The Concept of Over Tourism

After enduring a rollercoaster ride of emotions through our previous article on "Relationships", it's time for us to share with our readers on "Over tourism"  which is constantly growing as a contextual issue in the world. This article was sent to us by Dinuka Abeysinghe, a 2nd year undergraduate of the Faculty of Management and Finance, University of Colombo. Here he has shared his thoughts on this current ever growing issue and has tried to make us all aware on it.

In my opinion tourism is one of the main income sources to exotic countries like Sri Lanka. In 2018 Sri Lanka ended up with approximately 2.33 million tourists visiting our country and that is a staggering 10.3% increase compared to 2017. The tourism and hospitality industry has prevailed to provide more job opportunities in the country in the recent past and our citizens and businesses have relied heavily upon this industry. For this reason and many more the island was named the “the best country to visit” in 2019 by Lonely Planet. There was a significant drop in the tourism industry after the Easter attacks in April 2019, in which the industry went into turmoil and several jobs were lost in the process. However, the arrival rate is slowly on the rise again and is expected to make a full recovery in no time. The question is whether relying this heavily on tourism and encouraging it at this pace is healthy for our country or in fact any other country that relies on tourism.

This is where the concept of over tourism comes into play. Although Sri Lankans numbers are heading up, we still are not at a point where we can say that over tourism is a problem in our country. 

However, this issue must be addressed and contingencies must be put into place now before it’s too late because Sri Lanka although it is not at this stage, the country is surely heading up towards it. Over tourism mainly suggests that due to the increase in arrival rate of tourists a country’s resources (This includes both natural and man-made resources) could bear heavy damage or losses. For example, let’s take environmental pollution: if the amount of people who visit our lovely sandy beaches go up, that indicates the amount of waste that will collect in that area will also be higher than before. Kishu Gomes the chairman of the Sri Lanka Tourism and Development Authority stated that there is no problem up to now of over tourism in the country as a whole, rather there is a problem of congestion in certain exotic and symbolic locations in the country such as the beaches like Arugambay and religious sites like the Temple of the Tooth relic in Kandy. This congestion has led to the increase of pollution in these areas compared to the other parts of the island. The main reason being Sri Lanka does not have a proper waste disposal system in place to support the industry’s demand.

Will over tourism be an issue in the future? And how do other countries manage this problem while protecting the industry’s demand? Certainly for Sri Lanka this will become an issue because more tourists are coming into the country and the arrival rate is going up again despite the Easter bombings. Environmental pollution should be Sri Lanka’s number one concern mainly for the reason being, Sri Lanka being in the top 10 countries who dumps plastic waste to the ocean. This is a major concern because around Sri Lanka many marine animals consume this plastic waste and are adversely affected by the consumed waste. If this continues the tourists who come in to this beautiful island as well as the locals will miss out on natures wonders such as the blue whale who we can observe along the coasts of our proud nation. Before we bring more tourists we must implement contingencies that will prevent harm to nature itself and implement ways that will be effective practically and not just think of it in a theoretical manner.

One country in Asia is fixing this over tourism problem already. And it’s no one other than the Philippines who had over 7.1 million tourist arrivals in 2018. They closed off bays and beaches for a limited time to start off this project. Starting off with demolishing buildings to give more room to the beaches and cleaning their beaches from top to bottom leaving no waste behind. They also started to ban certain plastic bottles and instead started using Aluminum bottles to consume water and beverages. They also created a new sewer system to drain the sewage in a proper manner. Tourists mainly travel in these countries using tri-cycles (what we know as three-wheelers or tuk tuks). They replaced diesel tri-cycles with electric ones so the carbon foot print would reduce substantially. Also by introducing more trash cans around the city and disposing waste using segregation methods helped to overcome the issue of environmental pollution through over tourism. Philippines is known for its corals as well. They limited the number of boats in use to protect their corals. But last but not least they limited the number of tourists on the island so that it doesn’t get over crowded. Finally, they opened the bays and beaches to the people again and this time they had implemented all measures to overcome the issue of over tourism. This is what we call sustainable tourism where we don’t harm mother nature or any other important sites in a country.

What can Sri Lanka take from this? Well as over tourism is still in its baby stages in our country what we can do is follow countries like the Philippines and irradiate the issue of over tourism even before it becomes a problem. Waste management is a critical aspect when it comes to Sri Lanka and it will only increase as more people come in. Sri Lanka to prosper must follow practices that are environmental friendly because at the end of the day without beauty no one would visit this exotic island.

Dinuka Abeysinghe

Second year

Faculty of Management & Finance

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