What Local News Tells Us About Overtourism: New Skift Research

Overtourism manifests itself differently in every locale, but most destinations recognize the importance of local sentiment in understanding the problem. To evaluate this aspect of overtourism, Skift Research constructed an index that analyzes the text of a large set of over 17,000 local media reports and measured the frequency of stories that indicate a negative press sentiment toward arriving tourists. We launched this latest report last week in our Skift Research service, Natural Language Processing: Media Sentiment as an Indicator of Overtourism. Our theory is that struggles with overtourism would show up in the form of negative stories reported in media outlets. By measuring the level of negative tourism stories reported in the local press, we aim to create an index that could indicate overtourism. Higher results on the index indicate that communities are struggling with the negative impact of overtourism. While there can be no one all-encompassing metric to gauge overtou