Mass Tourism and Its Consequences

Tourism by definition is the act of travelling to other cities or countries for a certain amount of time. People usually travel with recreational purposes to relax and see foreign places during their holidays. Some people also travel for business related purposes. Most tourists are usually drawn to coastal cities with large beaches, old towns with interesting histories or large and developed cities live New York and London. Tourism has a lot of benefits for the cities and towns it is done in. 

Tourism almost always greatly benefits local businesses but sometimes tourism can also grow excessive. This is called mass tourism. For example, Venice, one of the most popular destinations for tourism, has around 20 million visitors every year but the population of Venice is only two hundred seventy thousand. This can cause a lot of problems for the environment and the actual residents of the city. Mass tourism can cause many issues for cities such as pollution, traffic, congestion, increased crime and more. In these cases, there isn’t a lot to do but put restrictions to lower tourism and many towns like Venice, Barcelona, Marseilles that are being affected by mass tourism and are in fact putting restrictions to alleviate the problem. These restrictions are taxes on cruise ships, tourism permits, entry fees and tourism taxes. However, while these restrictions do in fact help alleviate this problem, they can also drastically lower tourism income in these cities.  

In my opinion limiting mass tourism is acceptable but these restrictions might not work well for my country. This is because people come to Turkey as a cheap destination and these taxes and restrictions would most likely drive away a lot of tourists from Turkey. Tourism is one of the largest sources of income in Turkey and lowering the amount of tourists would likely cripple the already bad Turkish economy. 

If I was the Minister of Culture and Tourism of my country while I wouldn’t put any restrictions and high taxes for tourists, I would use better management, better cleaning services and roads to alleviate all the problems that mass tourism brings. Either way the restrictions that tourism destinations aren’t likely to stop and will probably continue to be placed on more and more cities and towns.

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