Every year, hundreds of millions of people travel the world for a myriad of different reasons. Many of them do so in search of authentic local experiences. They seek the narrow streets of Lisbon’s Alfama district, the rice terraces of Bali, the temples of Kyoto, or the markets of Mexico City. But life happens outside of a tourist’s visit. In destination after destination, the very tourism boom that “puts a place on the map” is quietly hollowing it out. There, overtourism quietly pushes  out the people whose lives, culture, and labor make it worth visiting in the first place. 

Connecting Overtourism and Community Displacement

In this light, a term has emerged at the center of this issue: overtourism. Overtourism refers to what happens when the volume of visitors to a destination exceeds what the local environment, infrastructure, and community can sustainably absorb. It is not simply about crowds. It is about what happens to housing, water, wages, and daily life when an economy reorganizes itself entirely around the needs of temporary visitors rather than permanent residents.

The mechanism of displacement is rarely dramatic. It usually starts with short-term rental platforms, such as Airbnb, converting houses and apartments into tourist accommodation. Landlords earn more from a week of tourist bookings than from a month of local tenancy, so the financial incentive to convert is overwhelming. Property values rise, attracting speculators. 

Slowly, this system reduces housing supply for locals and drives up rents. Long-term residents, typically lower-income and working-class, are priced out first. Traditional shops are also replaced by souvenir stores and chain restaurants that cater to the tastes of global tourists. Then what is once a living community becomes, as residents of Seville have put it, a theme park.

Speed and Scale

This process is called tourism gentrification, and it is not new. Colonial-era resort economies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia were built on precisely this logic: extracting value from a place and its people for the benefit of outside visitors. 

What is new today is the speed and scale. Digital platforms, for instance, accelerate it by funneling algorithmic recommendations into the same Instagrammable locations. Between the ease of global travel and connecting technology, these novel experiences have turned into overtourism and compressed decades of displacement into a few years. Furthermore, this is happening across every region of the world, from Europe and Latin America to Southeast Asia and beyond.

The Numbers Behind the Crisis

The data makes the scale of the problem concrete, and it spans every continent. In Lisbon, property prices surged 176% between 2014 and 2024. Central historic districts saw rises of over 200%, and by 2024, approximately half of all properties in the city’s central districts were registered as short-term rentals. In Alfama specifically, a University of Lisbon study revealed an alarming story. Between 2015 and 2017 alone, 27 families were forced from their homes in a single street, with 18 of those apartments immediately converted into tourist accommodation. The phenomenon echoes in Mallorca, Spain. There, over 1,000 people were living in cars in 2024 because the housing market had been so thoroughly consumed by tourist accommodation.

Across Southeast Asia, a 2025 systematic review of 15 case studies across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos found that UNESCO World Heritage designations, state-led tourism policies, and sharing economy platforms have been consistently driving local displacement and cultural erosion. In Malaysia, for example, George Town’s UNESCO World Heritage designation attracted capital and tourists. This boom then drove resident population down from 50,000 to just 9,000, with cultural festivals disappearing alongside the communities that sustained them. Meanwhile, locals of Canggu, Indonesia, have reported rapid gentrification, inter-communal conflicts, and noise pollution as direct consequences of overtourism. 

In Latin America, Mexico City saw protests erupt in summer 2025 as residents attributed surging rents directly to an influx of foreign remote workers and tourists. The so-called economic benefits rarely touch the communities most affected. Research from Málaga, published in 2025, found that tourism’s economic benefits are routinely overstated. In reality, there are leakages and indirect imports weakening local economies and deepening inequalities within regions. 

Pushback Worldwide

Governments are starting to push back, though responses vary widely in ambition and execution. In Japan, Mount Fuji implemented visitor caps and a 2,000 yen climbing fee on its most popular trail during peak season, specifically to protect both its ecological balance and its cultural significance to local communities. In Indonesia, Bali introduced a mandatory tourist levy in 2024, which directs revenue toward cultural preservation and environmental management. 

The Philippines saw a different approach. Boracay temporarily closed for rehabilitation. The Batanes Islands have since taken a more proactive approach, joining the UNWTO International Network of Sustainable Tourism Observatories to monitor tourism’s impacts before they reach a breaking point. These are meaningful interventions, but most still address symptoms rather than causes.

Rethinking Tourism

The deeper fix requires treating housing as a right rather than a tourism asset. This calls for stronger tenant protections, caps on short-term rental licenses in residential neighborhoods, and community land trusts that take housing permanently off the speculative market. These measures may sound like a long shot, but they are feasible and beneficial for the long-term wellbeing of local communities. While not yet a reality, Barcelona has announced plans to eliminate all short-term tourist rentals by 2028. 

However, the most instructive models may not come from a government at all. In Mexico’s Sierra Norte, Nahua and Totonac Indigenous peoples founded the Tosepan Titataniske cooperative, founded in 1977. The cooperative runs a community-managed eco-lodge where profits stay local and 35,000 members across 430 villages have a direct stake in how tourism develops. With this model, cultural integrity is built into the experience by design. It is what sustainable tourism can look like when communities hold the reins from the start, not as an afterthought. 

Tourism has always impacted the people and places it touches—visitors and locals alike. The experiences that come from it can teach us a lot about ourselves and the world. Now, what also matters is ensuring the exchange is a mutually beneficial one, and that the communities at the center of it get to decide how.

Editor: Nazalea Kusuma

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