Sabine Sedlacek, Ulrich Gunter (p), Bozana Zekan(p), Christian Weismayer

Discussion on the growth limits and carrying capacity of tourism destinations is not new. Already for decades, carrying capacity has been at the core of sustainable tourism and aims at offering ‘time/space-specific answers’ at individual localities of the various European regions. There are many definitions of this concept and the calculation of one ‘magic number’ to assess carrying capacity is not feasible for reasons such as differences in threshold established by tourists and residents, ecological limits, multitude of resources, etc.
The discussion about carrying capacity in the context of regional sustainability is linked to human activities impacting a region. This impact has to be within the region’s ecological limits and in parallel within the region’s social and economic limits in order to provide adequate supporting functions for the population living in the region. Related to tourism, this means that regions should learn as much as possible about the impact of tourism on their destinations in order to be able to develop solid and adequate policies for tourism development.
The proposed paper therefore introduces a new methodology for assessing carrying capacity, which (a) is specific enough to cater to destination-specific needs as verified by pilot-testing the new methodology on various representative case studies and (b) is general enough to be applicable to any tourist destinations throughout European regions. First, the various definitions of carrying capacity are presented and discussed. Second, existing methodologies of measuring carrying capacity are introduced and assessed. Third, the critical review of the extant literature on the topic and a stakeholder-involving approach lead to the development of the aforementioned methodology, whose single steps are described in detail.

Sabine Sedlacek, Christian Weismayer (p), Daniel Dan (p)

Nowadays, more and more people can afford to travel. But if more people are travelling for leisure as well as business purposes, this also places a continuously increasing burden on the most often chosen destinations in terms of social, environmental, and economic indicators, the three pillars of sustainability. In order to prevent such destinations from the ongoing emigration of the native population due to the loss of their residential quality-of-life (QOL), increasing life maintenance costs, increasing property prices in the center of such destinations, the destruction of the natural environment or historical monuments and other sights, the relocation of the local economy that is not strongly connected enough with touristic services or products to survive on the private market and profit from incoming tourists, and so forth, this problem has to be tackled. One possible solution is to constantly monitor cause–effect relationships. This allows a destination to identify unwanted situations or tendencies from a long-time perspective, and to set regulating mechanisms in time that help to reduce and regulate the influx of tourists onto an acceptable level. But exactly this threshold, called carrying capacity, that sets the limit for a destination’s enironment to sustain in an infinite long time period, is the challenging task to be solved here. For this reason a platform was developed that allows destinations 1) to estimate and observe their tourist flows, 2) to predict tourist flows to have a look into the future to be able to react in time, 3) to reveal crucial relationships between tourist flows and regional impacts, 4) to track crucial relationships over time, and 5) to compare them with other destinations. The destinations benefit from such a benchmarking solution as they can compare themselves with their competitors along the three pillars of sustainability, social, environmental, and economic, have a look at the same over time, and get a holistic picture of the actual situation of their destination.

Gunther Maier (p), Oliver Fritz, Karin Maier

Overtourism has become a hot topic in regional and local policy recently. Many attractive locations like Venice, Dubrovnik, Barcelona, and others struggle with large numbers of tourists that seem to crowd out the local population. In reaction to the resulting political pressure, many city and region governments propose and try out quite drastic measures to cope with these problems.
In following the academic as well as the political discussion of overtourism, we find that this discussion lacks a conceptual basis in economic theory. With this paper, we want to take a step toward filling this gap. We will try to identify the main components of an economic theory of overtourism, analyze these elements, and try to combine them into an economic "model" of overtourism. From our current point of view, concepts like "tragedy of the commons", "competition in the real estate market", and "issues of distribution of costs and benefits among stakeholder groups" seem to be strong candidates. This "model" should be able to provide some guidance for how to tackle the problem of overtourism and should provide hints about which policy measures may be able to solve the problem and which may not.