While the idea and challenges associated with it are by no means new, the term “overtourism” hasn’t been in the lexicon for too long. First coined on Twitter in 2012, it didn’t start to get real traction until 2017, when it began popping up in headlines all over the world.
The term’s popularization wasn’t due to any dramatic spike in visitor numbers—outside of the anomaly of the pandemic, global tourism has been on a massive upswing for decades. What made the news that summer of 2017 was the backlash from local residents in destinations such as Barcelona, Venice and Dubrovnik, which hadn’t happened at such scale before. There were protests in the streets, graffiti imploring tourists to go home, and in some cases, local authorities tried to stem the tide through increased fees, refusing to issue permits for tourism-focused businesses, and even closing entire islands to visitors.
In Whistler, always a forward-looking town, the discussion around overtourism that had largely been taking place for years in conference rooms and at council meetings hit the wider community when Tourism Whistler (TW) in 2019 launched a tourism visioning exercise, coming off surges in visitation.
“We did quite a bit of research and were asking people at the time what ideal tourism looks like in the future, as well as what’s special and unique about Whistler that we want to protect, and engaging residents, visitors, businesses and government officials,” Tourism Whistler president and CEO Barrett Fisher said last month.
With visitation beginning to return to a semblance of normality (although still lagging behind pre-pandemic levels), the conversation around overtourism has picked up steam once more in Whistler, except now armed with the insights gleaned from several years of relative downtime.
At municipal hall, elected officials and Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW) staff have named “smart tourism” as one of four core strategic priorities for council’s term, an effort “to help us look at our parks, trails, tourism programming and transportation options to encourage dispersion throughout the resort,” according to a February report.
As part of the work to define what a “smart tourism economy” could look like for Whistler, the RMOW wants to determine what additional metrics it needs to track its progress towards becoming “a regenerative destination.”
“We are working hard now to understand changing trends in population, demographics and visitation to ensure that our services and amenities support residents and visitors,” said Mayor Jack Crompton. “I point to the Balance Model as one of the tools that will be really important to ensuring we have good information to navigate by. GHGs, number of cars, congestion on the highway, parking utilization, resident satisfaction, access to nature, nature corridors, waste, visitation; we have a huge number of metrics and we are using those to make informed decisions about how we are managing the capacity challenges we are facing.”
A deeper understanding of Whistler’s natural assets
At least some in the community, however, wonder whether the RMOW is asking the right questions when it comes to managing growth. In a recent letter to council over the RMOW’s divisive plans to upgrade Rainbow Park and its associated months-long closure, Rhonda Millikin, award-winning ecologist, adjunct professor and 2022 council hopeful, argued that the municipality needs to better understand the carrying capacity of Whistler’s natural assets before it makes major decisions on things like parks infrastructure.
“I’m just really concerned that this is setting a precedent,” Millikin told Pique in a follow-up interview. “It’s one of our parks where we’re seeing huge numbers of tourists coming, which is great. But we haven’t asked the question whether that trend is sustainable long-term for our natural assets.
“I don’t think [the RMOW] fully understands what our natural assets can handle.”
What we do know, at least in terms of usage, is that demand for Whistler’s parks exploded in the pandemic, with visitation to the resort’s four destination parks up 35 per cent in 2022 compared to the previous summer, which was itself 77-per-cent higher than the same period in 2019.
Less is known about the natural carrying capacity of Whistler’s parks, rivers, lakes, and other ecologically sensitive areas, something Claire Ruddy, executive director of the Association of Whistler Area Residents for the Environment (AWARE), has been pushing the municipality on for years.
“When it comes to human-centric elements of our community, we have a lot of really good data and we use that to make informed decisions,” she said in a 2021 interview. “But when it comes to the natural areas, the ecosystems and the species of the valley, there hasn’t been an investment in mapping out those values and understanding them in a really deep way.”
While pointing to the troves of data the RMOW already relies on to make informed decisions, Crompton acknowledged there is always room for better datasets.
“This town has been keeping metrics on what the impact of our tourism economy is on the people and the place for a very long time. Those metrics are critical to us doing this work well,” he said. “We certainly can add new metrics that will give us different insights, but we’re not without a large number of metrics that give us very good information.”
Millikin believes the Rainbow Park project to be indicative of a deeper issue at the RMOW: its apparent tendency to operate in so-called “siloes,” rather than taking a more holistic approach to its biggest challenges.
“We’re still siloing our solutions,” she said. “There could be, with user fees, a way to solve multiple issues: climate change, community engagement, natural asset protection. So, I think there might be a rush to solve the problem with an immediate low-hanging fruit instead of considering a bigger solution. I think that’s a major problem.”
By establishing a user-fee model at busy parks and natural areas that would exempt local residents, Millikin believes the RMOW could ensure their long-term sustainability while also driving funds to support the research and preservation of Whistler’s cherished natural spaces.
“The money needs to go back to natural assets and not to operational funds,” she said.
Visitor dispersal versus visitor limits
Another key tenet of the RMOW’s smart tourism priority is looking to what other global destinations have done to effectively manage visitor volumes. Several destinations went so far as to implement visitor limits, or even outright bans, unwilling to wade back into a rushing tourism stream after COVID slowed international visitation to a trickle.
Machu Picchu, considered a global poster child for overtourism, was closed in March 2020 for several months. Upon reopening, Peruvian authorities reduced the number of daily visitors to the historic site from 4,000 to 2,224, issued in specific time blocks to avoid crowding.
At Montana’s Glacier National Park, which saw more annual visitors than Whistler did pre-COVID, it’s not unusual for parking lots to be full by sunrise and some trails to see upwards of 1,000 hikers a day. Like so many green spaces across North America, the park experienced a spike in visitors during the pandemic, prompting officials to institute an online reservation system for its scenic Going-to-the-Sun Road corridor during peak season.
In 2015, Barcelona, in many ways ahead of the curve on managing overtourism, introduced a cap on the number of tourists visiting the Catalan capital, which then hovered around 7.5 million annually. The mayor of the day also issued a temporary freeze on new developments, and imposed visitor caps on groups visiting iconic sites. At La Boqueria market and La Rambla, a busy central street, visitor groups were limited to no more than 15 people, and Gaudi’s Park Güell, formerly free, began charging admission and limiting visitors to 800 a day.
Barcelona is a somewhat-unique example in that, rather than to solely preserve sensitive natural habitat or a delicate historic site, the pushback against overtourism was largely to do with locals’ quality of life, which they had seen deteriorate for years as visitation to the city of more than 1.6 million ballooned.
So, is Whistler likely to follow in the footsteps of other tourism hotspots that have imposed caps on visitation?
“I don’t expect we’re going to start charging people to enter Rainbow Park or Lakeside Park. There are user fees for parking and access to Whistler Blackcomb, but at this point, we don’t have plans to charge for park use,” said Crompton, later pointing to the local areas that have already been set aside for protection.
“We have intact wetlands that are left. We have nature corridors that we’ve made sure remain intact. The Emerald Forest is a great example of a piece of our community that we felt strongly needed to be left undeveloped,” he added. “We continue to make decisions ensuring that this place remains healthy and that nature is protected. It’s not something you do once and then you’re done.”
Tourism Whistler has made significant headway in its push to disperse visitation, both to off-peak seasons and to off-the-beaten-path locations. But Fisher was clear implementing a visitor cap is not as simple as it appears on its face.
“We clearly need to do what’s right for the environment, our natural carrying capacity, what’s right for the community, and for our visitors—but it’s complex. You can take actions that could impact an outcome, but one also needs to think about the unintended consequence of that action. It might solve one issue and then create another,” she said. “For example, we have longtime loyal Vancouver and Lower Mainland visitors who we appreciate and want to support. We don’t want to turn visitors away, per se, but there are systems in place at other destinations and some parks, such as reservation systems, because at a certain point, if too many people come on a particular day, it undermines the experience for everyone, not only for the community, but for the visitor as well. These are tough topics that require some really collaborative, focused and comprehensive analysis and discussion.”
