Seasonality and overtourism

Writing at a time when Covid-19 has been prevalent throughout the world, to discuss issues such as seasonality and overtourism may seem both inappropriate and insensitive. Many tourist destinations and most elements of the tourism industry have, during 2020 and 2021, severely suffered economically from an absence of tourists rather than an imbalance or surfeit of visitors. The concerns about overtourism in particular, expressed so strongly in the last years of the second decade of the 21st century (see for example, Dodds & Butler, 2019; Milano et al., 2019), now seem strangely irrelevant and unmemorable. However, it is likely that what are viewed as major difficulties in tourism, both seasonality and overtourism, are almost certain to return to many destinations in the not too distant future. The fact that so many potential tourists were denied the opportunity to travel, particularly to foreign destinations, for almost the whole of 2020 and much of 2021, means that there is a great deal of latent demand forcibly pent up in most, if not all, of the traditional major origin countries.