Spaces and exchanges : What can tourists do to avoid overtourism?

Spaces and exchanges

The notion I will deal with is "spaces and exchanges". In order to do this, I'm going to put the emphasis on the theme of tourism, and particularly on its exacerbated version called "overtourism" to which the world is prey to nowadays. Since it's a phenomenon which devides the public opinion, some seeing its positive aspects and others its negative ones, we can ask ourselves: to what extent is tourism a two-edged sword? So, as to answer this problem, I'm going to refer to four documents studied in class: the first one is a commentary extracted from a blog written by a Hong-Kong citizen, the second is an article from the newspaper "The Guardian" entilted "First Venice and Barcelona: now anti-tourism marches spread across Europe", the third an extract from a report entilted "Carbon Footprint of Global tourism is huge", and the last one is an article from the site "responsibletourism.com called "What can tourists do to avoid overtourism?".

I'm going to focus first on the benefits of tourism, then I will emphasize the negative aspects of overtourism, and finally the solutions to make it a profitable phenomenon for everyone.

Tourism presents several positive aspects, for the tourists themselves as well as for the locals. Indeed, for those who experience an authentic version of tourism, it provides them will an insight into the local culture, by discovering the way of life of the country they're visiting, as promised in the first and the fourth documents. Thereby, this experience enables them to broaden their horizons, thus making them more tolerant to the understanding of others.

Furthermore, to meet people with lifestyle sometimes diametrically opposed to ours, living occasionally with the strict minimum and radiant all the same with happiness, allow us to adopt an hindsight vision of our own way of life, realising that way that a feeling of fulfilment comes from humble things, like an interaction with someone, faraway from our materialistic pleasures, as it is also stated in the fourth document.

Besides, together with the fact that tourism has positive aspects for tourists, it also benefits the locals. Since tourism usually represents a large part of the GPD of a country, it is therefore essential for some local economies as in Spain, thus the locals benefit from the money spent by tourists, as mentioned in the third document.

Althought it has many positive aspects, there is a catch. Indeed, tourism also has several negative aspects. In some of the most touristic countries, such as Spain, mass tourist accomodation is a source of various problems. In fact, the emergence of hosting rental platforms such as Airbnb has disastrous consequences on the rental market, as can be seen in the second document, since it's more profitable for the owners to rent in the short term to the tourists rather than in the long term to locals. Thus, one of the direct consequence of this phenomenon is whole neighborhood desertification. As a result, the rise of sometimes extremist movements of anti-tourism protests has spread in Europe, multiplying protest actions such as anti-tourism marches in Barcelona or Venice, as well as degrading actions of related tourism items, such as the slashing of the tires of a tourist bus denounced in the second