Tourists go to the place they know

This article was written for Uncover magazine - Meaningful Leisure Experiences. 

Authors: Ondrej Mitas is a senior researcher at the Experience Lab and the Tourism Impacts on Society research group. He also leads the Places and Flows Lab. Jeroen Klijs is professor of Societal Impacts of Tourism and leader of the aforementioned research group.

Some examples
The village of Giethoorn in the Netherlands. Once a tranquil place of canals and small thatched-roof houses, it is now frequently clogged with selfie sticks and bumper-to-bumper canal boats. And yet, just a 15-minute drive away lies the charming village of Blokzijl, quaint, peaceful, steeped in history, and with just as many scenic photo opportunities. Most tourists have simply never heard of it.

Or take the case of Volendam. Each year, hundreds of thousands of tourists crowd along its dike for a photo in traditional costume, a serving of fried fish, or a visit to the Volendam Museum. It is the kind of charming, historic fishing village people imagine when they think of ’authentic Holland’ except here, the atmosphere often buckles under the weight of its own popularity. Yet, less than an hour away lies Enkhuizen, a town with an equally rich maritime history, a picturesque old harbour, and the impressive open-air Zuiderzee Museum. In Enkhuizen, you can stroll through a historical fishing village without having to queue for a selfie. You will find timber-framed houses, old crafts, and boats bobbing in the water. Everything people are looking for in Volendam, but with more space, more calm, and more room for genuine discovery.

Information problem
In this context, it is crucial to remember that most tourist attractions, within most destinations, in most regions, would be deeply grateful to attract more tourists, their attendant spending, and their (potentially) positive socio-cultural impacts. It is just that you and I have never heard of these lesser-known attractions. Thus, one might see overtourism mostly as a problem of information. Too many people have heard too many good things about places that are now ‘overtourism’ hotspots, while not enough people have heard enough good things about lesser-known attractions and locations. Perhaps these lesser-known attractions might be just as enjoyable.

Experiment to test assumptions
Reasoning from this starting assumption, much could be learned from making specific changes in information sent to tourists and then seeing where they actually go. A team of researchers and industry leaders teamed up in 2021 to do just that. We set up an experiment in the Dutch province of Overijssel in cooperation with their Destination Management Organisation, Marketing Oost, and the tourism information company Travel With Zoey. Travel With Zoey blends artificial intelligence systems with human input in direct messages to tourists over services such as WhatsApp.

We recruited 155 participants who had booked stays in the late spring and summer of 2021 at 10 large campgrounds in the Vechtdal and Sallandse Heuvelrug areas of Overijssel. These areas are comparable to the fragile natural environments that could potentially suffer from too much tourist impact as mentioned earlier. Each participant was randomly assigned to receive information about either heavily visited or lesser-known attractions, and to receive these actively from a WhatsApp number operated by Travel With Zoey, wherein they could reply, discuss, ask questions, and receive fully personalised advice, or to receive these tips via a passive map-based app, of the sort destinations often promote. We wanted to know two things: would people go where we sent them? And, would it affect the quality of their vacation? In addition to participants filling in daily questionnaires, we used GPS tracking software from Mobidot to track participants’ movements.

Caveats
Before going into the findings, we must mention two caveats. First, this was obviously a convenience sample, which cannot be broadly generalised to tourists in other destinations, or even to other tourists to the same area who might be less open to destination information. Thus, the effects in the experiment are probably somewhat stronger than the effects in the entire population of tourists. Second, the first half of the data were collected (May and June 2021) in the environment of a strict pandemic lockdown, and featured extremely poor weather as well. Thus, participants were truly puzzled about how to spend their time besides merely sitting in a soggy tent. Needless to say, these are not the usual conditions tourists encounter in Overijssel in the late spring. How that may have affected the findings is not obvious, however.

Results
Simply put, no matter what information tourists received, their experience of the vacation as a whole was exactly the same. The groups only differed in their evaluation of the information source itself: Zoey or the map. Zoey received a 7.5, while the map received a 5.5. Also, participants reported using Zoey much more.

In terms of where tourists actually went, the information made a dramatic difference. Tourists hearing about the lesser-known attractions were about twice as likely to be moving near these attractions, and only 20% as likely to be moving near heavily visited hotspots. In short, tourists go where you send them. This may seem a bit obvious, but if it were that obvious, the crowding sometimes labelled ‘overtourism’ would already have been solved.

Overcoming obstacles in destination marketing 
One problem is that that some organisations do not want to or do not dare to stop their marketing of well-known attractions. As one DMO manager put it, speaking on condition of anonymity: “If we remove the big hitters from our brochures or website, our stakeholders call us immediately. They think we’ve gone mad”. We have even encountered this ourselves. When news spread about a possible repetition of this experiment in Amsterdam (see below), some local policymakers were contacted by tourist attractions worried that some ‘crazy scientists’ were about to scare off their visitors.

A second issue is that lesser-known (potential) attractions are sometimes not equipped to handle an influx of visitors. For example, directing tourists to a quieter walking trail might unintentionally lead to wear and tear on the path, parking problems in nearby residential streets, and complaints about missing signage or waste bins. Even with the best intentions, the necessary infrastructure is often not in place yet.

Third, and perhaps most seriously, a common unfortunate political consequence of discussions around ‘overtourism’ is to defund the local DMO. Paradoxically, and frustratingly, this destroys their ability to change their information strategy and inform really wide populations of potential visitors about lesser-known attractions.

A fourth issue, and the one we will address next, is that other destinations may work differently, and information interventions like this one may play out differently there. That is why this project has a follow-up, which is currently in the data analysis stage. Visitors to Amsterdam and Copenhagen in November and December 2024 provided us with exactly the same kind of data as in Overijssel. And just like in Overijssel, we assigned them to one of four conditions: getting information about the must-see attractions, or about lesser-known attractions; via Travel With Zoey, or in a more traditional way. In Copenhagen, the traditional info source was a website; in Amsterdam it was a (rather pretty) paper map.

More information?
You can read the full results of the Overijssel experiment in the article “Tell Me Where to Go” by Mitas et al. in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.