Count me among those who believe that travel is a good thing. It leads to opportunities for learning, for cultural exchange, for building bridges of understanding, and for creating better rounded people. I truly think that if more people traveled, more often and to more places, that the world would be a more tolerant – and better educated – place.

Beyond that, tourism is a huge driver of economic growth. As a direct industry, the tourism sector employs tens of millions of people worldwide, and that doesn’t include any of the indirect jobs that also benefit from the presence of tourists. (Those range from the low-hanging like restaurant workers to those less likely to be immediately thought of like construction workers who work on infrastructure.) Global tourism is expected to generate a whopping $5.8 trillion in 2024, and again that is only the direct benefit.

That money in turn helps locals. Besides employment, it leads to more money for essential services, for infrastructure, and for government funding. Tourism dollars pay for protection, restoration, and upkeep of sights, and for the development of new museums and other cultural centers. This even includes natural resources. Costa Rica, for example, has created an entire industry around tourism in untouched rainforest, which has made it more profitable to keep that pristine environment around than to raze it for farmland.

However, there are dangers in becoming too reliant on tourism, and there is a tipping point. It isn’t a stark line, but a wide gray area full of tough choices. So let’s talk for a moment about the dangers of overtourism, and of over-reliance on the tourism sector.

First off, there are diminishing returns from a completely touristic standpoint. Take Rome’s Colosseum, for instance. One of the most popular tourist attractions in the world, the Colosseum attracts roughly 16,000 people every day. And despite its size, it is not a large place. Those tourists truly pack the place, making it hard to move at times. Despite the cost of a visit going up regularly, more and more people try to see the Colosseum. That income is great, giving the money necessary to perform upkeep on the place. But the user experience is made poorer.

Likewise, too many tourists can overwhelm local infrastructure. Take Cartagena, Colombia, a city I was lucky enough to visit earlier this year. The city’s airport is tiny, a single runway and one central gate area. But with the city attracting more than 650,000 foreign tourists (not to mention any domestic ones) in 2023 – a number that is expected to rise in 2024 – that small airport is overcrowded. There is no room to sit, lines can exceed an hour for security or for customs, and local needs for domestic flights are pushed aside for more lucrative international arrivals since there isn’t room for both. Now, it can also be said that this tourism money can and probably will pay for either an expansion of the airport or a new one. But until that happens, it is just one example of infrastructure – essential infrastructure at that – that can’t keep up.

Likewise, tourism places a huge strain on power grids (see South Africa for a good example), water availability (Mexico is in a terrible drought and long showers by tourists in hotels come at the expense of local tap water for some of the country’s poorest communities), transit systems, roads, and more. Again, it is hoped that tourism income will eventually pay for upgrades, but for the time being, it can be a big detriment, especially to the local populations.

Even the financial benefit of tourism isn’t monolithically positive. For instance while a new hotel will employ locals, the chances that in a developing country the hotel is owned, or even managed, by locals is minimal. There simply isn’t the capital basis to do so. So if locals in the Dominican Republic are only able to work in guest services at a new Hilton resort, while the hotel profits are going to American ownership groups, does that really benefit the local economy? Sure there are taxes being paid, which does help, but it also has the potential to make entire developing nations into a class of golf caddies, housekeepers, and bartenders. Is that a positive?

(It should be noted that some countries are trying to address this by making guidelines requiring management to include locals. Ownership, however, remains limited to those with the initial capital to put up.)

Well, what about Airbnb? That model allows local homeowners to rent out rooms – or entire units – that they already own. The answer again is complicated. Yes, Airbnb and similar services do allow for locals to create a decent income based on renting their residential spaces out to tourists, generally at a healthy profit that can in turn be invested. But there is also a downside. First, Airbnb is becoming increasingly dominated by larger ownership groups (overwhelmingly foreign) purchasing and renting out large numbers of units. They will buy entire buildings to turn them into Airbnb hotels, again depriving locals without that financial capital the ability to do the same. But perhaps even more importantly, tourists coming in and desiring rental apartments in the most central locations means that it is more lucrative for even local owners to rent to tourists in those areas. So entire city centers are being abandoned as residential neighborhoods, with apartments simply existing to attract foreign Airbnb users. (Full disclosure here: I am one of those who rents apartments on Airbnb, so I am also a contributor to this. Hotels are just not financially feasible for me for weeks or months at a time.)

Travel and tourism are wonderful things, all in all. But there is a danger of over-reliance on them, and doing so to the detriment of the visitor experience, infrastructure, and the sustainability of the local population. What will the trend be? It’s hard to say, but I hope that we can be more responsible with how tourism dollars are spent, while still allowing for such wonderful travel experiences as I’ve been lucky enough to have.