Information and Communications Technology for Overtourism Management: An Exploration

With increasing attention being paid to aspects like carrying capacity and sustainability of destinations, overtourism has emerged as one of the biggest and most fiercely debated issues across the world. In the last decade, overtourism has become a buzzword and a social movement in tourism, gaining a lot of media attention. Effective, efficient, and innovative solutions to address the problem of overtourism at various destinations have been called for. One such solution is the use of advanced ICT tools for destination management that can contribute to reducing stress on overbooked destinations, planning for alternative destinations, targeting an alternate group of tourists, and most importantly to have control over the tourist inflow through systematic and planned destination management strategy. While literature concerning the usage of ICT for tourism promotion is in plenty, the aspect of destination management through the use of advanced technology has been rarely dealt with at a holistic level. This paper attempts to fill that gap by developing a framework for destination marketing organization (DMOs) in the quest to mitigate the problems of overtourism through the usage of new advanced technology. Based on the review of secondary literature, this paper tries to highlight the challenges associated with overtourism and then deals with the ways by which the problems can be mitigated by the usage of advanced and updated technological tools.