Overtourism: what’s next?

Abstract

In 2019, this journal asked whether overtourism was a genuinely new issue or merely a new label for a long-debated phenomenon, concluding that the phenomenon was old but the term was new and worthy of future study. Seven years on – and after a pandemic that first interrupted and then intensified tourist flows – this research letter revisits that question by asking what has changed. Through an updated exploratory review of the literature, it examines whether overtourism has consolidated into a more autonomous field of enquiry or remains a loosely bounded umbrella term, and it outlines priorities for the research agenda ahead.