The Genesis of Overtourism: Why We Came Up With the Term and What’s Happened Since
Photo Credit: Tourists watching tourists watching the geyser at Geysir, in Iceland. Flickr / Jen Proctor
Skift Take
We came up with “overtourism,” a simple portmanteau to appeal to people's baser instincts with an element of alarm and fear in it. That is the biggest reason why the term and its exploration by everyone has caught on.
Overtourism is a word that I inadvertently coined on June 14, 2016. It happened as it usually does for me when I work out concepts in my head: with an email to the two people I have been working with since we started Skift: Jason and Dennis. I quickly created a Google Doc outlining what I had in mind and shared it internally.
This was a continuation of the previous discussion we had in office with the editorial team about the democratization of global travel and what affect it had on the world, and who were the winners and losers.
That was also a time soon after UNWTO declared that the tourists traveling globally had crossed the one billion mark. It was also the seminal year when the Chinese travelers became the biggest group of outbound tourists in the world, crossing the 100 million mark annually.
There was also an ongoing parallel conversation happening at Skift amongst our editorial team on sustainable travel and our role in covering it. We
