Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Evan Byrne asks

In your opinion, what is the busiest “tourist spot” that you’ve been to? And while there, what did you avoid due to the amount of people that were there that you would have otherwise liked to have seen?

Because I usually travel solo, I tend to avoid busy places during peak tourist seasons. If a palace is busy, it usually means high hotel prices, and I just go somewhere else.

There have been a very small number of times when I have been on a cruise ship. I’m not talking about expedition ships that go to remote areas with a relatively small number of people or river cruises, but the really big cruise ships that have thousands of people.I’ve never actually paid to do such a cruise, but I was invited to attend by some cruise lines. For the most part, I didn’t mind the cruise experience, and being on the ship was better than I thought it would be.

However, on one of the cruises, we made a stop in Sicily. I went on an excursion to the town of Taormina. It turned out that there were five cruise ships all in port that day, and the small town of Taormina was just crushed with tourists. There was a flood of people who all hit the same place at the same time. It was far more people than a town like that could reasonably expect to host.

The thing was, it was over soon after it began. By 5 pm, the town was probably empty because everyone had to be back on the ship.

The problem with overtourism isn’t too many tourists per se. The problem is too many tourists at the same palace at the same time. There are lots of great places that people just don’t know about. Most overtouristed places are so because they have an international airport and/or a terminal for cruise ships.

People go there because it’s easy to get there.