communications are key – they must keep pace with developing road networks in order to attract tourists. Finally, the levels of computer use, car ownership and newspaper readership are important, because they help society to develop, in the process becoming more welcoming and attractive to visitors from overseas.   

Further Reading:

" Structural Equation Modeling in Tourism Demand Forecasting: A Critical Review ", published in  Journal of Travel and Tourism Research.

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Overtourism as Destination Risk

ISBN : 978-1-83909-707-2 , eISBN : 978-1-83909-706-5

Publication date: 13 May 2021

Tourism has been an important activity in the past. Today tourism is a high revenue generation industry in many countries. But recently, many destinations are suffering from overtourism. Overtourism is a real-life phenomenon experienced by destinations. Overtourism is defined as many tourists visiting a particular place simultaneously which has resulted in the falling or unacceptable quality of life. It is just the opposite of wellness tourism, a better place to live and a better place to visit. The term overtourism was first used on Twitter as #overtourism back in August 2012. In 2017 UNWTO ministers addressed overtourism at the World Travel Market. In the last few years, there have been anti-tourism movements in popular destinations such as Barcelona, Santorini and Copenhagen. These movements' main aim is the attention of press attraction and have led to different proposed actions by tourism decision-makers in making a policy to control overtourism. In recent years overtourism has become an important and discussed issue in media and academia. In this context, the term is still not widely defined and open to numerous discussions. This chapter aims to clarify the root causes of overtourism, the emergence of overtourism and how social media is responsible for and impacts overtourism. The methodology of this chapter is a general review literature of overtourism issues. The chapter states that the government poorly managed without a bigger political force and genuine knowledge of the government's difficulty and action are taking first in the tourism industry. This chapter identifies the social movement of overtourism raised by residents.

• Overtourism
• Social media
• Social-movement

Dhiraj, A. and Kumar, S. (2021), "Overtourism: Causes, Impacts and Solution", Sharma, A. and Hassan, A. (Ed.) Overtourism as Destination Risk ( Tourism Security-Safety and Post Conflict Destinations ), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 49-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83909-706-520211004

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• PLANET POSSIBLE

Should some of the world’s endangered places be off-limits to tourists?

Experts weigh in on what can be done to mitigate overtourism.

Habitat loss, overtourism, and the consequences of climate change have put more and more travel destinations at peril, even as the pandemic’s forced shutdowns gave once tourist-trampled places a breather.

This prompted us to ask our newsletter subscribers and Facebook followers the question: “Should there be places on Earth that are closed off to visitation? Should the wilderness be restricted in some way?”

Responses swamped our inbox, with most making arguments for limiting tourism. “The last few decades have taught us so much about what happens to wild places when people trample them,” wrote Margaret Cervarich, pointing to the trash pileup at Everest base camp.

“Many pristine and protected areas should be off-limits to humans completely, in my opinion. And a carefully evaluated few should be allowed for scientific studies,” wrote Charlisa Cato. Several, including Alper Takci, felt the limitations need to go further: “We should seal the whole planet off to humans.”

Indeed, some places have closed to travelers temporarily, including Iceland ’s Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon— made viral in a Justin Bieber video. Maya Bay, in Thailand’s Phi Phi archipelago, was overrun and its coral destroyed following the 2000 movie The Beach with Leonardo di Caprio. The beach, which has been closed since 2018, may soon reopen under stricter conditions. Other destinations have banned specific activities: In Hawaii , a new law   goes into effect on October 28 prohibiting swimming with spinner dolphins.

We put the same question to the experts. Most agreed that locking places away from people is not the answer. “I am opposed to the idea that you would, at face value, ban tourism to fragile places,” says Jeremy Sampson, of the UK-based Travel Foundation , a nonprofit working to improve the tourism industry. “The fact is that certain kinds of tourism can help protect natural resources or preserve heritage.”

Strategies to ease overcrowding

There are many cases where interventions have helped to mitigate overcrowding. Last July, Italy banned large cruise ships from entering Venice ’s waters and declared the city’s lagoon a national monument. Bhutan has for decades pursued a “ high-value, low-volume ” strategy, with prices only luxury travelers can afford, while investing in the preservation of nature and culture. Some destinations—including Amsterdam —have all but stopped actively marketing the city to tourists, switching objectives from “destination promotion” to “destination management” for the welfare of locals.

“We have many examples of visitor management systems that work to limit visitation in vulnerable places,” says Greg Klassen, a tourism strategist based in Vancouver. “For example, many national parks have areas open to visitors by first-come, first-served, lottery systems.”

Such measures have been gaining traction. In 2017, Peru limited access to Machu Picchu to two timed entries each day and restricted travelers to specific trails. Some of the new, stricter pandemic-era restrictions—visitors having to buy tickets for specific hours rather than half-day blocks, for example—will likely be permanent. In the U.S., Rocky Mountain and Yosemite National Parks recently introduced a timed-entry permit system to manage pandemic crowds. While temporary, they point to potential strategies for reducing congestion in the future.

( Can overtourism be made sustainable? )

Timed entry and lottery systems were also suggested by reader Wayne Woodman, who wrote, “I think a lot of our wilderness and national parks are being overwhelmed and need to be restricted. So yes. I would favor stringent controls with access based on a lottery basis so as not to restrict those less fortunate.”

Yet, lines and lotteries won’t solve everything. “It’s not just about the math. People always want to introduce a carrying capacity, and I think it’s just too simplistic. There could be other more nuanced solutions,” says Sampson. One idea is to make visitors promise to behave better. In recent years, destinations such as Iceland, New Zealand, Haida Gwaii , and the island of Hawaii have asked tourists to sign visitor pledges on or before arrival. The wording varies, but most ask visitors to tread lightly, protect nature, and respect the culture.

“Most visitors to Palau were not aware of what constituted reasonable behavior,” notes Klassen, who helped develop the Pacific country’s pledge. “A marine protected area covers the entire archipelago, yet visitors were taking home coral from the reefs, leaving debris and garbage behind, and in some cases behaving badly.”

The pledge outlines what visitors should and shouldn’t do (“Don’t collect marine life souvenirs . Do learn about the culture and people,” and unlike others, this one is enforced with fines of up to $1 million. “Even in places where they are voluntary, pledges still provide a level of education and commitment—even modest changes to visitor behavior can be helpful,” adds Klassen.

Growing a conservation economy

In some places, particularly in Africa , strictly controlled tourism is key to wildlife conservation, and its income is vital to residents who might otherwise resort to extractive industries to survive.

“In Rwanda , high-value tourism permits generate over $18 million per year, contributing to the repopulation of gorillas from a mere 254 in 1981 to 600 in 2019,” notes Tiffany Misrahi, vice-president of policy and research for the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Tourism is therefore crucial to the preservation of these wild places. “If these forgotten forests in the heart of Africa are not connected to the people of the world,” says Praveen Moman, founder of Volcanoes Safaris , which for 25 years has been bringing limited numbers of guests to Uganda and Rwanda to view mountain gorillas and chimpanzees, “there’s a very big danger that they could disappear altogether.”

Often left out of the conversation are the world’s Indigenous peoples— the ones who have kept the planet in balance for millennia.

“You can take a map of the environmental hotspots around the world and lay over it a second map of culturally endangered places, where indigenous peoples and their languages and traditions are struggling to survive. They are almost identical,” says Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey , a Polynesian filmmaker, anthropologist, and National Geographic Explorer.

( Skip the crowds and visit these hidden gems instead. )

“So when we talk about place, we must also talk about people. We need the wisdom of those who have stewarded the land for thousands of years. We need to learn from them and nurture our own interconnectedness with the natural world.”

In Canada , on the coastal fjords of British Columbia , within the Great Bear Rainforest, lies a swath of land the size of Ireland that protects thousand-year-old trees and the rarest bear in the world. Within it, Spirit Bear Lodge —owned and operated by the Kitasoo Xai’xais Nation—welcomes visitors from all over the world whose dollars revitalize local communities and fund further conservation, including a successful effort to stop bear hunts.

“The elders always say, ‘What we have here is not ours, we’re just holding it for the next generations,’ and that’s really important in everything we do,” says Douglas Neasloss, chief councilor of the Kitasoo Xai’xais Nation. “The community has made clear it’s not just about money but about the future. We’ve been able to revitalize our culture and create a sustainable business model where we’re not pulling out a fish or cutting down a tree.”

To help connect social and conservation enterprises to travelers who might otherwise converge on the same fragile sites, the country of Jordan , along with the nonprofit Tourism Cares, created a “meaningful travel map” of the country. It pinpoints 12 experiences that tread lightly, disperse travelers, and have a big community impact. The program has been so successful that a similar map is planned for Colombia .

Closing off places to visitors should perhaps be left as the last resort, and some respondents to our original question agreed. “In order for endangered places to be preserved, there must be a minimum number of people allowed to wonder at and be fascinated by them,” wrote Ebrahim Hamad. “People will not protect what they do not know.”

Starting with the end in mind

Another idea: Build a destination from the ground up. Rising up in Saudi Arabia ’s coastal desert on the Red Sea , in an area the size of Belgium, is a city-to-be called Neom. Plans call for the preservation of 95 percent of nature, “with zero cars, zero streets, and zero carbon emissions.”

“It’s one of the first destinations in the world entirely driven by regenerative tourism principles,” says Paul Marshall, Neom’s chief environment officer. The destination plans to use technology to transform the way people engage with nature and conservation, instead of channeling them into a visitors center.

“We want to have an inside-out visitors center using technology such as AR/VR to project [an image] while people are outside in nature,” says Marshall. “This won’t be nature pretending to be in a building; this will be educational information projected onto the real landscape.”

There are other technology applications. Just as Instagram and other social media contribute to the destruction of fragile places as copycats follow influencers to places “for the ‘gram,” some are using the same methods to reverse the damage.

The Leave No Trace organization, along with destinations such as Jackson Hole , encourages travelers to use generic rather than specific geotags to reduce the chances of a specific site being overrun. And the virtual reality that kept travelers “traveling” to destinations during the pandemic could be easily deployed to ease the burden on fragile destinations. France’s famous Lascaux caves , closed since 1963, has been sharing the site’s remarkable prehistoric art through a replica cave, a high-tech traveling exhibition, and virtual tours on its website.

“Achieving a future that allows access to places without harming them is no easy task. Individuals mean well... but have you ever found a group of people who absolutely agree on everything?” asks reader Barbara Cool. Perhaps not, but it’s crucial that we act.

“The question we should really be asking is how can travel be used as a tool to solve these global problems? Because it can,” says Sampson.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

While on-the-go, keep in mind  these ways to travel sustainably . Avoid traveling to overtouristed places when you can. Mitigate crowding at fragile areas when you use social media. The Leave No Trace organization , along with some destinations, encourage travelers to use generic rather than specific geotags to reduce the chances of a specific site being overrun. If traveling to destinations such as Iceland, New Zealand , Haida Gwaii , and the island of Hawaii  be sure to sign and adhere to visitor pledges to tread lightly, protect nature, and respect culture.

Norie Quintos  writes and blogs about the world of travel from a cultural perspective. Find her on Twitter.

Related Topics

• SUSTAINABLE TOURISM
• SUSTAINABILITY
• OVERTOURISM
• CITIZEN SCIENCE

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A Year Without Travel

For Planet Earth, No Tourism Is a Curse and a Blessing

From the rise in poaching to the waning of noise pollution, travel’s shutdown is having profound effects. Which will remain, and which will vanish?

By Lisa W. Foderaro

For the planet, the year without tourists was a curse and a blessing.

With flights canceled, cruise ships mothballed and vacations largely scrapped, carbon emissions plummeted. Wildlife that usually kept a low profile amid a crush of tourists in vacation hot spots suddenly emerged. And a lack of cruise ships in places like Alaska meant that humpback whales could hear each other’s calls without the din of engines.

That’s the good news. On the flip side, the disappearance of travelers wreaked its own strange havoc, not only on those who make their living in the tourism industry, but on wildlife itself, especially in developing countries. Many governments pay for conservation and enforcement through fees associated with tourism. As that revenue dried up, budgets were cut, resulting in increased poaching and illegal fishing in some areas. Illicit logging rose too, presenting a double-whammy for the environment. Because trees absorb and store carbon, cutting them down not only hurt wildlife habitats, but contributed to climate change.

“We have seen many financial hits to the protection of nature,” said Joe Walston, executive vice president of global conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society. “But even where that hasn’t happened, in a lot of places people haven’t been able to get into the field to do their jobs because of Covid.”

From the rise in rhino poaching in Botswana to the waning of noise pollution in Alaska, the lack of tourism has had a profound effect around the world. The question moving forward is which impacts will remain, and which will vanish, in the recovery.

A change in the air

While the pandemic’s impact on wildlife has varied widely from continent to continent, and country to country, its effect on air quality was felt more broadly.

In the United States, greenhouse gas emissions last year fell more than 10 percent , as state and local governments imposed lockdowns and people stayed home, according to a report in January by the Rhodium Group, a research and consulting firm.

The most dramatic results came from the transportation sector, which posted a 14.7 percent decrease. It’s impossible to tease out how much of that drop is from lost tourism versus business travel. And there is every expectation that as the pandemic loosens its grip, tourism will resume — likely with a vengeance.

Still, the pandemic helped push American emissions below 1990 levels for the first time. Globally, carbon dioxide emissions fell 7 percent , or 2.6 billion metric tons, according to new data from international climate researchers. In terms of output, that is about double the annual emissions of Japan.

“It’s a lot and it’s a little,” said Jason Smerdon, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory . “Historically, it’s a lot. It’s the largest single reduction percent-wise over the last 100 years. But when you think about the 7 percent in the context of what we need to do to mitigate climate change, it’s a little.”

In late 2019, the United Nations Environment Program cautioned that global greenhouse gases would need to drop 7.6 percent every year between 2020 and 2030. That would keep the world on its trajectory of meeting the temperature goals set under the Paris Agreement, the 2016 accord signed by nearly 200 nations.

“The 7 percent drop last year is on par with what we would need to do year after year,” Dr. Smerdon said. “Of course we wouldn’t want to do it the same way. A global pandemic and locking ourselves in our apartments is not the way to go about this.”

Interestingly, the drop in other types of air pollution during the pandemic muddied the climate picture. Industrial aerosols, made up of soot, sulfates, nitrates and mineral dust, reflect sunlight back into space, thus cooling the planet. While their reduction was good for respiratory health, it had the effect of offsetting some of the climate benefits of cascading carbon emissions.

For the climate activist Bill McKibben , one of the first to sound the alarm about global warming in his 1989 book, “The End of Nature,” the pandemic underscored that the climate crisis won’t be averted one plane ride or gallon of gas at a time.

“We’ve come through this pandemic year when our lives changed more than any of us imagined they ever would,” Mr. McKibben said during a Zoom webinar hosted in February by the nonprofit Green Mountain Club of Vermont.

“Everybody stopped flying; everybody stopped commuting,” he added. “Everybody just stayed at home. And emissions did go down, but they didn’t go down that much, maybe 10 percent with that incredible shift in our lifestyles. It means that most of the damage is located in the guts of our systems and we need to reach in and rip out the coal and gas and oil and stick in the efficiency, conservation and sun and wind.”

Wildlife regroups

Just as the impact of the pandemic on air quality is peppered with caveats, so too is its influence on wildlife.

Animals slithered, crawled and stomped out of hiding across the globe, sometimes in farcical fashion. Last spring, a herd of Great Orme Kashmiri goats was spotted ambling through empty streets in Llandudno, a coastal town in northern Wales. And hundreds of monkeys — normally fed by tourists — were involved in a disturbing brawl outside of Bangkok, apparently fighting over food scraps.

In meaningful ways, however, the pandemic revealed that wildlife will regroup if given the chance. In Thailand, where tourism plummeted after authorities banned international flights, leatherback turtles laid their eggs on the usually mobbed Phuket Beach. It was the first time nests were seen there in years, as the endangered sea turtles, the largest in the world, prefer to nest in seclusion.

Similarly, in Koh Samui, Thailand’s second largest island, hawksbill turtles took over beaches that in 2018 hosted nearly three million tourists. The hatchlings were documented emerging from their nests and furiously moving their flippers toward the sea.

For Petch Manopawitr, a marine conservation manager of the Wildlife Conservation Society Thailand, the sightings were proof that natural landscapes can recover quickly. “Both Ko Samui and Phuket have been overrun with tourists for so many years,” he said in a phone interview. “Many people had written off the turtles and thought they would not return. After Covid, there is talk about sustainability and how it needs to be embedded in tourism, and not just a niche market but all kinds of tourism.”

In addition to the sea turtles, elephants, leaf monkeys and dugongs (related to manatees) all made cameos in unlikely places in Thailand. “Dugongs are more visible because there is less boat traffic,” Mr. Manopawitr said. “The area that we were surprised to see dugongs was the eastern province of Bangkok. We didn’t know dugongs still existed there.”

He and other conservationists believe that countries in the cross hairs of international tourism need to mitigate the myriad effects on the natural world, from plastic pollution to trampled parks.

That message apparently reached the top levels of the Thai government. In September, the nation’s natural resources and environment minister, Varawut Silpa-archa, said he planned to shutter national parks in stages each year, from two to four months. The idea, he told Bloomberg News , is to set the stage so that “nature can rehabilitate itself.”

An increase in poaching

In other parts of Asia and across Africa, the disappearance of tourists has had nearly the opposite result. With safari tours scuttled and enforcement budgets decimated, poachers have plied their nefarious trade with impunity. At the same time, hungry villagers have streamed into protected areas to hunt and fish.

There were reports of increased poaching of leopards and tigers in India, an uptick in the smuggling of falcons in Pakistan, and a surge in trafficking of rhino horns in South Africa and Botswana.

Jim Sano, the World Wildlife Fund’s vice president for travel, tourism and conservation, said that in sub-Saharan Africa, the presence of tourists was a powerful deterrent. “It’s not only the game guards,” he said. “It’s the travelers wandering around with the guides that are omnipresent in these game areas. If the guides see poachers with automatic weapons, they report it.”

In the Republic of Congo, the Wildlife Conservation Society has noticed an increase in trapping and hunting in and around protected areas. Emma J. Stokes, regional director of the Central Africa program for the organization, said that in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, monkeys and forest antelopes were being targeted for bushmeat.

“It’s more expensive and difficult to get food during the pandemic and there is a lot of wildlife up there,” she said by phone. “We obviously want to deter people from hunting in the park, but we also have to understand what’s driving that because it’s more complex.”

The Society and the Congolese government jointly manage the park, which spans 1,544 square miles of lowland rainforest — larger than Rhode Island. Because of the virus, the government imposed a national lockdown, halting public transportation. But the organization was able to arrange rides to markets since the park is considered an essential service. “We have also kept all 300 of our park staff employed,” she added.

Largely absent: the whir of propellers, the hum of engines

While animals around the world were subject to rifles and snares during the pandemic, one thing was missing: noise. The whir of helicopters diminished as some air tours were suspended. And cruise ships from the Adriatic Sea to the Gulf of Mexico were largely absent. That meant marine mammals and fish had a break from the rumble of engines and propellers.

So did research scientists. Michelle Fournet is a marine ecologist who uses hydrophones (essentially aquatic microphones) to listen in on whales. Although the total number of cruise ships (a few hundred) pales in comparison to the total number of cargo ships (tens of thousands), Dr. Fournet says they have an outsize role in creating underwater racket. That is especially true in Alaska, a magnet for tourists in search of natural splendor.

“Cargo ships are trying to make the most efficient run from point A to point B and they are going across open ocean where any animal they encounter, they encounter for a matter of hours,” she said. “But when you think about the concentration of cruise ships along coastal areas, especially in southeast Alaska, you basically have five months of near-constant vessel noise. We have a population of whales listening to them all the time.”

Man-made noise during the pandemic dissipated in the waters near the capital of Juneau, as well as in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve . Dr. Fournet, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University, observed a threefold decrease in ambient noise in Glacier Bay between 2019 and 2020. “That’s a really big drop in noise,” she said, “and all of that is associated with the cessation of these cruise ships.”

Covid-19 opened a window onto whale sounds in Juneau as well. Last July, Dr. Fournet, who also directs the Sound Science Research Collective , a marine conservation nonprofit, had her team lower a hydrophone in the North Pass, a popular whale-watching destination. “In previous years,” she said, “you wouldn’t have been able to hear anything — just boats. This year we heard whales producing feeding calls, whales producing contact calls. We heard sound types that I have never heard before.”

Farther south in Puget Sound, near Seattle, whale-watching tours were down 75 percent last year. Tour operators like Jeff Friedman, owner of Maya’s Legacy Whale Watching , insist that their presence on the water benefits whales since the captains make recreational boaters aware of whale activity and radio them to slow down. Whale-watching companies also donate to conservation groups and report sightings to researchers.

“During the pandemic, there was a huge increase in the number of recreational boats out there,” said Mr. Friedman, who is also president of the Pacific Whale Watch Association . “It was similar to R.V.s. People decided to buy an R.V. or a boat. The majority of the time, boaters are not aware that the whales are present unless we let them know.”

Two years ago, in a move to protect Puget Sound’s tiny population of Southern Resident killer whales, which number just 75, Washington’s Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law reducing boat speeds to 7 knots within a half nautical mile of the whales and increasing a buffer zone around them, among other things.

Many cheered the protections. But environmental activists like Catherine W. Kilduff, a senior attorney in the oceans program at the Center for Biological Diversity, believe they did not go far enough. She wants the respite from noise that whales enjoyed during the pandemic to continue.

“The best tourism is whale-watching from shore,” she said.

Looking Ahead

Debates like this are likely to continue as the world emerges from the pandemic and leisure travel resumes. Already, conservationists and business leaders are sharing their visions for a more sustainable future.

Ed Bastian, Delta Air Lines’ chief executive, last year laid out a plan to become carbon neutral by spending $1 billion over 10 years on an assortment of strategies. Only 2.5 percent of global carbon emissions are traced to aviation, but a 2019 study suggested that could triple by midcentury.

In the meantime, climate change activists are calling on the flying public to use their carbon budgets judiciously.

Tom L. Green, a senior climate policy adviser with the David Suzuki Foundation , an environmental organization in Canada, said tourists might consider booking a flight only once every few years, saving their carbon footprint (and money) for a special journey. “Instead of taking many short trips, we could occasionally go away for a month or more and really get to know a place,” he said.

For Mr. Walston of the Wildlife Conservation Society, tourists would be wise to put more effort into booking their next resort or cruise, looking at the operator’s commitment to sustainability.

“My hope is not that we stop traveling to some of these wonderful places, because they will continue to inspire us to conserve nature globally,” he said. “But I would encourage anyone to do their homework. Spend as much time choosing a tour group or guide as a restaurant. The important thing is to build back the kind of tourism that supports nature.”

Lisa W. Foderaro is a former reporter for The New York Times whose work has also appeared in National Geographic and Audubon Magazine.

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram , Twitter and Facebook . And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation.

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Why we need to stop thinking of the Caribbean as a tourist ‘paradise’

Researcher in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Royal Holloway University of London

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Descriptions of the Caribbean have long reduced the region to the luring trinity of sun, sea and sand in order to market it as the ideal holiday destination. The splendour of its rainforests and the aquatic hues of its coral reefs are undeniably beautiful.

But Caribbean islands are also home to people, animals and other non-human species whose complex histories have been shaped by exploitative tourism .

In the west, the idea of a “paradise lost”, as popularised by Milton’s famous epic poem telling the story of Adam and Eve, gave rise to a hunt for “undiscovered” Edens still present on Earth.

When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, the appeal of an earthly paradise was at its zenith in Europe. Setting out with the intention of reaching East Asia to establish more effective intercontinental trade routes – as well as to spread Catholicism – Columbus seemed to be taking his cue from the Bible, whose Book of Genesis describes the garden of paradise as being planted “eastward in Eden” .

But when Columbus first set foot on what was in fact a Caribbean beach, the natural landscape presented another, secular prize: the promise of infinite riches from the natural world.

Sure enough, the increasing hype in the west around the search for paradise became less about pleasing God and more about greed for travellers like Columbus, as evidenced by colonisers’ exploitation of indigenous people and extraction of wealth from natural and biological resources.

The neocolonial paradise

The seductive modern image of paradise, with its golden sands and crystal waters, evolved as part of a neo-colonial project of tourism, as the flow of foreign power was being reimagined in the wake of the collapse of European empires .

From travel brochures to television advertisements, the tourism industry presents the unethical idea that paradise can be bought just like any other commodity.

The myth of paradise has turned the Caribbean region into a space open to invasion by the highest bidder . Westerners are encouraged to escape from the monotony of everyday life to be serviced at the hands of labourers – a dangerous echo of life on the plantation for enslaved African people.

Poetry as protest and resistance

Many contemporary Caribbean writers discuss some of the Caribbean’s most urgent environmental and social concerns, including exploitative tourism, dwindling local land rights and underpaid citizen labour .

Jamaica Kincaid , Michele Cliff and others have likened tourism to a renewed version of colonialism. For me, the most striking writing on the Caribbean environment comes from the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott .

Walcott, in his poem “Midsummer XXVII” , describes how nature in Trinidad has been “replaced or modified” by the “grey, metal light” of technology. Under the joint influences of colonialism and extractive capitalism affecting the islands, the Caribbean sea starts to seem like “sheets of zinc” and the sun like “steady acetylene”.

The dominance of tourist-oriented, rather than local-oriented, businesses is also suggested in Walcott’s poem “The Star Apple Kingdom” , which describes the “ulcers” of “hotels”, “casinos”, “brothels”, and the “empires of tobacco, sugar and bananas”.

In his Nobel prize lecture , Walcott condemns tourist brochures for reducing the enormous diversity of the Caribbean environment to blandly appealing beach vistas out of “the shame of necessity”, mourning the islands’ “future of polluted marinas”.

My research into environmental racism and the damaging myth of Caribbean paradise has also been inspired by the work of the Bahamian-born poet Marion Bethel. She writes about how colonial violence led to the brutal demise of the Caribbean environment through forest clearance, soil erosion and reef destruction.

In her poem “On a Coral Cay” , Bethel protests how in the Bahamas “the whale done dead … we no longer whale or wreck”. She also considers how the effects of the colonial past have catalysed new forms of environmental degradation in the present day. “Tourism”, she writes, “is king / divine and banking, a silver prince”, and this “tourist plantation” and “banking estate” has made the natives “waiters” who “service the world”.

Be an ethical tourist

Listening to Caribbean voices should prompt us to practice more ethical travel as tourists. Visiting the Caribbean for a holiday is not in itself immoral, but Bethel, Walcott and other Caribbean writers have condemned unethical tourism practices.

Despite the economic importance of tourism in the Caribbean, the local environment and particularly marine life continues to suffer as a consequence of unsustainable activities catering to demanding tourists.

Income from tourists is rarely distributed evenly: so support native businesses by shopping locally instead of at popular, often foreign-owned chains . Be respectful of native customs and traditions. Do more than dwell in the luxury of your hotel or on the beach: immerse yourself in Caribbean culture by visiting museums and historical sites. Opt for eco-friendly transportation. Don’t litter. Take photos of the land and the animals with caution and respect, and make sure the local people give their permission before they end up on your Instagram feed.

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UN Tourism | Bringing the world closer

Tourism – an economic and social phenomenon, share this content.

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Why Tourism?

Over the decades, tourism has experienced continued growth and deepening ‎diversification to become one of the fastest growing economic sectors in the world. ‎Modern tourism is closely linked to development and encompasses a growing number ‎of new destinations. These dynamics have turned tourism into a key driver for socio-‎economic progress.‎

Today, the business volume of tourism equals or even surpasses that of oil exports, ‎food products or automobiles. Tourism has become one of the major players in ‎international commerce, and represents at the same time one of the main income ‎sources for many developing countries. This growth goes hand in hand with an ‎increasing diversification and competition among destinations.‎

International tourist arrivals (overnight visitors) grew 4% in January-March 2019 compared to the same period last year, below the 6% average growth of the past two years.

This global spread of tourism in industrialised and developed states has produced ‎economic and employment benefits in many related sectors - from construction to ‎agriculture or telecommunications.‎

The contribution of tourism to economic well-being depends on the quality and the ‎revenues of the tourism offer. UN Tourism assists destinations in their sustainable ‎positioning in ever more complex national and international markets. As the UN agency ‎dedicated to tourism, UN Tourism points out that particularly developing countries stand to ‎benefit from sustainable tourism and acts to help make this a reality.‎

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Tourist Attractions Around The World Are Dealing With Overcrowding

NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic about the phenomenon called overtourism, which creates dangerous conditions for the environment, the locals and tourists themselves.

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NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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The destinations that are discouraging tourists, from Amsterdam to Cornwall

With amsterdam taking aim at disorderly brits, we discover where else has a difficult relationship with visitors, article bookmarked.

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Amsterdam’s new campaign warning British tourists against visiting the city for a “messy weekend” is the latest move in its fight against problem visitors.

As one of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations, attracting close to 20 million travellers each year, it’s not just overtourism that has been causing headaches for officials.

The city has already been cracking down on problem visitors, with earlier closing times for bars and brothels starting this weekend. A ban on smoking cannabis on the streets of the Red Light District should be in place from May, and discussions are ongoing as to whether tourists should be banned altogether from the city’s famous coffee shops.

Previously, the non-profit group Amsterdam & Partners, which describes itself as “dedicated to making Amsterdam an even better place to live, work and visit”, lobbied the Dutch government to implement a minimum flight price to discourage tourists looking for cheap city breaks, and in 2017 Amsterdam banned beer bikes , with the often rowdy activity labelled a “public order problem”.

The Dutch capital is not alone in prioritising quality over quantity when it comes to tourists. Venice, in Italy’s northern Veneto region, is on the front line of this particular battle.

For years, La Serenissima has mooted an entry ticket system to target daytrippers (those staying overnight already pay a tourist tax). The city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, called it “the right way forward for a more balanced management of tourism”.

In 2022, authorities announced plans to introduce the entry fee from January 2023, but these plans have been postponed. There’s no timescale for the entry price to launch, though from April next year anyone departing from Venice Marco Polo Airport will need to pay a €2.50 surcharge. The concept of an entry fee for tourists isn’t a new idea; Bhutan, the landlocked Himalayan nation, has been a proponent of this approach in order to fulfil its policy of “high value, low impact” tourism. The number of visitors has been highly restricted since the country opened to tourism in 1974, and those who do visit must pay the ‘Sustainable Development Fee’ of US$200 (£163) per day.

Read more on sustainable travel :

• A green guide to going on holiday
• The best travel companies for booking a sustainable holiday
• How to see Peru’s Machu Picchu the sustainable way

Venice has also made moves to “preserve decorum and traditions” in the canal city. In 2017, it banned new kebab shops and other fast-food restaurants from opening, following similar rules introduced in Florence and Verona.

While cities such as Barcelona introduced a network of bus stops to spread travellers more evenly around the city, some in Venice – such as Melissa Conn, director of Save Venice – believes this option is “worse”, and that she would rather tourists stick to Piazza San Marco so residents can enjoy the rest of the city.

An even bigger step to control tourism saw Venice banning cruise ships from the lagoon in August 2021. Pressure groups such as No Grandi Navi (No Big Boats) have long lobbied for large vessels to be banished from Venice’s historic centre, arguing that they pollute and threaten the stability of its buildings and fragile ecosystem.

The decision came after Unesco warned that Italy could be placed on a blacklist for not banning liners from the World Heritage Site.

A mass influx of tourists from ships has been a concern in several destinations already feeling the effects of mass tourism. In recent years, the Belgian government has cut the number of ships allowed to dock at Zeebrugge port and the Greek island of Santorini , which was seeing an overwhelming 10,000 tourists arriving each day on cruises, introduced a cap which cut that number of arrivals by thousands.

Several destinations in Southeast Asia have taken to closing down areas entirely to stem damage from tourism. Notable examples include the island of Boracay in the Philippines, which was closed to travellers for six months in 2018 after the then-president Rodrigo Duterte said it was becoming a “cesspool”, and Maya Bay in Thailand , which after being made famous by the 2000 film The Beach saw up to 5,000 tourists visit a day, causing damage to coral, disturbed marine life and oil leaks from boats. It stayed off-limits from 2018 until 2022 .

In the Pacific, the mayor of Maui County, Hawaii, Mike Victorino, asked airlines to decrease flights arriving there, as the state struggled with the post-pandemic travel boom. “We’re just asking for a pause,” Mr Victorino said at a press conference.

There are some less drastic measures taken to address the influx of tourists. Last summer on Italy’s Amalfi Coast , cars travelling on the busiest part of the SS163 (between Positano and Vietri sul Mare) in peak hours were subject to an alternate number plate system. Vehicles with number plates ending in odd numbers were allowed on the roads on odd-numbered dates and evens on the others.

The desire for the “right people” to visit an area has also been expressed in the UK.

Malcolm Bell, the former Visit Cornwall chief executive, told Cornwall Live last year that visitors “fall into five unofficial categories – at one level you have friends, then you have guests, then you have tourists, then you have bloody tourists, then you have f***ing emmets . You can quote me on that.”

Emmet is an old word in the Cornish dialect meaning “ant” that is used as a derogatory term for tourist.

Following the outburst, Cornish councillor Barry Jordan told The Telegraph that “we welcome all tourists. Cornwall relies on tourism.”

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Is it possible to be a ‘sustainable tourist’? 12 ways to make a positive impact on your travels

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After a period of plummeting tourism numbers during the pandemic, tourism is having a resurgence. This is good news for many workers and businesses, but it could be bad for the planet. Here is a selection of ways tourists can ensure that their holidays don’t harm the environment.

There are many positive aspects to tourism. Around two billion people travel each year for tourism purposes. Travel and tourism connect people and bring the world closer through shared experiences, cultural awareness and community building. It provides jobs, spurs regional development, and is a key driver for socio-economic progress.

However, there is often a downside; Many popular destinations are threatened by increasing pollution, environmental hazards, damage to heritage sites and overuse of resources. And that’s without factoring the pollution caused by travel to and from these destinations.

So, with that in mind here are some tips that will help you to enjoy your trip, and leave with the confidence that your favoured tourist destination will not be damaged by your presence, once you return home.

1. Ditch single-use plastics

Often used for less than 15 minutes, single-use plastic items can take more than 1,000 years to degrade. Many of us are switching to sustainable options in our daily lives, and we can take the same attitude when we’re on the road. By choosing reusable bottles and bags wherever you go, you can help ensure there is less plastic waste in the ocean and other habitats.

2. Be ‘water wise’

On the whole, tourists use far more water than local residents. With a growing number of places experiencing water scarcity, the choices you make can help ensure people have adequate access to water in the future. By foregoing a daily change of sheets and towels during hotel stays, we can save millions of litres of water each year.

3. Buy local

When you buy local, you help boost the local economy, benefit local communities, and help to reduce the destination’s carbon footprint from transporting the goods. This is also true at mealtimes, so enjoy fresh, locally grown produce every chance you get.

4. Use an ethical operator

Tour operations involve people, logistics, vendors, transportation and much more. Each link in the chain can impact the environment - positively or negatively. If you prefer to leave the planning to someone else, be sure to pick an operator that prioritizes the environment, uses resources efficiently and respects local culture.

5. ‘Please don’t feed the animals’

Sharing food with wildlife or getting close enough to do so increases the chances of spreading diseases like cold, flu and pneumonia from humans to animals. Also, when animals get used to receiving food from humans, their natural behaviours are altered, and they become dependent on people for survival. In some cases, it can also lead to human-animal conflict.

6. And don’t eat them either!

By creating the demand, consuming endangered or exotic animals leads to an increase in poaching, trafficking and exploitation of animals. Besides the harm done to the individual animal on your plate, irresponsible dining can contribute to the extinction of species already threatened by climate change and habitat loss. Keep this in mind when shopping for souvenirs as well, and steer clear of products made from endangered wildlife.

7. Share a ride

Transportation is a major contributor to the carbon footprint from tourism. Instead of private taxis, explore using public transportation like trains, buses and shared cabs. You can also ride a bicycle, which offers a convenient and cheaper way to explore and learn about a place.

8. Consider a homestay

Staying with a local resident or family is a nature-friendly option that allows you to get up close and personal with local culture and customs. Staying at local homestays can uplift communities by providing income while giving you a peek into different ways of life.

9. Do your homework

Before your travel, educate yourself about your destination. Doing so will allow you to better immerse yourself in local traditions and practices and appreciate things that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. With the right information, you can explore a destination in a more sensitive manner and surprise yourself with new adventures and discoveries.

10. Visit national parks and sanctuaries

Exploring nature and wildlife through national parks is an intimate way to learn about the animals and their ecosystems first hand. In some cases, your entrance fee supports conservation efforts that protect species and landscapes and preserve these natural spaces for future visitors to enjoy.

11. Don’t leave a trace

You can make a mark by not leaving a mark on your vacation destination. Put garbage in its place to avoid litter, and don’t remove or alter anything without permission. Let’s make sure we leave only soft footprints, and not the environmental kind.

12. Tell your friends

Now that you’re ready to travel in eco-friendly style, it’s time spread the word! Inform fellow travellers, friends and family about how sustainable tourism benefits local people by enhancing their livelihoods and well-being, and helps all of us by safeguarding our beautiful environment.

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The effects of natural disasters on international tourism: A global analysis

Jaume rosselló.

a Departament d’Economia Aplicada, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain

b Griffith Institute for Tourism, Griffith University, Australia

c Departament of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Susanne Becken

d School of Hospitality Management and Tourism, University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Maria Santana-Gallego

Tourism is shaped by a wide range of factors and forces, including exogenous ones that have no direct link with the tourism sector. Natural disasters and unexpected events are prime examples of such determining factors, as they have profound effects on individuals and society, and as a result have the potential to affect tourism flows considerably. Several theoretical arguments exist why natural disasters and unexpected events could influence tourist destination choices. However, empirical research to confirm the nature and extent of impacts of disasters on tourism is lacking. To address this gap, this paper incorporates a dataset on natural and man-made disaster events into a model of international tourism flows to evaluate the effect of different types of disasters on international arrivals at the national level. Findings provide evidence that the occurrence of different types of event change tourist flows to varying degrees. Although in some cases a positive effect is estimated, in general the impacts are negative, resulting in reduced tourist arrivals following an event. Understanding the relationship between disaster events and tourism is helpful for destination managers who make critical decisions in relation to recovery, reconstruction and marketing.

Graphical abstract

• • First global evaluation of the impact of disasters on international tourism flows.
• • Tsunamis, Floods and Volcanic Eruptions constitute negative motivators.
• • Volcanic Eruptions impact most negatively on international tourism flows.
• • High economic consequences of a disaster impact negatively on tourism.
• • In line with theory, some disasters can also positively affect flows.

1. Introduction

Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, bush fires, hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves have always occurred. These events have formed part of the wider ‘riskscape’ that humans have learned to manage and live with. However, more recently the impacts of disasters have increased substantially, partly because of the exacerbating effects of climate change, but also due to the growing complexity of socio-ecological systems in a highly connected and globalized world ( Becken, Mahon, Rennie, & Shakeela, 2014 ). For instance, the year 2017 recorded a series of hurricanes (Harvey, Irma and Maria) in the Caribbean and a severe earthquake in Mexico, amongst other events, and these resulted in the highest incurred losses ever recorded (US$ 135 billion) ( Munich, 2018 ).

Disasters constitute abrupt changes that shock the system in which tourism is embedded ( Shondell Miller, 2008 ). The nature and extent of impacts depend on the type of shock and the resilience of the affected system ( OECD, 2014 ). Most disasters have profound impacts on individuals, organizations and communities, and consequently on tourism activities. The repercussions of a disaster are likely to affect tourism directly at a destination country, but indirect consequences for travel to and from the affected region are also conceivable ( Jin, Qu & Bap. 2019 ; Ruan, Quan & Liu, 2017 ). Understanding, managing and responding to these risks, therefore, has to be an integral component of sustainable tourism management ( Shakeela & Becken, 2015 ). Consequently, it is not surprising that the topic of risk management and disaster mitigation is attracting increasing attention in tourism research. An emerging body of literature has provided both theoretical and empirical insights into multiple aspects of disasters and tourism.

Research to date has largely focused on crisis management and disaster risk reduction ( Becken & Hughey, 2013 ; Faulkner, 2001 ; Ritchie, 2008 ). In particular, academics and practitioners have been interested in how sustainable development and marketing strategies should include plans to prepare, protect and rebuild a destination after a disaster, both in terms of physical assets and destination image ( Aljerf & Choukaife, 2016 ; Okuyama, 2018 ). The perceptions of safety is an important aspect of destination image, and different types of risks and events have been studied in the context of visitor travel information seeking and decision making ( Sharifpour, Walters, Ritchie, & Winter, 2014 ; Trumbo et al., 2016 ; Williams & Baláž, 2015 ). Re-establishing public perceptions of safety and attractiveness following a disaster is crucial to attract and reassure potential visitors to travel to the destination and, by doing so, assisting the affected area to regain functionality and economic recovery ( WTTC, 2018 ). In addition to understanding visitor perceptions, it has been found that addressing risk perceptions and behaviours of relevant tourism stakeholder is critical for effective disaster response and recovery ( Kozak, Crotts, & Law, 2007 ; Park & Reisinger, 2010 ).

Tourism is exposed and vulnerable to multiple types of hazards ( Becken, Zammit, & Hendrikx, 2015 ), and disasters have the potential to deter visitors from travelling to affected destinations ( Bhati, Upadhayaya, & Sharma, 2016 ). However, empirical research that confirms or quantifies the relationship between disasters and tourism activity is scant. Existing studies have taken a case study approach (e.g. for Chinese outbound tourism, see Jin, Qu, & Bao, 2019 ), but a global analysis is missing ( Ghaderi, Mat Som, & Henderson, 2014 ; Jónsdóttir, 2011 ; Mazzocchi & Montini, 2001 ; Rucińska & Lechowicz, 2014 ). It is therefore timely to undertake a global study that uses a consistent approach to measuring the impact of disasters on international tourism movements. To increase the value of such a study for tourism managers, it needs to be designed in a way that includes a wide range of disaster types and magnitudes in the same model ( Ghimire, 2016 ).

Consequently, the aim of this research is to explore the effect of various types of natural and man-made disasters on international tourism movements. To that end, this research integrates two different global datasets, namely one on disasters and another one on bilateral international tourist flows. A gravity model for international tourism flows is defined to quantify the effects of different disaster events on international tourist arrivals to the affected country. More precisely, we analyze the impact of droughts, earthquakes (ground movements and tsunamis), epidemics, cold and heat waves, floods, industrial accidents, landslides, wildfires, storms and volcanic activities. Moreover, we use three different proxies to measure the impact of disasters; namely the number of deaths, affected people and economic costs. Results will support the tourism sector and other key players (e.g. international insurance companies) in developing adequate responses to managing risk and recovery. To the best of our knowledge, the present research is the first attempt to undertake such an integrated analysis at a global scale.

The rest of this article is organized as follows: the next section contains a literature review of the arguments behind the expected relationship between disaster events and tourism demand. The third section explains the methodology, data and the research design. The fourth section presents the empirical application. Finally, a concluding discussion is presented that provides recommendations and an outlook on future research.

2. Literature review

The general perception might point towards an increase in the frequency of natural disasters over time, but this assumption needs to be verified. In fact, it has been suggested that, in some cases, the definition of disasters can become too fluid for statistical time series consideration ( Horlick-Jones, Fortune, & Peters, 1991 ). Neumayer and Barthel (2011) analyzed the economic damage from climate-related disasters and they found no significant upward trends in normalized data over the last 30 years globally. However, the same study acknowledged that the frequency of weather-related natural disasters indicates an upward trend.

Other research suggests that the combination of climate change, industrialization and urbanization has accelerated the magnitude and occurrence of natural disasters around the world and the extent of the resulting damage (Becken et al., 2015; Park & Reisinger, 2010 ). Population growth (often occurring in exposed areas such as coastal environments) is recognized as a key driver to explain why natural disasters affect more and more people ( Berke, 1998 ; Wachinger, Renn, Begg, & Kuhlicke, 2012 ). Aside from natural disasters, Richardson (1994) notes that man-made disasters are becoming more severe because of the increasingly more powerful technology that is being used.

Perceptions of the frequency and extent of disasters are just as important as statistical facts. A key factor in this growing risk perception is the media ( Gierlach, Belsher, & Beutler, 2010 ). For a the general public, who is exposed to mass media, it may appear that we live in an increasingly disaster prone world ( Faulkner, 2001 ). The saying ‘perceptions are reality’ is nowhere more pertinent than in tourism, where potential visitors chose their destinations based on a mix of objective and subjective factors. Destination (risk) perception has emerged as one of the critical factors in the decision-making process ( Becken, Jin, Chen, & Gao, 2016 ).

Disasters and other forms of crises (e.g. epidemics, conflict, pollution) can lead to a reduction in visitation to the affected area ( Bhati et al., 2016 ). Several examples in the literature provide empirical evidence of reductions in tourist arrivals following major events. For instance, Mazzocchi and Montini (2001) evaluated the impact on visitation to the Umbria region in Central Italy, following a major earthquake in September 1997. The data showed that arrivals fell drastically the first month after the main shock, with ongoing loss in tourism activity being recorded until June 1998. A case study of a volcanic eruption at the Eyjafjallajökull glacier in Iceland on 14th March 2010 showed that tourism numbers to Iceland reduced by 49% until 28th April 2011 ( Jónsdóttir, 2011 ). Huang and Min (2002) analyzed the Taiwan earthquake in September 1999, using an integrated moving average model to explore the recovery process. Their study revealed that the island's inbound arrivals had not yet fully recovered from the earthquake's devastation after 11 months. Kuo, Chen, Tseng, Ju, and Huang (2008) also used a time series model to investigate the impacts of infectious diseases, including Avian Flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome, on international tourist arrivals in Asia. The empirical results indicated that the numbers of affected cases had a significant impact in the case of SARS (see also Mao, Ding, & Lee, 2010 ; McAleer, Huang, Kuo, Chen, & Chang, 2010 ), but for Avian Flu.

Man-made crises, such as the BP oil spill in the Mexican Gulf in 2010, have also been found to reduce demand for travel to the affected area ( Ritchie, Crotts, Zehrer, & Volsky, 2013 ). Often, declines in visitation spread to neighboring areas, even when they are not impacted by the event. A recent example has been the dramatic down turn in tourism in the Caribbean region, following the devastating hurricane season in 2017 ( WTTC, 2018 ). Events within one country or a region can lead to notable structural breaks in international tourism arrivals, which was demonstrated by Cró and Martins (2017a) in a recent study on various forms of crises in 25 countries.

There are several reasons why visitation to disaster areas declines in the immediate aftermath of an event. The most direct inhibitor relates to the damage inflicted by a disaster that prevents the affected areas from engaging in tourism activity. Secondly, the decline in tourist arrivals is due to people's risk perceptions and avoidance of regions that are deemed unsafe ( Kozak et al., 2007 ; Sönmez, Apostolopoulos, & Tarlow, 1999 ). Thirdly, and related to the second issue, is that potential travelers may feel uncomfortable or have ethical concerns about travelling to a disaster region. These underlying factors are discussed in more detail.

In many cases, disasters pose significant physical constraints on the delivery of tourism services, thus severely limiting the supply side of tourism ( Shaw, Saayman, & Saayman, 2012 ). Depending on the type and extent of the disaster, critical infrastructure could be compromised or dysfunctional. Prominent examples include airports and ports, land transport infrastructure, and electricity and telecommunication networks ( Ghobarah, Saatcioglu, & Nistor, 2006 ; Parajuli & Haynes, 2006 ). In addition, core tourism assets could be damaged and not ready for business, such as accommodation establishments and key attractions. For instance, the 2015 earthquake in Kathmandu, Nepal, resulted in wide-spread destruction of UNESCO listed World Heritage sites, and several trekking routes were deemed unsafe due to risks of rock fall and movements following further aftershocks or heavy rain events ( Becken, 2015 ).

Even longer-term and insidious disasters, such as a drought, may impede the ability of a destination to cater for tourism. A recent example was the water shortage in Cape Town, South Africa, that led to a reduction in tourism and a notable loss in income for local businesses. The decline was possibly influenced by requests to conserve waters, but also due to perceptions by visitors that the destination is not able to host tourists ( Wendell, 2018 ).

In addition to uncertainty around whether the destination is safe or tourism-ready, there are other psychological factors that influence tourists’ decision making. Frequently, media coverage of disasters conveys the resulting loss of life, human suffering, public and private property damage, and economic and social disruption. The ensuing negative publicity often characterizes the period after a disaster, lasting until full recovery is achieved and pre-disaster conditions resume ( Sönmez et al., 1999 ). For instance, Cohen (2005) points out that religious beliefs relating to the bodies of the tsunami victims trapped in sediment and rubble were behind a group of Asian tourists deciding to abandon their plans to visit Thailand after the 2006 Tsunami. Others may simply consider it inappropriate to visit a disaster zone.

Apart from religious or ethical concerns, some travelers do not wish to impede the recovery effort and place additional burden on the destination's resources and infrastructure (e.g. Becken, 2015 ). In some cases, the delayed recovery towards previously tourism figures is deliberate and led by the local tourism organizations. This was the case for the Christchurch (New Zealand) earthquake (2011), where extensive destruction of the city made tourism impossible, or at best would have led to unsatisfactory tourist experiences, leading Christchurch Canterbury Marketing to de-market Christchurch but promote surrounding regions instead ( Orchiston & Higham, 2014 ). Optimal timing and stages of recovery were examined by Okuyama (2018) for the case of avian flu in Japan.

Whilst both theory and empirical evidence point to a decline in tourism following a disaster, several factors might promote travel to an affected area. Providing information about hazards and their effects draws human attention and may even cause a level of fascination (e.g. the ‘ring of fire’, referring to tectonic activities around the edges of the Pacific Ocean). In this way, the number of tourists might be influenced by the coverage that media devote to natural disasters in other countries. Media often use extreme natural phenomena as material for captivating stories, and travel bloggers, tourism campaigners and social media multiply the lure of these. An example of a disaster turning into a tourist attraction is the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, with “the prospect of a new eruption bring[ing] a mix of trepidation and anticipation” ( Lawless, 2016 , p. 1).

Media coverage about a natural, or perhaps also man-made, phenomenon plays an informative role as a motivating factor to visit a region. Rucińska and Lechowicz (2014) argue that mass media and marketing are influential factors in the development of various forms of disaster-related tourism, as information on catastrophes popularizes the host location and the type of the phenomenon. Such coverage could be both educational and simultaneously stimulate the interest of the audience. Additionally, natural disasters and unexpected events can cause the arrival of people from other countries for humanitarian reasons but also for visiting friends and relatives who have been victims of those events. According to the statistical framework used by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, these arrivals are captured as international tourists.

Finally, the decision to visit a disaster area for a range of motivations has been conceptualized as Dark Tourism ( Rucińska & Lechowicz, 2014 ). This type of tourism involves travelling to places historically associated with death and tragedy ( Foley & Lennon, 1996 ). According to Rucińska (2016) , tourists might decide to travel to a region that has experienced a disaster because they want to feel emotions, risk, and the dynamics of natural hazards. Overall, the present research hypothesizes a negative relationship between national disasters and inbound tourism; however, it also considers the motivating factors pointed out by Rucińska (2016) that might lead to an increase in visitation after a disaster. The model developed in the following section will capture the cumulative impact of both effects.

3. Methodology and data

3.1. gravity model for tourism demand.

This research develops a gravity model for international tourism flows to quantify the effects of different types of natural and man-made disasters on tourist arrivals to the affected countries. Gravity models are commonly used in the trade literature ( Anderson, 2011 ), and increasingly in tourism research ( Fourie, Rosselló-Nadal, & Santana-Gallego, 2019 ; Khadaroo & Seetanah, 2008 ; Santeramo & Morelli, 2015 ). These models consider that international flows between two countries are directly proportional to their economic size, and inversely proportional to the distance between them. Consequently, the level of bilateral tourism flows can be explained by a set of determining variables as in a demand equation. Morley et al., 2014 have shown that gravity models to explain bilateral tourism can be derived from consumer choice theory. Accordingly, the formulation of a gravity model can also be interpreted as a tourism demand equation.

Analytically:

where, the dependent variable L n T o u i j t is the logarithm of tourist arrivals from country i , to destination country j , at year t ; X j t d is a set of d destination-specific time-variant variables such as income level or population while X i j t k is a set of k country-pair time-variant determinants such as belonging to the same regional trade agreement. The variables of interests for this research are included in Y j t l which is the set of l variables capturing the effect of l different disasters typologies (e.g. earthquake, tsunami, volcano, etc.) occurred in destination j during year t . This research uses three alternative proxies to measure the effect of disasters; namely number of deaths (D) in thousands, people affected (A) in millions and economic costs (C) in billions of US$. Finally, β 0 , β 1 k and β 2 l are parameters to be estimated.

Due to the panel nature of data used in these kinds of models, and since our variables of interest are destination-country time variant, country pairs fixed effects λ i j and origin-year fixed effects λ i t are also considered for estimation purposes. One of the consequences of this choice is that time-invariant country pair characteristics (such as distance or common borders) and time-variant origin country characteristics (such as income or population in the origin countries) are not explicitly included in the model. Specific consideration is not necessary, because all these variables are captured by these fixed effects, as also suggested by Balli, Ghassan, and Jeefri (2019) , Fourie et al. (2019) or Giambona, Dreassi, and Magrini (2018) . This is a common practice in the development of gravity models in order to avoid omitted factor bias, and instead focus on the variables of interest for the particular research question.

3.2. Data selection

As dependent variable, L n T o u i j t , we consider the natural logarithm of international tourist arrivals from country i to country j in year t . This dataset originates from the Compendium of Tourism Statistics compiled by the United Nations World Tourism Organization ( UNWTO, 2015 ). This database contains tourism movements between 171 countries for the period 1995–2013, with missing data for some years and countries.

In reference to the d variables determining tourism flows ( X j t d ), and according to the considerations mentioned above about the no inclusion of time-invariant country pair characteristics and time-variant origin country characteristics, we consider the logarithm of the real GDP per capita ( LnGDPpc jt ) as a proxy for the development level at each destination, and the logarithm of population ( LnPop jt ) to control for the size of the destination country ( Lim, 2006 ; Yap & Saha, 2013 ). Both variables were taken from the World Development Indicators (WDI) elaborated by the World Bank. Third, we also consider an instability indicator that concerns safety and security of visitors when they travel to a destination. Whilst there are different ways for evaluating safety and security at international level (See Cró & Martins, 2017b ; Cró, Martins, Simões, & Calisto, 2018 ; Fourie et al., 2019 or Santana-Gallego, Fourie, & Rosselló, 2020 ) in this case, and due to data coverage reasons, we use a proxy of the crime rate defined as the number of homicides per 10,000 inhabitants in the destination country ( Crime jt ). Data also stem from the WDI. On the other hand, vector X i j t k includes a variable to control for the intensity of the economic relationship between a pair of countries, which is also time varying. The idea is to capture the presence of trade agreements between country pairs as an indicator of bilateral relationships that could boost tourism. This variable ( RTA ijt ) is a dummy variable for being a signatory to the same regional trade agreement and stems from the Regional Trade Agreements Information System compiled by the World Trade Organization.

Data for the occurrence and impact of disasters were retrieved from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), which makes data available through the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT). EM-DAT was created with the initial support of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Belgian Government. The main objective of the database is to inform humanitarian action at national and international levels. The initiative aims to rationalize decision making for disaster preparedness, as well as provide an objective base for vulnerability assessment and priority setting. EM-DAT contains core data on the occurrence and effects of over 22,000 mass disasters in the world from 1900 to the present day. The database is compiled from various sources, including UN agencies, non-governmental organizations, insurance companies, research institutes and press agencies. 1

According to the objectives of this present research, the disaster types included in EM-DAT and considered in our analysis are presented in Table 1 , Table 2 . For the gravity equation estimation we are limited by the availability of the tourist database (1995–2013). All other datasets provide data for this timeframe as well, leading to a database that covers a total number of 7885 events from the period of 1995–2013. These are described using three types of impact metrics ( Table 1 ). More specifically, of all events, 74.8% report information on the number of deaths, 59.3% report the extent of affected people (beyond deaths) and 31.7% state an estimated amount of damage measured in economic terms.

Disaster typology and main descriptive magnitudes (1995–2013).

Notes: Cold Waves include severe winter conditions. Epidemic episodes are not characterized by economic costs.

Disaster typology by Regions and main descriptive magnitudes in terms of people.

Notes: Affected People in thousands. Costs in US billions of dollars.

With regards to people killed by different disaster types, Table 2 shows that ground movements emerge as the most fatal type of disaster, with a reported number of 338.000 deaths during the period 1995–2013. Tsunamis and storms accounted for almost 250,000 deaths in the same period. In terms of affected people, floods and droughts have the greatest impact, with about 1,7 and 1 billion of people impacted upon, respectively. Concerning the economic costs of disasters, storms rank first, with a total amount of 798,32 billion dollars of damage recorded in the database. Storms make up 38% of total economic costs for the selected disasters in the EM-DAT during the period 1995–2013.

The distribution of disasters across different regions, indicates considerable variation both in terms of event type and resulting impacts. For instance, in the case of storms, although only 16.8% take place in the Americas, the impact in terms of deaths, affected people and costs is comparatively high (42.5%, 60.3% and 66.1%, respectively) than in other regions. A similar result is obtained for earthquakes in the Asia-Pacific regions (44.5% of events), with disproportionally high impacts in relation to the number of deaths (49.2%), affected people (85.2%) and costs (73.4%). Europe, with some exception, is characterized by a lower incidence of deaths and affected people, but a higher occurrence of costs.

Table 3 shows the most important events for each type of disaster in the database. For example, it can be observed that the Earthquake of Haiti in January 2010, which led to 222,570 deaths, was the worst event in terms of fatalities. The major storm (Cyclone Nargis) that occurred in Myanmar during May 2008 resulted in 138,366 deaths, the second largest number in the records. In terms of affected people, the drought affecting India during 2015 and 2016 was the most significant event reported in the database (330 million people impacted). Disasters also cause substantial economic damage. The highest economic loss recorded was tropical hurricane Katrina that made landfall in New Orleans, USA. It caused a total amount of damage of $125 billion.

Main Disasters in terms of affected population, deaths and economic costs.

3.3. Data preparation and analysis

Although the disaster database includes the exact day of the event, for the purpose of this analysis we are limited by the yearly nature of tourism data. Following guidance from the previous literature ( Jónsdóttir, 2011 ; Mazzocchi & Montini, 2001 ; Rucińska & Lechowicz, 2014 ) we consider two alternatives: distributing the potential consequences of each of the disasters to the time frame of the following 12 months and alternatively to the next 6 months after an event. Thus, for instance, if a hypothetical disaster occurred in September of year 2000, in the first case, 4/12 of the amount of damage (measured in deaths, affected or costs) would be attributed to the year 2000 and 8/12 to 2001. In the second case, 4/6 of the amount of damage would be allocated to the year 2000 and 2/6 to 2001.

Another important issue to be considered is the multicollinearity that can arise between the different types of impacts related to the same specific disaster. Thus, it is expected (and found) that the consequences of a certain disaster in terms of deaths will be correlated to other impacts measured in terms of affected people and economic costs. The increase in the variance of the coefficient estimates could drive them to be unstable and difficult to interpret. Consequently, our first strategy is to consider the three impact metrics (i.e. deaths, affected people and cost) separately in different equations. Additionally, for each of the three metrics, we evaluate the possibility to distribute the effects within 6 and 12 months. This results in 6 specifications: three for each of the impacts, times the two evaluation periods (6 and 12 months).

Importantly, according to the theoretical argumentation, the relationship between disasters and arrivals is not unidirectional and necessarily negative, but an increase in tourist arrivals could be observed in certain circumstances. For this reason, a second research strategy considers the inclusion of all the variables in a general regression that is reduced using statistical testing strategies in order to get a specific regression encompassing every other parsimonious regression that is a valid restriction of the general regression ( Hoover & Perez, 1999 and 2004 ). In other words, we integrate the three impact metrics into a single equation. Through this strategy, it is possible to explore in detail if effects arise that counteract the initially expected negative relationship between disaster impacts and tourism flows. Again, two impact timeframes are considered.

The gravity model for bilateral tourism flows as defined in equation [1] is estimated by using the Correia (2017) procedure to estimate linear models with many levels of fixed effects. This procedure is a generalization of the panel-fixed effects estimator with both country-pair and origin-year fixed effects. Database includes 171 countries for the period 1995–2013.

Table 4 presents the results of estimating equation [1] for the bilateral tourist arrivals ( L n T o u i j t ) as dependent variable and including each disaster impact measure separately. As previously mentioned, because our variable of interest is destination-country time variant, country pairs fixed effects and origin-year fixed effects are included in the model to control for any type of determinant at origin or country-pair level. Therefore, only time variant country-pair and destination-specific determinants are required. Each column shows the estimate of different disaster consequences (D = deaths, A = affected people, and C = economic costs) and the two alternatives for distributing the effects across the following 6 and 12 months. It is important to mention that we are interested in estimating the short-run effect of the natural disaster on inbound tourism. Exploring how the tourism sector at the destination country recovers in the long-run is beyond the objective of the paper.

Estimation results.

Note: ***p < 0.01, **p < 0.05, *p < 0.1. Dyadic and origin-year fixed effects are included in the model but estimates are not reported. Robust standard errors clustered by pairs.

In general, for all the estimates, control variables considered as determinants of tourism flows are statistically significant and with the expected sign. The coefficients for both L n G D P p c j t and L n P o p j t are significantly positive and slightly higher that unity, implying that a 1% increase in the destination GDP per capita and population will lead to an increase higher than 1% on tourist arrivals to the country. The coefficient for the RTA ijt , that controls for the existence of a trade agreement between country pairs during specific years, is also significant and positive. In this case, due to the binary nature of the explanatory variable used, the estimated coefficient (slightly higher that 0.04) implies that the existence of a trade agreement increases the number of tourists to a destination by more than 4%. Finally, and as expected, the variable related to low levels of security and safety at the destination country ( Crime jt ) shows a negative effect, indicating that an increase in the number of homicides (per 10,000 inhabitants) reduces tourist arrivals.

In reference to the different types of disasters, for events associated with Tsunamis , Floods and Volcanoes , all the significant parameters are found to be negative, indicating that these three types of disasters constitute substantial negative motivators for prospective visitors. A more detailed examination of coefficients highlights that volcanic eruptions appear most deterring to international tourists. This circumstance could be related to the severity of the damage caused by volcanic eruptions, including potentially irreversible damage to infrastructure or the complete loss of a natural asset. For the occurrence of an eruption, and for every increase in the number of deaths (for every 1000 people), affected (in millions of people) and costs (in millions of US$), there will be a decrease in international tourists to the destination between 1.07% and 1.32%, 2.13%–1.78% and 4.51%–3.44%, respectively (according to whether the 6 or 12 months delay is considered).

Wildfires, Earthquakes, Industrial Accidents , and Storms present mixed effects on international tourist arrivals. For all types of disasters, and when economic costs are considered, a negative and significant relationship is found. In other words, the economic damage from these events, for example to infrastructure, is likely to reduce tourist arrivals. Wildfires appear as the second most detrimental type of disaster when measured in economic damage, leading to an expected fall of 0.03% of tourist arrivals for every million US$ cost associated with the disaster. Interestingly and perhaps paradoxically, a significant positive relationship is evident between the number of people affected by Wildfires and tourist arrivals. For every million affected people, an increase between 0.34% and 0.35% is expected. Consequently, and considering the negative effect of economic damage mentioned above, the net effect of Wildfires on tourism should consider the two different types of disaster impact measures. Earthquakes show a similar negative impact compared with Tsunamis (see above) in terms of the economic costs of the disaster, with falls around 0.002% for every million US$ cost. However, the other impact metrics do not show a negative relationship. In terms of number of fatalities, there is even an increase in tourism for the number of deaths per 1000 people by 0.002%. Thus, the overall impact of an earthquake is a combination of decreases in response to economic damage and number of deaths. Industrial Accidents and Storms show similar patterns in that there is a positive relationship between the number of fatalities and affected people, but a negative relationship between the economic impact of the disaster and tourism arrivals. For example, for Storms there is a decrease in arrivals by 0.003% for every million US$ cost but increases between 0.018% and 0.024% for every death/1000 people and between 0.018%-0.024% and 0.03–0.04% for every million people affected.

Droughts emerged as the only type of disaster that did not show a significantly negative relationship between disaster cost and tourism, but instead arrivals were significantly linked to the two other disaster impact metrics. More specifically, for every death/1000 people an increase higher than 1% is obtained, while for every million people affected a decrease of −0.001% is estimated. It is perhaps not surprising that the relationship between disaster costs and tourism is not significant for Drought . Overall, it is less likely that drought conditions produce direct impacts on tourism-relevant infrastructures and supplies, as tourism businesses might absorb the extra costs of supplying water during water constrained times. There could be indirect costs, for example due to more expensive food supplies, but such effects do not seem to result in significant changes in visitation.

Epidemics , Landslides , Cold waves , and Heat waves do not achieve significant results for any of the six regressions considered, and for this reason they were not considered in the final estimation presented in Table 1 . In the case of Epidemics , and Landslides we should note that these two variables have a strong structural component. For instance, epidemic episodes, such as Cholera, Dengue, and Ebola, as well as land movements with consequences on people are recurrent in the same types of countries at different times, but rarely are these factors extended to other countries. In a similar way Rosselló, Santana-Gallego, and Waqas (2017) evaluated the effects of Dengue, Ebola, Malaria, and Yellow Fever on international tourism flows showing how these diseases have a strong structural component and are often recurrent in the same countries.

The case of Cold and Heat waves is different. It should be noted how travel booking decisions (especially in international travel) are often taken months in advance, when no reliable weather predictions exist. Although it is possible to cancel travel plans in case of extreme temperatures, tourist might assume the conditions are temporary and unlikely to impact their trip. In terms of longer lasting risk perceptions of a destination, heat or cold waves might not be seen as particularly threatening, and hence easily forgotten. Visitors might expect that their tourism service provider is dealing with adverse conditions, for example by providing air conditioning or heating. Instead, extreme temperatures are more likely to impact local people (e.g., farmers) leading to wider economic damage (but not attributed to tourism). Regarding the distribution of the potential effects of each one of the disasters during the next 12 months (columns from one to three) and during the next 6 months (columns from four to six) no significant but only minor differences are found. Additionally, different attempts to discriminate disaster by geographical regions did not yield significantly different conclusions.

As mentioned earlier and in order to explore the bidirectional effects between disaster events and tourism flows, a second research strategy is implemented. Based on two initial general regressions (one for each of the delay periods considered), including all the considered variables, a reduction is undertaken in order to get the specific regressions presented in Table 5 .

Regarding the distribution of the potential consequences of each type of disaster during the next 12 months (columns one to three) and during the next 6 months (columns four to six), in general, no significant differences are found. With the exception of Floods and Storms , the coefficients for the remaining disasters (in absolute terms) are higher for the 12 month impact regressions than for the 6 months ones, thus, indicating that effects are probably better captured by longer time lags. In contrast, the effects of Floods and Storms seem to have a shorter life span, since the 6 month timeframe captures a higher impact.

The analysis of the different disaster impacts reveals how, on the one hand, costs always present a negative relationship with international tourist arrivals. This confirms that the economic costs of a disaster are an important measure for tourism managers, probably because of the inherent damage to local infrastructure that is captured. On the other hand, the impact of some types of disaster evaluated in terms of deaths shows a positive relationship with tourist arrivals. This does not mean that the occurrence of these disasters will have a net positive effect on the arrival of tourists, since the negative effect of the associated costs must be taken into account when deriving an overall estimate of impact. As outlined earlier, the number of deaths could be related with the arrival of people for humanitarian reasons, or with a flow of people who travel to see (and support) friends and relatives affected by the event. This could present a significant effect in relative terms for those countries with a low base level of arrivals. The total effect also should consider the impacts of the number of affected people that for some disasters have a reducing effect ( Droughts, Tsunamis and Volcanoes ), while for others there seems to be an increase in the number of tourists ( Industrial Accidents, Wildfires and Storms ).

5. Discussion and conclusions

Natural disasters and unexpected events have wide reaching effects on all spheres of life, including tourism. From a theoretical point of view, it has been assumed that a negative relationship between disasters and inbound tourism dominates (e.g. a Cró & Martins, 2017a ). However, because of some motivating factors identified in the literature, and due to the methodology and definition used by the UNWTO in collecting international tourist arrivals, an increase in visitation after a disaster seems also plausible.

The number of inbound tourism arrivals directly impacts the performance of the national tourism industry, and ultimately the government, especially in countries where tourism is a major contributor to the national economy and fiscal revenue ( Massidda & Mattana, 2013 ). It is therefore of great importance for policymakers to improve their understanding of how disaster events affect visitor demand. This research highlights the need to consider different types of disasters and their varied consequences when assessing the consequences for tourism.

5.1. Significance of different types of disaster impacts

The empirical research presented in this paper draws on two sets of data to explore in depth the relationship between international tourist arrivals and global disasters, measured through three different impact metrics (costs, deaths and affected people). The effects that these different disasters might have on inbound flows at a national level were investigated though a gravity model, estimated by panel data with destination-fixed effects and using yearly data. By doing so, spurious potential determinants related to the destination but not the disaster can be avoided. As a result, however, recurrent disasters affecting the same destination and those with a very short-run effect have not been captured.

Findings of this analysis provide evidence that the economic consequences of a disaster in a particular country generally affect international tourism arrivals negatively. This is likely due to damages to infrastructure, key attractions and a wider weakening of the economy in the host country. All of these reduce the destination ability to cater for tourism, undermine investment into tourism supply, and reduce destination attractiveness, at least in the short-term.

At the same time, the analysis reveals that evaluating the tourism impacts of a disaster in terms of deaths and affected people is more ambiguous. Our research found a dominance of positive effects in the case of deaths related to a disaster. Thus, whilst disaster damage seems to prevent tourists to visit the affected destination, the number of fatalities and affected people seem to be less of a deterrent. Tourists may not see a risk to their own safety. Also, there could be an increase in tourism for some disasters due to the arrival of humanitarian ‘tourists’ and people visiting friends and relatives. Whilst generally, this observation might be testimony to tourism resilience, and indeed reassuring for destination managers, there may be situations where continuous tourism demand after a disaster is hindering recovery works or impacting the well-being of residents. More research on ‘optimum’ recovery timeframes that take into account resident needs, would be useful (e.g. Okuyama, 2018 ).

5.2. Reductions in demand differ for disaster types

It is useful for decision makers to understand that not all disasters cause similar impacts. The comparison of different disaster types showed, for example, that volcanic eruptions typically cause the most significant and substantial negative impact on tourism. Specifically, for every million people affected by an eruption a fall between 1.7% and 2.1% in the international tourism arrivals is expected, if a six-month period or a twelve –month period is considered, respectively. Other disasters have smaller and shorter-term impacts (e.g. Floods and Storms ). Furthermore, floods and tsunamis are detrimental without nuance, although it is difficult to discerne whether the negative effect is due to the possible destruction or disablement of infrastructure or to the negative image of the destination generated by these types of event.

When a destination is affected by a wildfire, an earthquake, an industrial accident, a storm or a drought, mixed effects may be expected. For example, when these types of disasters result in economic damage, a negative and significant relationship can be established, indicating that damage to infrastructure and built assets, and maybe business capability, is likely to reduce tourist arrivals. Finally, this research revealed that some types of events are unlikely to have a major effect on arrivals, for example an unexpected epidemic, a landslide, a cold wave and a heat wave. It should be noted how these natural disasters are characterized by little or no impact on infrastructure and no long-term risk to tourists after the event has finished.

5.3. Managerial implications

Natural disasters and unexpected events are traumatic experiences for the resident population and may cause lasting damage to destination infrastructures, which requires adequate and adaptive tourism management ( Hystad & Keller, 2008 ). Strategies used to predict natural disasters and mitigate hazard risks in the first place need to be deployed to minimize the impacts. Examples include the implementation of appropriate building codes, zoning regulations, and emergency training and preparedness for key stakeholders. New policies and practices may require additional resources, but investments into preparedness are likely to generate positive returns in the long term. In general, the empirical results in this paper confirm that disaster events are challenging news for tourism managers who need to deal with an unexpected fall in tourism demand. Clearly, economic damage from an unexpected event leads to some reductions in tourist arrivals. In those cases, efforts by destination managers should focus on the recovery of necessary infrastructure and business capability. Proactive planning, for example around business continuity, business support networks, and recovery assistance programs, could accelerate this effort ( Hystad & Keller, 2008 ). Leadership may come from government agencies, destination management organizations, or businesses themselves. Related research in New Zealand revealed that leadership is “mainly provided by tourism stakeholders with a community-value orientation, and to a lesser extent by those who are mainly business-driven” ( Hughey & Becken, 2016 , p. 69). In other words, response and recovery is often led by individuals who have a strong commitment to, and engagement with, the affected community.

For some events, it is not necessarily the economic damage that is the most significant impact, but it could be the number of people affected or killed. For some disaster types, for example wildfires and storms, this research even established a positive impact. The positive relationship between number of tourists and affected people of fatalities by some disasters implies that these can attract visitors to the destination, a circumstance that should be taken into account by the managers of the destination. There are many different reasons why visitors might want to visit a destination that had been affected by a disaster (e.g. Rucińska & Lechowicz, 2014 on dark tourism), and understanding this non-orthodox typology of visitor types could be useful for destination managers. Regardless, marketing activities have to be designed with great care to attract the right types of visitors at the right time, considering potentially ongoing limitations around tourism capacity ( Okuyama, 2018 ; Orchiston & Higham, 2014 ). Marketing campaigns implemented by businesses, local tourist destinations or national tourism bureaus should ideally align in their messaging and magnitude, implying a particular need for vertical integration following a disaster ( Hughey & Becken, 2016 ).

5.4. Limitations

This research has several limitations, including the availability, accuracy and granularity of data, which is outside the control of the research team. It could be argued that some impacts on tourism are significant, yet short-lived. Given that the data used here is provided on an annual basis, short-term effects are likely to be missed or under-estimated in this research. Besides the limitations about the estimation method and the nature of the data of the UNWTO we have imposed a homogenization for each disaster. That means that a specific disaster in a developed country has the same effect than in an less developed one. In reality, this might not be the case. Consequently, results obtained in this paper should be considered as average responses. Future research should further explore this matter and investigate if differences among countries in reference to their level of development exist. Our attempt to discriminate the different disaster by region did not obtain significant results. Future research on the positive impacts of certain types of disaster consequences would also be beneficial in developing a potential tourist typology consisting of ‘dark tourism’ segments, humanitarian arrivals or other presently unidentified markets.

Author contribution

Jaume Rosselló-Nadal as an expert in tourism demand modelling and the quantitative analysis of tourism has contributed with the knowledge of the specific literature of demand modelling and the identification of the gap in the literature. Susanne Becken as an expert in sustainable tourism and climatic change issues has contributed with the knowledge of the specific literature of natural hazards and potential effects on tourism and Maria Santana Gallego as an expert within the fields of gravity models in a special way in the design of the methodology and in the exploitation of the results. He has also been responsible for the first model estimations.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) and the European Regional Development Funds (ERDF) for its support to the project<ECO2016-79124-C2-1-R> (AEI/ERDF, EU) and UNWTO Statistics Department for kindly providing us with the tourist data for this study. We also wish to thank participants to the 8th International Conference on Tourism Management & Related Issues.

Biographies

Jaume Rosselló-Nadal has a PhD in Business and Economics, is Full Professor at the Universitat de les Illes Balears (Spain) and Adjunct Professor at Griffith Institute for Tourism (Australia). His research interests include tourism demand modelling and environmental issues with special interest in climatic change issues. Jaume has led different research projects in Spain and Europe.

Dr Susanne Becken is a Professor of Sustainable Tourism at Griffith University, Australia. Susanne has led a large number of research programmes and consulting projects in Asia Pacific in the area of climate change, risk management and sustainable tourism. She contributes through various industry and Government advisory roles and panels, and is on the editorial boards of nine tourism journals.

Maria Santana-Gallego is PhD in Economics and Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Economics, University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. She teaches tourism economics and macroeconomics. Her research interests include quantitative analysis of tourism and gravity models.

1 EM-DAT can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.emdat.be .

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Personal Finance Advice

Over-Tourism: 11 Places That Are Suffering from Their Popularity

Posted: May 27, 2024 | Last updated: May 27, 2024

Over-tourism is a paradoxical problem where countries that financially thrive on international tourism are also burdened with the consequences of hosting too many tourists. Over-tourism causes local garbage problems, cost of living surges for locals, ecological destruction, damage or destruction of artifacts, population inflation in concentrated areas, and more. 

There is nothing wrong with being a tourist. Over-tourism is a socio-economic and ethical issue where millions of tourists irresponsibly descend on foreign locales, ruin what makes them special, and worse, not realizing or caring. Here are 11 places suffering from their popularity and some tips on how to travel responsibly as a tourist.

1. Hanoi’s “Train Street” Selfie Trap

Hanoi, Vietnam’s Hoan Kiem District infamous Train Street has become wildly famous with selfie takers in recent years. It’s a train district where rustic cafes, shops, and local people selling their wares sit dangerously close to both sides of a busy train track. Locals have to move themselves and their products out of the way multiple times daily to avoid collision with the train.

International tourists are now swarming Train Street, standing perilously on the sides of the tracks, and sometimes in it, to take selfies. Tourists taking selfies on Train Street are causing train delays, and stoppages, and endangering themselves. In 2019, local officials began closing some Train Street businesses and limiting tourist group visits for safety reasons.

2. Kyoto’s Geisha Harassment Issues

A geisha is a female Japanese entertainer trained in the ancient, traditional, and folklore arts of Japan. Geishas in full traditional dress and makeup commonly walk around the streets of Kyoto. Unfortunately, rowdy tourists have been harassing and touching geishas as well as grabbing their clothing. Tourists also stalk and take pictures of them without permission, which is rude in Japan, a country with rigid social rules and norms.

Local officials started charging tourists $63 or more for harassing geishas, but it didn’t stop. As of March 2024, local officials were set to ban tourists from some streets in Kyoto to mitigate the problem. Over-tourism completely destroyed the Geisha tourism business model. The city must now ban or restrict tourists to save its heritage while losing money. 

3. Spanish Steps Garbage Problem

The Spanish Steps is a famous public staircase and plaza in Rome, Italy. The site became world famous in a scene in 1953’s “Roman Holiday,” starring Audrey Hepburn. Tourists have been flocking to the spot since to take selfies and hang out on the steps. Over-tourism destroyed the aesthetics of the Spanish Steps with tourists congregating, partying on the steps, and leaving behind garbage. In 2016, the local government spent $1.6 million to clean up the Spanish Steps. It is now illegal to sit on the Spanish Steps. Violators can face a $500 fine.

4. Justin Beiber Fans Destroy a Canyon in Iceland

Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon in Iceland is famous for its verdant beauty and the islet at the bottom of the canyon. The canyon was also featured as a backdrop on Game of Thrones . Justin Bieber filmed his 2015 music video “I’ll Show You,” at the site. According to a 2019 study by the Environment Agency of Iceland, over 1 million tourists have trampled and catastrophically damaged the ecology and aesthetics of the canyon since 2015.  Tourists are now banned from visiting the site , but many sneak in anyway.

5. Komodo Island Tourist Ban

Komodo Island is a komodo dragon habitat in Indonesia that is very popular with tourists. Almost 2000 Komodo dragons live in the habitat. Local officials are now spending millions of dollars to stop the illegal smuggling of Komodo dragons and to stop over-tourism from destroying the natural habitat activities of the giant lizards. Indonesian authorities considered a complete ban but are now charging tourists $1,000 for an annual membership to visit the island.

You can visit Komodo Island on a restricted basis and for shorter time periods with cheaper membership levels. Indonesian locals and business owners vocally protested the change in rules in 2022. They fear the local economic repercussions of overcharging tourists who might choose to stay away, even as over-tourism causes ecological chaos.  

6. Venice, Italy Restricts Rowdy Tourists

Venice, Italy is a romantic city and an over-tourism magnet, but it is a city in ecological danger. Due to climate change, the city is sinking and experiences floods often. Venice might sink by over a foot by 2100 . In the meantime, Venetians have complained that tourist crowds make traveling in the city difficult. The city has implemented rules banning littering, lewd dress, public boorishness, and vandalizing structures and artifacts. Venice now restricts tourist groups to two dozen who can only explore the city by day .

7. Tiny Austrian Towns Get 10K Visitors Daily

Over 6% of Austria’s economy is derived from tourism. One Austrian town in particular, Hallstatt, is suffering from a dramatic over-tourism problem. Hallstatt has less than 800 residents but sometimes 10,000 international visitors try to visit daily. Fans of the 2010 film Frozen mistakenly believe that Hallstatt was used as a model for the film and flock there. The small town has been featured in South Korean and Chinese TV shows, so the majority of the town’s visitors come from Asia. Hallstatt’s townspeople staged public demonstrations in 2023 to protest the over-tourism problem preventing residents from living normal lives. Tourists are crowding local streets, entering private residences, and taking selfies everywhere without considering how it disrupts local life.

8. Santorini, Greece Tourist Surge

Santorini, Greece is an idyllic Greek island renowned for its natural beauty. The city has a population of 15,000 but over 2 million tourists visit the city annually. Locals complain that over-tourism is straining the local infrastructure , raising local cost of living standards, and making it difficult for everyday people to live their lives. The city is seeking to restrict the number of cruise ships and tourists who can visit daily.

9. Cozumel, Mexico Coral Reef Destruction

Cozumel, Mexico is a tourist-favorite coastal town in Mexico. It’s the second-most-visited cruise destination on the planet. Cozumel is also home to natural coral reefs that are now threatened by over-tourism. Cruise ship traffic, scuba diving, and tourist-derived pollution are slowly destroying the local coral reefs. Steps are now being taken to restrict tourism without dramatically affecting tourism.

10. Maya, Bay, Thailand Tourist Intrusion

Maya, Bay, Thailand is an island paradise with scenic bays and huge rocks jutting out above them. The 2000 film The Beach starring Leonardo Dicaprio was filmed there. Now, up to 8,000 tourists visit Maya Bay daily. The bay is now clogged with tourist group boats that destroy the natural aesthetic beauty of the bay.

The coral reefs are being damaged, Local authorities fear that tourists will disturb the local aquatic wildlife, like sharks, by recklessly wading and swimming in the bay. Authorities now restrict the number of tourists in the bay and have banned swimming in it. 

11. Spain Wages War Against Over-Tourism

Spanish cities like Barcelona and Binibeca are waging protests against over-tourism. Small towns with hundreds of residents are being inundated with entitled tourists who enter private residences, litter, crowd public walkways and streets, and engage in spontaneous public celebrations. Local residents have started public protesting and even used graffiti to write anti-tourist messages. Local authorities are planning to restrict the number of tourists who can visit daily and are entertaining the idea of banning tourism outright.

What You Can Do to Ease Over-Tourism

The world is getting smaller every day and people are traveling more in this post-pandemic world. Tourism will never be eradicated, but over-tourism could make it difficult to visit some of your favorite places soon.

Travel during off-peak seasons and follow local laws when you go on vacation. Also, consider how much you will enjoy yourself if you travel to a foreign country just to hang out with thousands of tourists more interested in taking selfies than enjoying the experience. You may want to research under-visited cities and go there instead or consult the help of a good travel agent.

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Watch CBS News

How Trump's conviction could change the dynamics of the 2024 race

By Olivia Rinaldi , Jacob Rosen , Katrina Kaufman

Updated on: May 30, 2024 / 7:47 PM EDT / CBS News

Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his Manhattan criminal trial, adding another layer of uncertainty to an already unprecedented campaign.

As a c onvicted felon , Trump is not prevented from continuing to campaign for president , since the Constitution does not prohibit candidates from running for president even if they are convicted of a crime. In fact, there is precedent for a candidate running from behind bars: In 1920, Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs ran for president from a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

Trump is the first former U.S. president to be found guilty of felonies, and the first major party candidate to run for office after being found guilty of a crime. Here's how his conviction could change the 2024 campaign:

How Trump can campaign after his conviction

Now that he's convicted, Trump is all but certain to appeal the decision handed down by the jury, and he is likely to be able to return to the campaign trail as the process plays out. 

The next development in the case will come at sentencing, currently scheduled for July 11. Justice Juan Merchan has wide discretion over when sentencing occurs and what the punishment looks like. Trump faces a maximum of up to four years in prison and a $5,000 fine for each of the 34 felony charges of falsification of business records. The sentencing options available to Merchan include prison, probation, conditional discharge, fines or house arrest.

The judge could put limitations on his travel, such as restricting Trump from leaving the state and taking his passport, but Merchan has said he doesn't want to interfere with his ability to campaign.

"I would think that the judge wouldn't dare interfere with his right to speak to the American public because it's the right of the voters to be informed as well," said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert on corporate governance and white collar crime.

In a recent survey of dozens of cases brought by Manhattan District Attorney's Office in which falsifying business records was the most serious charge at arraignment, attorney and author Norm Eisen found that roughly one in 10 of those cases resulted in a sentence of incarceration.

"I think that is fascinating," said Caroline Polisi, a criminal defense attorney and professor at Columbia Law School. "A lot of commentators say the reason he won't be incarcerated is because the logistics of it with respect to the Secret Service would be too much. On the other hand, if you're saying he should be treated like any other defendant, we have a lot of data saying that 90% of other defendants would not get jail time in this situation."

The impact of the conviction on Trump's ability to campaign could largely hinge on what sentence Merchan ultimately hands down, and when Trump would serve it.

"In the context in which he is found guilty and then sentenced to no jail time, I don't think it's going to cause a bit of difference," added Polisi. "There might be some minor issues. He might not be able to vote for himself. But other than that, I don't think it's going to cause any problems."

When determining Trump's sentence, the judge could take into account his numerous gag order violations — which led Merchan to threaten him with jail time if the violations continued — and his lack of demonstrated remorse or respect for the legal system. Throughout the trial, Trump referred to Merchan as "conflicted" and "corrupt" and to the case itself as a "sham." 

"In New York, a 78-year-old defendant, who's a first time offender, committed a non-violent offense, and has an otherwise, well, distinguished record — in some regards being an ex-president is distinguished. In that kind of world, there'd be no chance of an incarceration sentence," said Coffee. "They can use probation, they can use fines. But there may be a view of many judges that you have to show that no one's above the law, and even the future president should have a taste of prison."

Even if Merchan does order Trump to serve time behind bars, the sentence could be deferred until his appeal has run its course.

"In other cases, when you don't have someone running for the White House, it would be more or acceptable to put him immediately into incarceration," said Coffee. "You certainly could put special conditions on what he could do or put him under house arrest, but I think until we get to the actual election, we're going to have to let Donald Trump run around and campaign."

The conviction's possible impact on Trump's poll numbers and support

Trump has predicted that a conviction in this trial could boost his poll numbers. 

"Even if convicted, I think that it has absolutely no impact. It may drive the numbers up, but we don't want that. We want to have a fair verdict," Trump told CBS Pittsburgh in an interview earlier this month.

Trump's support among his Republican base has been remarkably resilient in the face of his various criminal cases. In the months following his four indictments last year, Trump maintained his commanding lead in the Republican primary, capturing the nomination despite the dozens of criminal charges he faced.

Many Trump supporters who CBS News has interviewed since the trial began have said a guilty conviction will not change how they vote in November, adopting the former president's grievances as their own.

"Stormy Daniels has already been reviewed and stuff. It's kind of coincidental," Michigan resident Lori Beyer said at a recent rally in Freeland, Michigan, adding she would vote for Trump regardless of the conviction. "I don't think it's going to impact it, as far as I'm concerned."

Whether a conviction changes the minds of voters who are not committed to the former president remains to be seen. A recent CBS News poll found that the majority of Americans believed Trump is "definitely or probably" guilty of the charges he faced in New York. The overwhelming majority of Democrats — 93% — believed Trump was guilty, while 78% Republicans said he was not. Independents were split, with 53% believing he was guilty and 47% saying he wasn't. 

Opinions about whether Trump was guilty or not were already highly partisan, according to Kabir Khanna, deputy director of elections and data analytics for CBS News. Most people who believed Trump was guilty also thought the jury would convict him, and vice versa. 

Additionally, Khanna said people who followed the trial closely were the most polarized in their views.

"Together, these factors could blunt the impact of the verdict on the views of an already divided public," Khanna said. "Some voters may be swayed by the news, but I wouldn't expect a sea change." 

Other polling supports that notion. A NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey released Thursday found that 67% of registered voters nationwide said a Trump conviction would not make a difference in how they vote. Among independents, just 11% said a guilty verdict would make them less likely to vote for Trump.

The conviction also gives the Biden campaign a potentially potent new weapon in their arsenal: the ability to label Trump a convicted felon. Mr. Biden remained largely silent about the Trump trial while it was ongoing, but NBC News reported last week that he planned to become more aggressive about Trump's legal woes after the trial concluded, while acknowledging that Trump would be on the ballot regardless of how his legal cases played out.

Trump has used the trial to help boost his fundraising, and will likely look to capitalize on the conviction. The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee saw an influx of donations after jury selection began, with the two entities raising $76 million in April. His campaign had about $50 million cash on hand at the beginning of May as he prepared to get back out on the campaign trail after the trial.

The former president repeatedly used the developments in the trial to raise money, including when he was held in contempt for violating the gag order against him.

"I'd get arrested ONE MILLION TIMES before I'd let those filthy dogs get their hands on you," one typical fundraising appeal read. 

Trump's other criminal cases

The New York case might be the only one of Trump's four criminal prosecutions to reach a conclusion before voters cast their ballots in the fall, giving the guilty verdict added weight.

The two federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith remain in limbo. 

In Washington, D.C., Trump faces charges related to his actions to remain in power after the 2016 election. Trump has argued that he is immune from prosecution, and the Supreme Court is currently weighing his claim.

The high court heard arguments in the immunity dispute on April 26 and is expected to issue a decision on the matter before the end of the court's term, likely in June. If the case is allowed to move forward, there is a slim possibility that the district court could schedule the trial before November. If the justices side with Trump and find him immune from prosecution, the charges would be dropped.

In Florida, Trump faces federal charges stemming from his retention of classified documents after he left the White House. Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, has indefinitely postponed the trial. She ruled in early May that picking a trial date would be "imprudent and inconsistent with the court's duty to fully and fairly consider" numerous unresolved pre-trial motions. Those motions include Trump's efforts to dismiss the case altogether, as well as issues related to what classified information can be revealed at trial.

In the third case that remains outstanding, Trump faces state charges related to the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The trial in that matter is also on hold as Trump seeks to have District Attorney Fani Willis removed from the case. Georgia's Court of Appeals recently granted Trump's appeal of a decision that had allowed her to remain, bringing the trial to a temporary halt.

Trump's two federal cases could largely be in voters' hands if they are not resolved by November, a fact that raises his personal stake in the outcome. If he wins and returns to the White House in January 2025, Trump could order the Justice Department to seek to drop the charges altogether.

Trump has pleaded not guilty in all of the criminal cases against him.

• Donald Trump

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Money blog: The 'least bad' popular sweets - and the ones that 'can wreak havoc on your health'

An expert says first-time buyers may want to look beyond banks when selecting a mortgage. Read this and the rest of today's consumer and personal finance news below, and leave your thoughts in the comments box.

Friday 31 May 2024 06:49, UK

• First-time buyers urged to consider building societies over banks
• Leon rivals Pret with new coffee subscription deal
• 'Stealth tax' on incomes to remain until 2028, Hunt says
• Energy prices 'will be high for a decade'

Essential reads

• The popular sweets that are the 'least bad' for you
• Women in Business : 'A truck unloaded a £600 car that her son bought on eBay thinking it was a toy' - the schoolgate stories that led to GoHenry
• Money Problem : 'My mortgage lender is ending my two-year fix and I haven't been in the house for two years - can they do this?'
• Best of the Money blog - an archive

Ask a question or make a comment

Every Friday we get an overview of the mortgage market with the help of industry experts. This week the guys at Moneyfactscompare.co.uk are helping us focus on first-time buyers - and why building societies may provide the best option for them.

First, the broader mortgage market. Moneyfacts finance expert finance expert Rachel Springall said: "It has been a relatively quiet week for fixed-rate mortgage re-pricing, but there have been a couple of building societies tweaking rates as well as withdrawing selected deals. This includes a sub 5% five-year fixed rate mortgage from Saffron Building Society at 90% loan-to-value.

"Week on week, the overall average two-year fixed rate remained unchanged 5.92% but the five-year rate rose to 5.49%."

Honing in on first-time buyers, and Moneyfacts has issued advice that building societies can often be the best option for those starting out.

Rachel said: "First-time buyers comparing mortgages will find building societies on average price lower than the market averages (90% and 95% loan-to-value, for two- and five-year fixed mortgages)."

The big-seven bank (Barclays, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, NatWest, RBS and Santander) average is actually lower, Moneyfacts says - but "the lowest rate deals might not be the best on a true cost basis". 

"Mutuals have pioneered innovative products and initiatives for buyers, such as the Track Record mortgage from Skipton Building Society, the £5,000 deposit mortgage from Yorkshire Building Society and the partnership between Leeds Building Society and Experian to potentially help consumers to boost their credit score," Rachel says. 

"In addition, Nationwide’s Helping Hand mortgage gives first-time buyers the option of borrowing a higher loan amount.

"Saving money on the upfront cost of a mortgage is incredibly important for first-time buyers who may have exhausted their cash on a deposit, legal fees and moving costs. Any borrower looking to get their foot on the property ladder would be wise to seek independent advice to ensure they find the right deal for them."

This week's lowest rates for first-time buyers are...

This week's Moneyfacts has the Best Buys - which look at the overall cost of the mortgage, not just the rate - as... 

It can be hard to balance the demands of eating well without spending a lot.

In this series, we try to find the healthiest options in the supermarket for the best value - and have enlisted the help of  Sunna Van Kampen , founder of Tonic Health, who went viral on social media for reviewing food in the search of healthier choices.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tonic Health (@tonichealth)

In this series we don't try to find the outright healthiest option, but help you get better nutritional value for as little money as possible.

Today we're looking at sweets. 

"We all love a treat now and then, but making small changes in our choices can lead to big benefits without having to give up entirely," Sunna says.  

The sugar hit

"It is important to put it into context just how impactful a bag of sweets can be," Sunna says. 

The NHS daily recommendation for sugar intake is 30g a day for adults, 24g a day for seven to 10-year-olds and 19g a day for four to six-year-olds. 

A typical bag 100g bag of sweets can contain anywhere from 40-70g of sugar - more than double your daily intake.

It's safe to say Sunna is not a fan of one of the nation's favourite brands, pointing to their 74% sugar content. 

"To put that into perspective, that's almost three-quarters of each Skittle being pure sugar, or 25 teaspoons in one 136g bag," he says.

That's three times the daily recommended intake according to the NHS. 

"While they're undeniably tasty, this sugar content can wreak havoc on your health and they are also coloured with a multitude of artificial colours."

Sky News approached Skittles' parent company Mars Inc. for comment but did not receive a reply. 

"While none are healthy, there is an opportunity to cut your sugar intake in dramatically within the Haribo range," Sunna explains. 

Here's the sugar breakdown:

• Supermix - 55% sugar content
• Tangfastics - 50% sugar content
• Starmix - 47% sugar content
• Fruitilicious - 34% sugar content
• Zingfest - 32% sugar content (and Sunna's new favourite)

The difference becomes clear when you break that down into teaspoons of sugar. 

"Supermix has 24 teaspoons of sugar in a 175g share bag while Zingfest has only 12 in a 150g share bag," Sunna says. 

"That's a 50% reduction in your sugar content, albeit it on a slightly smaller bag size, but portion control is important because nobody is putting an open bag back in the cupboard."

A sweet alternative

Sunna recommends Rowntree's Berry Hearts if you're looking for something to try. 

"These little heart-shaped gummies do my favourite thing - remove all the yellows and oranges in favour of a bag full of reds and purples - but also only contain 35% sugar.

"That's less than half the sugar content of Skittles - and they use black carrot, carrot and hibiscus as colours in place of artificial sweeteners."

A bag of Skittles every week would lead to more than 5.2kg of sugar a year. 

"Swapping to Berry Hearts would be 2.1kg a year - a saving of over 3kg of sugar. That's a massive reduction," Sunna says. 

This shows that, even when indulging in sweets, picking ones with lower sugar content can make a big difference. 

"Reducing sugar not only helps with weight management but also lowers the risk of chronic diseases and improves overall well-being."

The nutritionist's view - from  Nichola Ludlam-Raine, d ietitian at  nicsnutrition.com ...

"Sweets and candy are undeniably a treat that many of us enjoy, but it's important to be mindful of their sugar content, especially with the significant variations between different types, in addition to the portion size and frequency in which we are consuming them. 

"Grab bags and share bags can lead us to eating more, and may distort what is a healthy portion size. 

"In addition, most of us would look on in horror if we actually saw the amount of sugar that was being added to these sweet treats.

"Choosing options with a lower sugar content, like Rowntree's Berry Hearts, can help satisfy a sweet tooth while helping us to keep below the daily free-sugar limits (free-sugar includes added sugar, and the sugar naturally occurring in honey and fruit juice too), but we mustn't be misled by these 'health halos' either - sugar is sugar, and it can easily add up if it's consumed too regularly throughout the day.

"Reducing our free-sugar intake should be a goal for many of us, and is crucial not just for weight management but for overall health, including reducing the risk of dental caries (although sugary drinks tend to take the biscuit here). 

"Remember, making small, smarter choices can lead to substantial health benefits over time. 

"Enjoy your treats, but have them in moderation (ie, not on a daily basis), choose wisely and try not to graze on sugary sweets throughout the day as your teeth won't thank you."

Read more from this series... 

UK house prices could rise slightly this year and outpace inflation over the next two years, according to a poll.

Housing market specialists surveyed by Reuters predict a 1.8% overall increase in prices for 2024, with wage growth expected to outstrip this.

A predicted drop in mortgage rates will also improve affordability for first-time buyers, they said.

Aneisha Beveridge, head of research at estate agency Hamptons , said: "Stable house prices combined with real income growth should aid affordability this year."

Following a more modest rise this year, prices will grow by 3.1% in 2025 and 4% in 2026, according to the poll carried over four weeks in May.

Specialist forecasts for 2024 ranged from a 4% drop to a 4% increase.

But despite the predicted rise, a lack of supply could prove a hurdle for househunters - especially those getting on the ladder for the first time.

Seventeen specialists polled said supply was likely to fall short of demand in the coming two to three years. 

"Construction is throttled by a lack of positive sentiment among developers. They will only build again when there are sure signs of market and political stability," said property consultant Russell Quirk .

A separate Reuters poll found that the Bank of England's base rate, which has been at 5.25% since August 2023, could drop to 4.5% by the end of the year and 3.5% by the end of 2025 - still far above the record low 0.1% during the pandemic.

Leon has launched its own coffee subscription scheme in a move to rival fellow high street brand Pret A Manger.

The fast food chain's £25-a-month "Roast Rewards" deal offers five barista-made drinks per day as well as 20% off the breakfast and all-day food menu.

It undercuts Pret's £30 a month offer, which also allows for up to five drinks a day and 20% off food. 

Customers will also be given bonus "loyalty points" when they subscribe and each time they renew. The scheme launches on 30 May through the Leon Club App.

Leon managing director Mac Plumpton said the company was "so excited to unveil the UK's most affordable coffee subscription".

Pret increased the price of its "Club Pret" subscription service by 20% to £30 a month in 2023, citing increased costs.

Energy prices are expected to rise again in the autumn and last week's announcement of a cut in the cap from July should not be taken as a "sign of stability", the head of the Energy Saving Trust has said.

"Confirmation that energy prices are coming down for the next quarter is very welcome," Mike Thornton said.

"However, no one should take this lower price cap as a sign of stability."

He added: "Forecasts show that energy prices are set to rise again this autumn and will be staying high overall for the next decade."

He urged the next UK government - to be decided in the general election on 4 July - to focus on policies that "support people to use less energy and install cost-effective energy efficiency improvements in their homes".

The cap will fall to £1,568 a year from 1 July - a drop of £122 from the previous quarter. 

McDonald's customers have taken to social media to complain about a "naughty" detail in one of its new deals. 

The fast food giant started a new mix and match deal this week - which allows shoppers to pick up three items for just £3 in store.

However, those ordering online have found the price increase to £4 for the same deal. 

Writing in the Extreme Couponing and Bargains UK group, one user shared a screenshot of her My McDoanld's app, writing: "It's gone from 3 for £3 to 3 for £4. Which is odd, or is that cause it's on the app."

Another branded the price difference "naughty". 

McDonald’s has since confirmed that this price is correct on app.

The increase is due to delivery fees charged by couriers like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat - and is fairly standard across the industry. 

Sony Music is reportedly in talks to purchase the entirety of rock band Queen's music catalogue in a deal mooted to be worth some $1bn (around £800m). 

Bloomberg reports  the company has partnered with another anonymous investor to engage Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon and the estate of Freddie Mercury over a sale that would be the largest of its kind.

Queen Productions Ltd, of which the bandmates and Mercury's estate are equal shareholders, recorded revenues of $52m in the year that ended in September 2022. 

This comes after the catalogue of Bruce Springsteen was acquired by Sony in 2021, while rival Warner Music bought David Bowie's songbook for around $250m in 2022, as industry giants battle to invest in songwriting catalogues. 

They are seen by many as attractive investments as the music can be used in future films, advertisements and on the radio - which all produce royalties for the rights owners. 

A squeeze on people's incomes due to frozen tax thresholds will continue until 2028 under Tory plans, Jeremy Hunt has confirmed.

Rishi Sunak introduced a freeze on tax-free personal allowance thresholds (the amount you can earn before you start paying tax) when he was chancellor back in 2021. In his autumn 2022 budget, Mr Hunt extended the time it would need to be in place from 2026 to 2028.

The frozen rates mean many have failed to feel the benefit of a the national insurance cut which kicked in this year.

The Office for Budget Responsibility also estimates the static rates will drag an additional four million people into paying tax by 2028 and push three million into a higher tax bracket. This is because wages will go up alongside inflation but the threshold won't. 

The policy is often referred to as a "stealth tax".

Mr Hunt told BBC Radio 4's Today programme today: "The tax rises that happened as a result of the pandemic and the energy shock, these two giant shocks, will stay for their allotted time period."

But he reiterated the Conservatives' pledge to end the freeze after 2028, saying: "I can absolutely undertake that the threshold freeze that we introduced until 2028 will not continue after that."

The Tories have said they will unfreeze the thresholds for pensioners if they win the election.

Labour has also refused to commit to unfreezing overall tax thresholds.

Sir Keir Starmer said earlier that he believed the tax burden on working people was "too high" but that his party was not going to "make commitments that we cannot afford".

"Therefore I'm very clear about the tax that will remain and will be locked and where we cannot make those commitments," he said.

What are the tax thresholds and what do they mean?

The personal tax allowance is frozen at £12,570. You don't pay income tax on anything you earn below that - anything above is taxed at the 20% base rate. At the same time, the higher rate has been frozen at £50,271 - anything above that is taxed at 40%.

Tom Selby, director of public policy at AJ Bell, said the personal allowance, if it had been inflation-linked since 2021-22, would be forecast to rise to £15,989 by 2028 - nearly £3,500 higher than the frozen threshold.

Tourists headed to Scotland for holidays will face a tourist tax for hotels, bed and breakfasts and holiday lets.

The Scottish Parliament passed the Visitor Levy (Scotland) Bill two days ago, meaning local authorities can set a charge for overnight accommodation.

According to the bill, the fee will be a percentage of the cost of a hotel or other room.

For instance, a 1% levy on a £200 booking means a visitor would pay £2 in tourist tax.

However, any charges or levies will not come into effect until spring 2026, as councils will first have to consult local businesses before carrying out an 18-month implementation period.

Those receiving disability benefits will not pay any charges, with children and young people also exempt.

Ministers will also have the power to set a cap on the number of nights where a levy would apply.

It will also be up to councils if they want to put a charge in place - but with Holyrood research suggesting 17 of Scotland's 32 councils backing the plans, it is likely some visitors will be hit by charges.

Scotland's employment and investment minister Tom Arthur said on Tuesday the charge would be a " force for good", suggesting it "has the potential to be an important tool enabling investment in the local economy, and supporting an important industry".

However, Scottish Conservatives argued there needed to be a more "robust" exemption scheme, with housing spokesman Miles Briggs saying: "Scots will be pretty unhappy when they realise that they will have to pay a 10% tax to stay in a hotel when their house is flooded."

The new law means Scotland joins Manchester, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole in charging tourists to stay the night.

Manchester's £1-a-night City Visitor Charge was introduced last April, and is estimated to have raised around £2.8m in its first year.

European hotspots like Barcelona and Venice have also introduced tourist taxes, with the Spanish city charging visitors €3.25 if they're staying in official accommodation.

Workers posing as Disney favourites such as Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Snow White in California have formed a union - Magic United.

There are roughly 1,700 performers and assistants who help to bring popular characters to life at Disneyland near Los Angeles.

Disney has faced allegations of not paying them a living wage, despite many facing exorbitant housing costs and commuting long distances.

Parade performers and character actors earn a base pay of $24.15 (£19) an hour, up from $20 (£15.75) before January.

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