The only answers to over-tourism are prices or queues
Major tourism sites are becoming over crowded as a result of rational herd behaviour. The inevitable result will be charges or queues, says Paul Ormerod
Peak holiday season, and the media is full of stories and pictures of popular sites across Europe being overwhelmed by the crowds of visitors.
Shots on social media show the streets around the Trevi fountain in Rome or in the Acropolis in Athens absolutely jam packed even at 8 o’clock in the morning.
The phenomenon is replicated even in apparently remote places. As a keen hill walker I have visited the isle of Skye many times.
In mid-July, the main town of Portree – village is a more accurate description given its population of around 3,000 – was thronged with visitors from across Europe. Queues snaked outside the popular restaurants. Just to the north of Portree is a rather spectacular rock column, the Old Man of Storr. Just 30 years ago, you basically pulled over onto the verge and made your way on traces of a path up the hillside. Now, there are huge car parks and a tarmacked pavement leading to the column.
Of course, across the Highlands and Islands as a whole, it is still possible to walk for hours across the countryside and never meet anyone. The Old Man is rather remarkable, but the Highlands abound with places of striking natural beauty. Even in the very narrowly defined field of rock columns, there are several more impressive and readily visible stacks only a few hundred metres off the coast in the sea.
At any point in time there have always been destinations which have been more fashionable to visit than others, even though the inherent attributes of the various places may be very similar.
Concentration of popularity
But popular places are simply becoming not just more popular but massively so. Social media is the facilitator for this concentration of popularity.
On the internet more generally, for example, sites can rapidly become popular for reasons not connected to their inherent qualities. They become more popular simply because they are already popular. People start to follow the crowd rather than rely on their own judgment.
Although the statistic is a few years old now, one authoritative estimate was that 60 per cent of all click-throughs on Google searches were on the first site to be displayed, and at least 90 per cent on the first three. And essentially the rankings are determined by how many people have clicked on the links previously.
This herd-like behaviour seems irrational. But an important paper by Sushil Bikhchandani and colleagues in the top ranked Journal of Political Economy some 30 years ago showed that it was perfectly compatible with the economic concept of rationality.
Suppose you have to decide the places to visit on your holidays. You might have some private information about the options. In addition, there is some public information available to all.
If enough people have chosen and have already given more weight to the public information, it will seem like it is more accurate than your own. So you are likely to give more weight to it when you choose.
When there is excess demand for something, such as a visit to the Acropolis or Vatican, economics offers two ways to regulate it. By price or by queueing.
Attempts are being made to try to control numbers by levying a fee. It now costs €2 to get close to the Trevi fountain in daylight hours. But this has made little difference. The amount is trivial in comparison to what it has already cost people to get there.
The only realistic option seems to be by basically making people queue. Enough people should eventually learn to avoid tourist hotspots. But in the meantime, enjoy the crush.
Paul Ormerod is an Honorary Professor at the Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester. You can follow him on Instagram @profpaulormerod