Every summer, millions of people fly around the world on vacation. The United Nations World Tourism Organization estimates that international arrivals, the measure of global travel, will be 2% higher than pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

However, as more people take vacations, some of the world’s tourist hotspots are more crowded than ever. And that has even sparked protests in some popular destinations. In some European cities, residents have marched through popular areas, urging tourists to “go home.”

Some destinations, such as Amsterdam, are doing what would once have been thought unthinkable and actively discouraging visitors. The tourist rush has become an indelible feature of travel and deserves some understanding.

So what is overcrowding in tourism? How do we respond to it? And why does overcrowding seem to be increasing?

Overcrowding by tourists

Essentially, overcrowding occurs because many people go to the same place at the same time.

There are three basic principles of overcrowding in tourism. First, overcrowding is real and causes stress and detracts from our experience.

Second, we feel more cramped in the presence of incompatible behaviors. For example, we feel more cramped on a sidewalk when we have to avoid a skateboarder, a cyclist, and a few aggressive vendors than we do at a crowded music festival where everyone is behaving similarly.

Third, a place is overcrowded when we believe it to be. There is no standard measure of overcrowding that visitors perceive. It is an individually experienced phenomenon.

We cannot understand the influx of tourists without considering the situation of the locals. We recently learned that locals sprayed tourists with water pistols during a demonstration in Barcelona. Locals only do this when they are really fed up.

This brings us to what I call the host-guest contract, the idea that visitors should stay in tourist areas so that local residents can maintain the sanctity of their neighborhoods.

The rise in short-term rentals allows many visitors to venture beyond the touristy parts of the city. Some visitors may feel that if they limit themselves to touristy areas, their trip will remain superficial and not worth the time and money it costs.

Short-term rentals may allow them to avoid other tourists and have a more “authentic” experience, but it can cause problems for local residents as they have to deal with more and more tourists invading their neighborhood.

How people cope with overpopulation

Some people hate crowds, others are attracted to them. There are four basic ways to deal with the stress of crowding.

The first is to change travel plans to avoid crowds. This is the most common coping method and consists of avoiding certain places if we know they will be busy.

Another method is rationalization. When people find themselves in crowds of tourists, they often rationalize the situation to avoid cognitive dissonance. For example, visitors to the Louvre Museum might be more willing to tolerate crowds because they assume everyone wants to see the Mona Lisa.

It means that people deliberately enter crowded tourist places. And they do so for several reasons: because of the attraction, because of the fear of missing something, because crowds provide a sense of security and the reassurance that they are in an important place. Rationalization explains why we see thousands of people in the same place at the same time.

A third coping technique is product switching, which suggests that we intentionally downgrade a product to avoid cognitive dissonance. If someone tells you that Tofino used to be a quaint little surfing town and is now a tourist destination, they are engaging in product switching.

The fourth option is direct action, which involves reaching out to authorities to remedy a situation. This could be as simple as asking a museum staff member to quiet a noisy group or posting an assessment of Niagara Falls that provides more information on how to avoid crowds.

Coping methods are similar among visitors and residents of the places visited, but the latter place more emphasis on displacement. They have deeper knowledge of the place and the ability to navigate effectively in crowds.

The influence of social media

Some argue that tourism has taken a turn for the worse with the advent of social media. That may be true, but the real impact of social media is that it has made travel a more visible status symbol.

Before social media, travelers printed out their photos and shared them with family and friends. Today, we can share our photos instantly online.

Furthermore, the desire for the most “Instagrammable” experiences possible encourages risk avoidance. Essentially, it encourages us to stick to tried-and-tested tours, destinations and attractions rather than straying off the beaten track. This reinforces the basic principle of overcrowding: lots of people deciding to go to the same place at the same time.

Given all these trends, it is likely that most post-pandemic travel will continue to be to “safe” destinations where tourists are more likely to feel they are getting their money’s worth. In other words, Global North travelers will travel to places in the Global North that they believe offer a worthwhile experience.

All tourists want to have a good time on vacation. This often means that the wisdom of the crowd still applies. No matter how uncomfortable overcrowding may be, it feels less risky when thousands of people go to the same place at the same time than if you’re alone.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.