With the post-World War 2 rise of the global middle class, tourism has risen as one of the largest industries in the world. Especially in the last several decades, spending on international travel has ballooned to 10.9 trillion, accounting for 10% of global GDP. A number that’s expected to accelerate.

The share of this pie is spread profoundly unequally. Destinations such as Paris, Rome, Orlando, Las Vegas, and Tokyo take in an outsized share of tourists, with many of these cities reaching a breaking point. Just two months after wildfires engulfed Lahaina in Hawaii, officials moved to bring back tourism despite residents saying they were still in the grieving process. This comes after years of concerns that tourism is pricing locals out of housing to build hotels and vacation homes, and that hotels are consuming an inordinate amount of water for pools and irrigation. These and other hardships have led many to call for restrictions on the number of tourists, hotels, and vacation homes allowed on the islands.

Barcelona is another center of the anti-tourism backlash. This city of roughly 1.6 million received over 12 million visitors in 2024, many of them during the summer season. The strain these visitors have had on residents, who see little of the billions of dollars they bring to the city, has elicited protests, with some residents shooting visitors with water pistols as a lighthearted but firm rejection of the industry.

Across the world, much of the revenue from tourism is absorbed by large hotel chains, cruise operators, and other scaled tour operators. The jobs brought by this industry, in the meantime, mostly provide low wages and seasonal work in hotels, shops, and restaurants that fail to bring much wealth or security to workers. For citizens of popular destinations, the demands tourism places on a city’s infrastructure, housing, and workforce align are fundamentally extractive, as opposed to enriching people, communities, and natural or cultural resources.

On the flip side, a number of destinations over the years have had collapsing tourism numbers. As long-distance travel became more accessible to the middle class, formerly thriving destinations that catered to local audiences were hit hard. Before the advent of budget airlines, many British vacationers spent their weekends at seaside resort towns such as Blackpool. Nowadays, Ibiza or Amsterdam draw in a far larger share of British tourists, leaving these historic seaside haunts to rot.

A similar trend has played out in my backyard. Backbone State Park is the oldest state park in Iowa. Set along the southernmost edge of the ancient Driftless Hills, its gorgeous geology, scenic overlooks, and beautiful beach have drawn in day trippers, weekend campers, and summer vacationers for over 100 years.

Back in the day, the park was constantly packed. Back in the 70s and 80s,1 summer afternoons saw throngs of locals cruising up and down the park’s roadways, stopping for picnics, renting a canoe from the boathouse, or enjoying the overlooks sprinkled throughout the park. Come Friday and Saturday night, teens and young adults would make their way to the beach to listen to music, play beach games, and socialize with others from the farming towns surrounding the park. It was a place where folks would intermingle with others and bond with friends. One of the much lionized third spaces that we are pining for nowadays.

Below are two photos, one taken on a random summer day in the 1960s and the other taken this year. As you can see, the parks’ utilization has declined dramatically in the decades since. And before you think I may be comparing apples to oranges, the first photo was taken on a random weekend, the latter was taken on Memorial Day weekend!

The environmental and social issues brought on by overtourism are clear, but I also think a major loss from this trend is borne by the local destinations being abandoned in favor of mega-destinations. The concentration of tourist dollars into a few particularly enigmatic destinations has led to their degradation, while the rest have been left out to dry. The cultural resources harbored by small-time destinations – be they out-of-the-way parks, eclectic museums, or hole-in-the-wall hotels and restaurants – are suffering from a lack of visitors. The same visitors who are overwhelming the resources of the most popular destinations.2

Now is the time to redistribute tourism. One thing that could help on an individual level is exploring new strategies to seek out more out of the way destinations. Looking around one's locality, anywhere from 1-4 hours away from home, is a great way to seek out under-visited destinations. From my current vantage point in St. Louis, there are several cute towns along the Missouri River that I’ve visited on day trips, as well as various villages and forests in the Ozark Mountains that could serve as wonderful local destinations.

Another method is to search for places where one has some sort of pre-existing connection. Destination around friends and family is an obvious one, but you can get creative with it. For example, in 2021, I did an internship in Kansas that introduced me to the beauty of the Flint Hills. Since then, I have added a number of destinations in the region to my travel shortlist. Similarly, when my family visited Ireland in 2017, we went out of our way to visit County Monaghan. While not a particularly prominent destination, it drew us in due to our shared names. In finding destinations, searching for connections, be they roots or shoots,3 to a place can be a great way to find unexpected locales outside of the beaten path.

Finally, searching for destinations similar to popular choices can be a good way to get outside of the mega-destination bubble. Instead of hopping between national parks, one could include National Forests or Bureau of Land Management sites in an itinerary. Instead of visiting Paris, take a road trip through the French countryside, stopping at mom-and-pop inns and exploring regional cuisines. These approaches can not only help redistribute revenue; it’s also an avenue to a more authentic experience.4

Beyond individual thinking, there are a number of policy options that can be used to redistribute tourism. Many destinations are instituting push policies to stem the number of tourists they receive, such as steep hotel taxes or bans on Airbnb. Pulling tourists towards less popular destinations is trickier, but there are options. Partnerships like Sister Cities can help raise awareness of new destinations targeted at a specific customer base. Cities could even organize bus tours of regional destinations as a way of making such trips easier to manage and keeping money local.

Tourism redistribution would help develop localized cultural and recreational industries, spreading the wealth around and relieving pressure from burdened destinations. More importantly, however, it helps visitors better connect to the destinations they are visiting. In a world where tourism is more spread out, it’s harder for large resort operators, cruise lines, or purveyors of cheap knick-knacks to insert themselves into the transaction and skim large profits off a place's cultural and natural resources. In a world of distributed tourism, locals have a better chance of starting businesses, artisans have more direct access to customers, and visitors receive a more holistic experience of the places they visit.

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