With an increasing number of destinations under strain, visitor satisfaction on decline, travellers are beginning to look for alternatives.

Here are the 3 risks and 3 opportunities that I think operators, hotels and DMCs can act on right now.

The Risks

Risk #1: Crowds can be a liability to your business

A growth in the number of tourists used to be unambiguously good news for everyone. That’s no longer true.

During a portfolio review of several thousand itineraries for a client, Equator found that crowds were driving down year-on-year reviews, as once-authentic experiences were turned into tourist traps. So much so, that several attractions were acting as a drag on the entire itinerary. This presented a commercial risk for the company – they couldn’t swap out destinations as their contracts with hotels and DMCs had years to run.

The benefits that come with long-term contracts – guaranteed access to a site, better rates, and commercial security – are no longer assured. There are new risks and liabilities to consider when signing a long-term deal: the extent to which crowds may negatively impact the visitor experience, worsen the quality of life for residents, and result in an array of new, and often-times inconsistent regulations.

We’re already seeing some of these risks come into effect. Barcelona, for instance, has announced that from 2028, short-term vacation rentals will be prohibited. In 2022, the Town of Bar Harbor, Maine announced a cruise cap that will reduce cruise visitors by as much as 80%, Bhutan has set a daily tourist tax of $100, and Rome announced a fee for tourists wanting to see Trevi Fountain.

My recommendations:

Read more

On her return, we grabbed lunch and I asked her how it went.

“I couldn’t find a restaurant that wasn’t fully booked. The Colosseum was a clusterfuck. I could barely see anything at the Uffizi. It was suffocating.” So thoroughly had crowds ruined her experience of Italy that she decided she will never go back.

It’s tempting to write this off as one traveler’s bad luck, or a failure to plan properly (it was June, after all). That has been the go-to argument among many in the travel and tourism industry: They should have done their research, arrived at every attraction at ridiculous o’clock, pre-booked every experience across 9 individual apps, and decided what they wanted to eat 8 months in advance. In other words, you can have a good time at the world’s greatest attractions, so long as you plan your vacation with the precision of a space launch.

New data, released by Equator at PURE 2025, challenges that assumption. For years, a trend has been building in tourism that is set to reshape how people decide where and when to travel.

Crowds are the experience

In a sentiment analysis of hundreds of thousands of reviews and posts across global attractions, Equator found that crowds have become the single fastest-growing source of negative visitor feedback. At some of the world’s most iconic sites, the impact is so significant that average ratings are in year-on-year decline.

In Kyoto, Japan, the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove – a site best known for its towering green bamboo stalks – has gone from one of Kyoto’s must-see attractions to “overhyped” and '“not worth the wait”. Of the 10,000 comments and posts analyzed by Equator, one-in-two mentioned crowds, with 15% stating that the crowds were the cause of their negative review (1- or 2-star ratings). In peak season, that number rises to 25%.

It’s a similar story at the Louvre, Paris. Summer visitor ratings at the Louvre have dropped more than a full star — from 4.5 to 3.4 — since 2017. Crowd-related complaints comprise nearly one in five reviews left online at the museum.

To track this at scale, Equator built Crowdshift — a sentiment index that draws on hundreds of thousands of visitor reviews and posts across global attractions. What it reveals is a consistent pattern: the same popularity that makes a destination iconic becomes, past a certain threshold, the very thing that destroys the experience. There’s a reputation ‘decay curve’ to tourism attractions. This decay curve isn’t confined to museums or UNESCO sites – it’s playing out on remote waterfalls in Bali, along hiking trails in Spain, and even at Everest Base Camp.

Tourists begin looking elsewhere

So what happens next? For that, we need only turn to Google Search Trends.

Searches for “best time to visit to avoid crowds” have increased 25x since July of last year. In fact, it doesn’t matter how you phrase ‘avoid tourists’ the same trend shows up. “Authentic travel,” “slow travel,” “off the beaten path,” “hidden gem” - all have increased somewhere between four and forty times compared to previous years.

What makes this signal significant is that it isn’t tied to any single viral post or content creator. Nor is it one single event. When six different phrasings of the same underlying question all break sharply upward at the same time, the signal is in the demand, not the supply. In other words, avoiding other tourists is fast becoming a decision-factor in trip planning.

So why are visitor numbers still going up?

If destinations like Venice, the Great Wall of China, and Bali are getting inundated with bad reviews - why are visitor numbers to these destinations still climbing year-on-year?

The simple answer is that these places are not going to become unpopular overnight. We’re not saying that demand is disappearing entirely. The data says that the visitor experience is worsening to the point where avoiding crowds has become a new, and significantly more important of trip planning.

Think of it like this: if you went to a restaurant and the food was great, but the experience was miserable – long waits, a small table located right by the restroom, having to shout over the noise, bad customer service – you’d likely leave a bad review and never return. That’s what is happening to the destination: the “product” hasn’t changed. The experience consuming it has.

So what happens next?

At the destination level, both national and local governments are beginning to respond. Rome has introduced a fee to visit the Trevi Fountain. Barcelona has tightened caps on short-term rentals. Amsterdam have run ‘anti-tourism’ adverts. Bhutan charges tourists a daily fee of $100 simply to enter the country and limits visitor numbers entirely. The Louvre (perhaps the most high-profile example) has announced a structural renovation specifically designed to manage crowd flow and reduce the bottleneck that has turned the Mona Lisa into a five-second photo opportunity flanked by selfie sticks (we made a whole video about this).

The commercial side is, however, wide open.

The question isn’t whether people want to avoid the crowds. The data is fairly clear about that. The question is whether tour operators, travel brands, and the online travel agencies (Booking.com, Viator, Expedia) will move to meet demand – or whether they’ll keep funnelling people to the same overloaded destinations, competing on price for an experience that’s getting worse year-on-year.

In our next article (for paid subscribers), we’ll be laying out what travel businesses can do to stay competitive when crowds are impacting their most popular itineraries - how to identify which destinations in your portfolio are already tipping, where the opportunities are, and how to act on this data now to futureproof your business.

Outlier is brought to you by Equator - an advisory company specialising in tourism data and forecasting traveller trends. We help travel brands anticipate demand and demonstrate impact, so more travellers choose them.

We’re also introducing a paid tier. We’ll be publishing a monthly deep dive or guide for paid subscribers (starting with this one), while continuing to share regular free articles.

We’re building Outlier to become a go-to resource for independent travel brands and decision-makers planning their next product moves and strategies. You can subscribe for free or consider becoming a paid subscriber and get full access for $8/month or $80/year.

This makes it possible for us to invest the time and research required to create the resources that travel brands doing the most good need to outcompete those doing the most harm. Thank you for your support!

Subscribe now

There is a long-held consensus among marketing executives that sustainability does not sell.

Despite 4 in 5 travellers claiming to want to travel more sustainability, few are willing to back that up with their wallets. Fewer than 5% of travelers pay for carbon offsets. Most will never inquire about a BCORP certification or read an annual impact report. According to Booking.com’s ‘2024 Sustainability Survey’, despite good intentions, sustainability simply isn’t a priority for most travellers when it comes time to book their trip. It’s what Harvard Business Review calls the ‘intention-action gap’ in sustainability: consumers want to feel virtuous, not be virtuous.

There’s just one problem with this theory.

At the end of my street is a liquor store filled with four human-sized fridges, filled with a bewildering array of craft beers, from East Coast IPAs, fruit sours, to coffee stouts. They have names like Rocky Ridge, Margaret River Brewing and Eagle Bay.

Most of these beers are locally sourced, create regional jobs, rural investment, and have limited distribution (which equates to fewer emissions). They are – by most measures – far more sustainable than the likes of corporate brewing. They also cost 3x as much as Heineken, Amstel, or Budweiser.

According to marketing executives, these brands shouldn’t exist. So what has craft beer figured out? And what does that mean for travel and tourism?

1. It’s what they didn’t say.

Craft beer has some fairly substantial sustainability credentials. When compared to corporate brewing, it produces fewer emissions in transportation and in packaging. It also plays a vital role in revitalising neighbourhoods, promoting local investment, creating local jobs, and acting as a space for community engagement. In Australia, two-thirds of brewing jobs are in rural communities. Because of this, it is attributed to supporting community engagement and fostering a sense of local pride and identity.

Not that you’d know any of this. Most microbreweries don’t brandish their sustainability credentials. They don’t make BCORP certification or lower emissions a premium feature that consumers have to pay more.

They don’t compete on everything. They found their genuine advantage - local identity, authenticity and independence. In doing so, craft beer tapped into the 4 in 5 consumers who were looking to support local businesses (KPMG) in a way that was meaningful to them. By evoking place, reconnecting beer drinkers to their communities, traditions, and local cultures, craft beer became an expression of self identity for consumers.

Proof of this is everywhere. Just look at craft beer brands Camden Town, Beavertown, Goose Island, Margaret River Brewing, Eagle Bay, Brooklyn Brewery, 4 Pines, Kyoto Brewing Company, Darling Brew… all of them are named after, or references to a place. In fact, a 2023 study of all 506 Czech microbreweries found that 65% chose their name to signal where they were from.

Craft beer identified the values that mattered to its markets, then built brands on just that.

2. Go big or go home.

These breweries weren’t shy about building bold brands centred on local identity. Nor were they afraid to take on the corporate giants. Craft went bold, bright and loud.

They knew what they were, who they were marketing to, and were more than happy to market themselves as different. Take UK-based Beavertown, for example. Named after the Cockney nickname for De Beauvoir Town, the area in Hackney where the brewery was founded in 2011, its original brand was inspired by graphic novels, and marketed deliberately as an alternative to traditional beers. It was loud. So much so, they built entire ad campaigns focused on “protecting the nation from hop deprivation”.

Budweiser, meanwhile, leant into … fighter jets?

3. They turned product into brand-reinforcing experiences

Craft breweries don’t sell beer that happens to be from somewhere. They sell somewhere that happens to make beer. Camden Town Brewery isn’t a brewery in Camden; it’s the experience of Camden in a glass.

This went beyond branding. Breweries quickly doubled up as brew pubs and restaurants, providing spaces for local communities to meet, for artisans to exhibit crafts, sell merchandise and foster a greater sense of local community identity. These experiences attracted visitors, generated economic activity and gave a reason to travel to places they’d otherwise never go.

Sound familiar?

The effect was that the impact storytelling was woven into the experience, not bolted on in a report no one is going to read. The idea that craft beer, micro-breweries, brew-pubs are all about local jobs, revitalisation, giving back to communities is visible on every visit, on every social media post, and reflected in the brand every time you see the packaging.

Sure, visitors came for great-tasting, high-quality beers. But what really set craft beer apart - and why they could charge up to 4x more – was that it offered an experience that tapped into consumer aspirations to connect with local identities and feel a sense of community. One that is woven into the very fabric of the product and brand identity.

The Proof.

The rise of craft beer has been staggering. In the US alone, microbreweries increased from 1,500 in 2000 to over 8,000 in 2023. The total number of craft breweries reached an all-time high of 9,683 in 2023, with a dollar value estimated to be $28.8 billion a year (significantly larger than the revenues of OpenAI). According to the Brewers Association, the craft brewing industry employs almost 200,000 full-time equivalent jobs each year. That’s equivalent to Apple, Netflix and Dropbox combined.

In Australia, that growth is even more significant. In 2000, there were less than 50 breweries in the country. Today, that number is closer to 650. Over half of the jobs in the industry are in micro-brewing, of which two-thirds are in rural communities.

The success of craft beer’s local identity strategy didn’t go unnoticed by the corporate giants like Ab InBev, Asahi and Heineken. In fact, as sales of craft beer soared, fears over market share and positioning among the corporate giants grew.

So they all quietly went on a spending spree. The first major acquisition was kicked off by Ab Inbev (ABI), who acquired Goose Island in 2011. It then bought LA’s largest craft brewer, Golden Road, in 2015. By 2023, ABI owned 19 craft brands. Heineken, not wanting to be left behind, acquired the once fiercely independent Lagunitas in 2017, as well as the aforementioned Beavertown in the UK. While down under, in Australia, Japanese giant Asahi acquired Mountain Goat, Pirate Life and Balter Brewing, while Kirin/Lion acquired Stone & Wood, and Little Creatures.

The crucial detail here is how these acquisitions are managed. Many of the breweries that began as craft operations built on local identities continue to operate under their original names, with their original branding. In fact, looking through their website at all, you’d be hard-pressed to find any mention of their new global, conglomerate owners.

Which begs the question: if sustainability doesn’t sell – why keep the locally owned brand?

Now I could end the story here. But there’s one more twist in the irresistible story of craft beer: the acquisitions unravelled fast. Perhaps the most dramatic example is Constellation’s $1 billion acquisition of Ballast Point Brewing of San Diego - a headline deal of the craft acquisition era. Within just a few years, production fell by as much as 20% and multiple locations were shuttered. In a devastating admission from Constellation’s own CMO, Jim Sabia, the company’s “hypothesis was wrong”: it turns out the craft beer segment turned out to be “really local”. Both Molson Coors and ABI have also sold off most of their craft portfolio.

The pattern here is that the conglomerate idea of simply buying the veneer of local, maintained superficially while distributed nationally, didn’t work. The consumer demand for local wasn’t a flavour preference that could be bottled and shipped. It was a relationship with place that dissolved the moment the relationship became inauthentic.

So what does this mean for selling sustainability in travel and tourism?

Up until now, the measure of success in marketing sustainability in travel and tourism has been determined by whether companies can successfully outsource costs of sustainability to consumers by asking them to pay for carbon offsets or determining how many ask about sustainability certification.

Which - let me be blunt - makes no sense. Apathy towards carbon offsets doesn’t mean they don’t care about emissions. It means they don’t think emissions are a premium feature they should pay for. Much in the same way restaurant goers don’t think they should be charged extra to make sure the chef washes their hands. Nor does a lack of initiative around certification indicate it’s not important. Just because I don’t ask to see a pilot’s license to fly, doesn’t mean I don’t care whether or not they can land an Airbus A380.

Just because something matters to a company, or what a certifying body deems important, doesn’t necessarily mean that it matters to the customer.

Craft beer shows that sustainability sells when a brand is able to align their impact around the value sets and aspirations of its customers. To do that, there are a few things you need to get right:

• Lead with what your audience already wants. Craft beer identified a desire for authenticity, local connection, distinctiveness – and built brands that spoke directly to them. It put all its other impact aside.

• You don’t need to convince anyone that sustainability matters. Instead, find the values your customers care about and highlight exactly how your product delivers on them.

• Weave that impact into the brand identity through experience, not reports. It should be something that guests feel, and willingly share themselves, not something they’re educated about.

• Be bold about what makes you different. Independent travel brand have an advantage: genuine local connections, relationships, depth of place-knowledge and a kind of authenticity that big conglomerates like the Marriott cannot.

• Stop competing on everything. Win on one thing. Craft beer doesn’t win on price, on distribution, or on brand recognition. Corporate brewers beat it on all three. But craft wins overwhelmingly on local identity, community connection and the experience of place. That was enough to build a $130 billion global economy.

The craft beer revolution proved that in an age of global homogeneity, people will pay a significant premium — three, four, even five times the price — for something that could only come from here. That’s the same proposition every destination, every independent hotel, every local tour operator theoretically sells. The difference is that craft beer figured out how to make it real: not through sustainability claims or impact reports, but by embedding place into every aspect of the product, the brand and the experience.

The 4 in 5 consumers who say they want to travel more sustainably probably do mean it. They’re just not going to pay for a carbon offset to prove it. But they will pay for something authentic, local and rooted in place — the same way they’ll happily pay $12 for a craft beer that costs $3 to make, while ignoring the $4 Heineken sitting right next to it.

Outlier is brought to you by Equator - an advisory company specialising in tourism data and forecasting traveller trends. We help travel brands anticipate demand and demonstrate impact, so more travellers choose them.

“I’m not worried. Venice is Venice. Tourists have always wanted to go. Tourists will always want to go.”

He’s not wrong. Tourists do love Venice. It is a city of unique beauty and cultural significance. Last year alone it attracted as many as 28 million visitors. It is consistently ranked among the most visited cities in the world, despite having a local resident population of just 50,000 people.

So why does his response make me uneasy? Well as logical as the CEO’s reasoning appears, it reminded me of a historical lesson from the 17th century involving swans.

Subscribe now

The ‘Black Swan Theory’

Up until the late 17th century, European zoologists had only ever seen white swans. Naturally (pun fully intended) they concluded that all swans must therefore be white. Then, in 1697, Dutch explorer Willem De Vlamingh, navigating the coast of what is now West Australia, encountered black swans on a previously unchartered river (a river now appropriately called Swan River, in Perth, Australia).

The discovery didn’t just upend a zoological assumption about swans; it highlighted a flaw in the reasoning that all swans must be white.

In the words of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, “That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation that it will rise.” Hume’s point was that our expectation that the sun will rise each day is based on habit and past experience, not on logical certainty. In other words, just because something has happened in the past, it doesn’t logically follow that it will happen in the future.

Uncharted waters

Fast forward a few hundred years to conversation I was having with the CEO: there was a reason I was asking about the impact of overtourism on demand for Venice.

In the last 75 years, the global tourist population has risen from 1 million in 1950 to over 670 million today. The pace of growth, urbanization and development has, in many destinations, resulted in a growing concern about the impact of tourism. Locals in Barcelona, Venice and Dubrovnik are finding it harder to access services, unable to afford rent, or are discovering that their favorite, family-run café has been transformed into a Starbucks. With the total population of tourists expected to double in the next 25 years, this phenomenon is set to get worse.

Overtourism is far from the only major phenomenon impacting travel.

Artificial intelligence is already transforming how travelers design and plan trips. Google Magic Eraser now lets users remove unwanted crowds from its photos. Hopper are using GPT-powered trip planners to provide alternatives to last-minute changes or cancellations. These advancements, as exciting as they might be, pose some fairly existential questions for the future of travel: what happens when millions of AI-generated itineraries all funnel tourists to the same ‘hidden gems’? Or how adaptive-pricing will fuel overtourism?

Then there is climate change. Extreme climate events are becoming more frequent. Last year alone, flash floods brought Dubai to a standstill; the LA wildfires killed 29 people and burned through 37,000 acres of land; an extreme heatwave in Spain triggered public warnings over the long term impacts of extreme heat, and; Greece was forced to evacuate 2,000 people as wildfires broke out across the island of Rhodes. These events are now affecting traveler behavior. According to a report in The Guardian, many tourists are now abandoning beach holidays in favor of cooler climates.

The convergence of climate shocks, the rise of artificial intelligence and a rapidly expanding tourist population mean that previous observations about tourism dynamics may no longer hold true. In other words, much like the explorers of the 17th century, the travel industry is entering uncharted waters.

And that is why I asked the question. I wanted to understand the extent to which he thought the convergence of these phenomena might impact his business. To which he said ‘no’.

Lessons on resilience from Karl Popper

I’m increasingly of the mind that one of the most overlooked risks facing the travel industry today isn’t climate change, recession or overtourism. It’s certainty - the unexamined assumption that tomorrow will always look roughly like today.

Too many leaders in tourism rely on assumptions that feel safe because - until now - they’ve held true. In the mind of that CEO, Venice has always been popular, so it always will be. Tourists want what they’ve always wanted.

Sure, this type of thinking is comforting, but it’s hardly strategic. It’s how we came to believe that nuclear power was safe, that house prices could only go up, or that corporations were too big to fail.

Creating future-proof strategies in an age where climate instability, shifting geopolitical alliances, generational value shifts, and AI are already reshaping traveler behavior requires us to question long-held truths about the travel industry. They deserve more serious consideration than inductive reasoning allows.

This is why I keep coming back to Karl Popper. His idea of critical rationalism holds that progress depends not on proving ourselves right, but on exposing where we might be wrong. The strength of a theory lies not in how easily it can be confirmed, but in how rigorously it can be tested. In the case of Venice, that means asking “what would need to happen for Venice to suddenly become unpopular?”.

I suspect few companies seriously consider questions like this. Perhaps because they sound silly. Asking a room full of travel executives ‘what would need to happen for Venice to suddenly become unpopular?’ would likely result in you being quietly asked to leave the room and never invited back.

History, however, has shown that it’s exactly these type of questions we regret not asking. They’re how we identify blindspots. Or know what early-warning systems are needed so that we can future-proof a strategy.

A few months ago, I couldn’t explain why the CEO’s dismissive response about Venice bothered me. Now I can. It wasn’t what he said. Or the idea that Venice would continue to be popular. It was that he hadn’t even considered the idea that it might not be. It was the realization that he could acknowledge that travel was fundamentally changing, while holding onto the idea that his observations of events in the past would continue to be true in the future.

His strategy wasn’t grounded in exposing weaknesses or testing the strength of assumption, but built on faith. And faith, however comforting, is not a strategy.

.

So what’s going on? Why are corporations suddenly changing their mind about sustainability?

It’d be easy to blame Trump. And it’s true to say the political climate has given some cover. But most of these rollbacks began well before the 2024 election. A more common explanation is the ‘intention-action’ gap. Described by Harvard Business Review as the disconnect between what consumers ay and what they actually do. According to the paper, two-in-three consumers claim they want to buy from purpose-driven brands, but only about a quarter actually do. A similar study was published by Phocuswright, that found travelers rarely follow through on their green claims.

For many corporations, this phenomenon has become a convenient retreat: if consumers won’t pay for sustainability, why should brands? But that begs the question, is the fault really with the consumer, or with how sustainability was built and marketed to them?

Let’s find out.

The origins of the corporate sustainability movement

To understand where we are with corporate sustainability today, we need to go back (just briefly) to its beginnings.

Although the roots of the movement stretch back to the 1970s, it wasn’t until the 1990s that sustainability entered the mainstream. A series of high-profile environmental disasters, including the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and the oil fires during the first Gulf War, ignited public outrage and exposed the global costs of corporate negligence and fossil fuel dependency.

The first major landmark for the climate movement was in 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit. Over 170 countries convened to create the United Nations Convention of Climate Change, the foundation for global environmental governance. Just five years later, in 1997, this evolved into the Kyoto Protocol, which marked the first legally binding agreement among industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gases.

That same year, to hold corporations to account over their impact, the Ceres and Tellus Institute launched the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The idea was simple - give large corporations a standardized approach to measurement and reporting on environmental, social and governance issues so that they could be held accountable. Within just five years, over 100 global corporations, including Ford, Nike, Shell, BP and Novo Nordisk had begun reporting using GRI.

Despite the promise of the Kyoto Protocol, government action was limited or non-existent. The United States refused to ratify the agreement, and by the early 2000s, had formally walked away from it. With regulators on the sidelines and public skepticism growing (particularly as greenwashing became more prevalent), pressure mounted for some form of corporate accountability. Enter third-party certification bodies. By the late 2000s, organizations including BCORP, Fairtrade, the Rainforest Alliance, and LEED had become mainstays offering a new kind of credibility: independent verification.

Over the next two decades, corporate disclosure and certification systems grew rapidly. As of 2025, 96% of the world’s 250 largest companies report on sustainability, and membership of organizations like BCORP have grown from several hundred to over 6500.

Sustainability marketing was borne from a need to validate

As public pressure for corporate responsibility mounted, companies turned to disclosure not just as a tool for transparency, but as means of boosting sales. The logic was simple enough: if consumers cared about the planet, then proving our brand cares too will unlock sales. Certification bodies, recognizing an opportunity to expand their influence and revenue, were happy to promote the idea.

And so, by 2010, sustainability marketing had gone mainstream. Corporations had repackaged the pie charts and technical jargon of their 200-page ESG reports into marketing content.

The world’s single largest corporate polluter, Shell, unironically began selling high performance engine oil as carbon neutral. IKEA sold a plastic bag as an opportunity to replace other plastic bags. HP began putting ‘ocean-bound plastic’ into their laptops. Cruise-liners claimed that food waste was ground up and turned into ‘fish food’. While Ryanair (in true Ryanair fashion) decided - without much effort or evidence whatsoever - casually decided to declare itself as the world’s lowest emission airline.

So why didn’t consumers buy into the claims? What went wrong with the corporate logic?

Reason #1 - ‘Slightly better’ isn’t good enough.

For most companies, sustainability wasn’t a transformation, it was a retrofit.
Rather than fundamentally reimagining supply chains, operations and systems, most companies simply kept the engine running and tweaked the impact. Disclosure frameworks and ESG reports became a way to showcase directional progress: slightly less plastic, slightly fewer emissions, slightly better wages.

Corporations assumed that if consumers saw movement - even incremental - they’d be satisfied.

Turns out they were wrong. Corporations underestimated the intelligence and intuition of the modern consumer. Perhaps because the idea that Coca Cola’s PET plastic initiative isn’t all that impressive when staring at a vending machine filled with single-use plastic bottles. Or H&M’s ‘Conscious Collection’ requires navigating countless racks not part of that collection (presumably called ‘not-conscious collection?).

Well-intentioned as sustainability initiatives might be, they don’t (and shouldn’t) obscure reality: there’s a big difference between a product built to solve a problem and one that’s simply been rebranded to soften its harm.

Before corporations and market research firms declare sustainability isn’t a priority for consumers, they should try creating transformationally sustainable products first.

Reason#2 - The customer, not the company, is the main character

In their rush to prove they were doing the right thing, most companies turned inward and focused on validating their efforts. Executives assumed that if they list carbon offset figures, announced Scope 3 assessments, and plaster eco-labels on packaging, they’ll increase market share by showing consumers they’re ‘taking sustainability seriously’.

As rational and data-driven as this approach was, it was fundamentally misaligned to how consumers think. Consumers don’t support brands to reward them for their sustainability efforts. They support brands because of what that brand says about their personal identity. It’s what made Apple’s ‘Think Different’ campaign so bruilliant; rather than asserting the technical specification of the G3 or the iPod, it celebrated the type of person that buys Apple products. It’s why Spotify Wrapped was brilliant. Why Patek Philippe’s tagline (a brand almost no one can afford) is so well known.

By focusing on low-flush toilets, carbon-offsets and the quantity of recycled plastics, sustainability branding failed to give consumers any meaningful reason to support them. They forgot that the company is not the main character, the customer is.

Rather than emphasizing ‘look how much we care’, what they should have done is say ‘look what this choice says about you.’

Reason #3: Sustainability is framed to fail.

Finally, the way sustainability has been framed has been a near-guarantee that consumers would reject it.

In 2023, Deloitte found that 60% of consumers think sustainable products are significantly more expensive, even when differences in price are small. This isn’t because sustainable products should inherently cost more, but the result of retrofitting sustainability onto existing corporate operations. Carved out as niche product lines, ‘sustainable products’ rarely benefited from economies of scale. And whatever emissions were produced, were simply passed on to the consumer in the form of an offset.

Before someone argues that designing sustainable products is inherently more expensive, let me remind you that' we’ve subsidized fossil fuels to the tune of $trillions while claiming their ‘efficiencies’. Redirect a fraction of that into supply chain innovation, robotics, material R&D and that ‘cost’ of sustainable production doesn’t look expensive, it looks inevitable. Just ask the auto industry what happened after they stopped laughing at Tesla (admittedly…before we all started shouting at Tesla).

Even when cost isn’t an issue, sustainable products are almost always harder to buy. Consumers are asked to ‘opt-in’ to carbon offset programs, to filter for low-impact products, or have to check the bottom shelf to find the compostable goods. At a time when every user-interface and experience designer is trying to make it faster and easier to click ‘buy’, sustainability has gone in the opposite direction.

Ultimately, the ‘better choice’ for the planet comes at the cost of experience. We invite consumers to ‘skip the beef option’, ‘opt for low-flow showers to reduce water consumption’ and use plant-based dishwasher soaps - however ineffective they are. In a world where corporations are making - at best - marginal improvements to their supply chains, why are we expecting the consumer to give something up?

In the end the problem, as advertising strategist Rory Sutherland put it, is that “We are not logical creatures, we are creatures of meaning”. Emotion, not calculated reason, drives purchasing decisions. So when framed as an appeal to our sense of personal guilt, are we all that surprised that sustainability marketing hasn’t worked?

The result? Public indifference skepticism

Corporate sustainability marketing has broken almost every rule in traditional brand marketing. Instead of creating products that sell themselves by forging emotional connections with consumers, sustainability efforts focus inward. They emphasize corporate virtue over customer benefit.

The race to label the impacts of products with technical jargon (e.g. CO2e kg.day) has - unsurprisingly - overwhelmed consumers. Studies by Expedia and Amcor have shown that between 70% and 80% of consumers are either overwhelmed or confused by sustainability labeling. The difficulty consumers are having in decoding sustainability claims has, according to Deloitte, limited their willingness to pay more for sustainable products.

Public displays of corporate validation - awards, ESG reports, and virtue-signaling - have, at best, created a dangerous kind of public apathy. At worst, they have triggered skepticism and a rising backlash that actively undermines genuine progress made by the firms truly committed to mitigating the harmful impacts of growth. Research conducted by the European Commission found that half of companies exaggerated their claims or failed to provide evidence. It’s unsurprising then, that Kantar reported that over half of consumers say they’ve seen or heard false or misleading sustainability claims from brands.

Right market for the wrong seller.

The ‘intention-action gap’ exists because consumers aren’t buying ‘good intentions’ from corporations largely responsible for the current crisis we’re now in.

Corporate sustainability marketing didn’t fail because people stopped caring. It failed because corporations retrofitted sustainability onto business-as-usual. They opted for incremental improvements to existing systems, over a fundamental overhaul of how their products were designed and built. Conscious of the inherent contradiction between real impact and perceived brand, executives saw validation as the best and only strategy to convince consumers they cared.

The problem was that this strategy - however logical - broke every rule in marketing. Consumers were never going to believe that a bottle of engine oil made of 40% recycled plastic by Shell absolves them of their 590 million tonnes of CO2e per year (that’s 1.5% of total global emissions btw). Nor does an emotional appeal based on ‘marginally less guilt’ give consumers something to aspire to.

But imagine consumers were offered a real choice. Not a slightly-less-harmful version of the status quo, but a product actually built to solve a problem, from a brand people want to be a part of, that speaks to them in the same way we market everything else: with aspiration, emotion, and clarity. In that scenario, it’s hard to imagine consumers would continue with the status quo.

Corporations were right to think the sustainability is a brand differentiator that offers huge market appeal. But they were wrong to think that market was for them. The future of sustainability marketing doesn’t belong to legacy brands, but to small businesses. Businesses that can build their products that align impact with consumer values and write the stories that resonate.

Right now, as corporations retreat from sustainability under the political cover of MAGA and the claim that “public apathy” justifies divestment, small brands and startups have a choice: do they follow their corporate counterparts, or see corporate failure for what it is - an opportunity to go after arguably the largest untapped market in modern history?

Want to know how small brands are already doing that? Hit like and subscribe - we’lll unpack that in the next article.

Fast forward six months and many media outlets are warning of the impacts of a recession in travel and tourism. And for good reason too: the combination of stagnant wages, the high cost of living, continued inflation, rising nationalism, uncertainty around tariffs, and an overheated market is making investors nervous.

So which is it? Is tourism about to break Europe? Or is all this talk of ‘overtourism’ overblown? Let’s find out.

A little bit of history.

To understand the origins and driving force behind the tourism crowds, we have to go back to the 1950s. This was a different era of travel: planes served lobster, had legroom, flight crew offered near endless cocktails, and Marilyn Monroe was seemingly on every flight. Little wonder it’s often described as a ‘golden age of travel’.

Except that for most people, it was neither ‘golden’ nor ‘an age of travel’. Because in 1950, most people couldn’t afford to take a vacation, much less book a seat next to Marilyn Monroe.

If you wanted to travel to Cyprus in the 50s, for instance, you’d need to earn around US$147 per day, adjusted for inflation (Equator). There were less than 836k people on the planet who made that much money. That was less than 0.5% of the world’s population (World Bank).

The majority of people in 1950 were earning between $1-$2 a day. Today, that’s described as ‘living in, or near extreme poverty’. Survival - not travel - is the primary concern of most households. To picture what the state of the world’s income back then, Equator put together the graphic below with a little help from Gapminder.

The yellow mountain? That’s the world’s population displaced by daily income. The cost of travel in the 50s is set at $147 a day. To convey just how inaccessible travel was in the 1950s, there are so few people earning more than $147 a day that they’re not even visible in the visualization.

Over the next 75 years, however, that changed. Improvements in healthcare and social systems meant the global population exploded. Advancements in technology, access to education, investment in infrastructure, and new legal frameworks meant travel became more accessible and more affordable than ever. The income required to take a vacation to Cyprus dropped from $147 to just $57 per day and as a result, the number of people who could afford to travel went from 836k to over 670m by 2025.

Click play on the video below to see an animation of this happening:

This is why everywhere feels so much more crowded: there are more people, making more money, buying something that’s become a lot more affordable. Travel and tourism has become increasingly more affordable and accessible.

Recessions don’t change the trajectory of growth.

Given the extraordinary growth of travel and tourism, you’d might be forgiven for thinking that a recession is exactly what tourism needs. A global economic downturn will reduce visitor spending and ease pressure on destinations, housing markets and attractions. Right?

Well, no.

According to the World Bank, the world has experienced four global recessions in the last seventy-five years: in 1975, 1982, 1991 and 2009. During each of these episodes, “annual global GDP per capita contracted, and was accompanied by a weakening of other key indicators of global activity”. Mapping those recessions against arrivals, however, it’s hard to pinpoint any major disruption to travel and tourism other than COVID-19. While there are fluctuations and some dips, there’s one very clear direction of visitor arrivals in the last 70 years: up.

That isn’t to say that travel is recession-proof. It’s just that in the face of extraordinary macroeconomic forces, recessions don’t change the broader trajectory of the industry. In fact, recent studies have found that during economic hardship and higher costs of living, travel continues to be one of the fastest-growing areas of consumer spending.

The industry is incredibly elastic. In the aftermath of the 2009 global financial crisis, for instance, from 2010-2019 it grew by 60%, outperforming both the mining and banking sectors during that same period.

Travel is just getting started.

This is where things get really interesting (or terrifying, depending on your outlook). First, there’s no sign of tourism’s growth slowing. Short of total economic collapse, global climate catastrophe or a global war (admittedly these feel increasingly likely these days), growth in travel is set to continue.

If it does, then the number of people who cross that ‘threshold of affordability’ over the next 25 years will increase by almost 500 million (or the entire population of Europe). To put that in perspective, that’s the entirety of tourism’s growth over the last century, almost doubled, in a quarter of the time.

The next 25 years in travel and tourism

That’s the conservative projection. The model above assumes that the affordability of travel remains the same, which is unlikely. The average cost of air-travel-per-kilometer has dropped by as much as 40% from 1993 to 2019. Given the promise of AI in boosting efficiencies and productivity, there’s every chance that travel becomes even more affordable. A 10% improvement in affordability over the next 25 years would an additional 200 million people.

The other major variable in this model is that as income goes up, households travel more. According to research company Arival, wealthy travelers account for a disproportionate share of bookings. Despite making up 20% of all travelers, they represent a third of all bookings and almost 50% of total spending on tours. In other words, the more money we make, the more we travel.

Last year wasn’t some sort of ‘peak travel’. No. We’re just getting started. Which begs the question: if the New York Times are wondering whether Europe is at a breaking point today, what happens in 2050, when the number of tourists worldwide doubles?

Final Thoughts

You’d be forgiven for being cautious about the future of travel. The New York Times, BBC, and Forbes have all penned articles about concerns travelers have over visiting the US. Coverage of an imminent 'recession’, ‘stagflation’ and the emerging global trade war appear to be causing further disruption (Google Search Trends reveal that coverage of the term ‘recession’ in the news now exceeds the levels of news coverage during COVID-19). It all feels very…uncertain.

That is precisely why I wrote this article. We shouldn’t be uncertain about the future of travel. Its continued growth is almost inevitable. In just three generations, the industry has gone from being an economic past-time of the super rich to a global economic force that supports the livelihoods of 300 million people around the world (1 in 11 jobs) and contributes over US$11 trillion do the global economy. During which period, recessions, global financial crashes, and global conflicts have barely registered (in terms of visitor arrivals and visitor expenditure).

What keeps me up at night isn’t the idea of a recession. It’s the idea that the decision makers at destinations, at corporations, in government and industry associations are worried about short-term uncertainty they have little control over, rather than laying the groundwork for what we know is going to happen next.

🍕🍔 🍟 Takeaways :

• The causes of overcrowding are macroeconomic, technological and demographic change, not Airbnb and Instagram.

• Historically, recessions have had very little impact on travel and tourism.

• Don’t let lower-than-expected quarterly reports and short-term uncertainty distract you from the major threat to travel: inexorable growth.

What We’ll Cover:

• That major structural renovation and exhibit curation should resolve a lot of the bottlenecks and problems impacting the Louvre today

• That the practical application of data and forecasting are critical to the success of this renovation.

• Acknowledging and addressing overtourism can create opportunities for diversifying growth and revenue streams.

Staff walkouts, protests over working conditions, plummeting reviews and a director who described the museum as being in disrepair - it’s been a difficult few years for the Louvre. So on January 28, 2025, Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, announced that the gallery was set to undergo a major renovation.

The big news is that the Mona Lisa is going to be moved to her own, dedicated exhibit. They’re also adding a new entrance on the Seine-side of the museum to make it easier to get into the gallery and they’re revamping the dated facilities.

The question is, will any of this resolve the gallery’s overcrowding problem? Let’s find out.

One for the Bucket Listers

Problem: The Mona Lisa tops many travelers’ bucket-lists. So much so, that people who have little interest in a Veronese or a Botticelli, will queue for hours to see Da Vinci’s masterpiece. It’s become something of a rite of passage. The problem is that the portrait shares its space with other paintings. So those that do want to look at a Veronese, have to manage the throngs of people who don’t.

Solution: By moving the portrait to its own dedicated exhibit, the Louvre will be separating the ‘bucket-listers’ (visitors only interested in saying they’ve seen the Mona Lisa) from those that are interested in everything else.

Will it Work? Yes, to a degree. While it is true that 4 in 5 people visit the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, that won’t translate into the gallery becoming 80% quieter overnight. What it will achieve though, is some separation between those wanting to look at the Mona Lisa, and those interested in everything else.

Improved Crowd Management

Problem: Right now, ticket entry to the Louvre offers access to the entire gallery. Once in the gallery, visitors can go where they please, when they please. The problem is that this makes it hard to predict and manage crowds, which is why the ‘allocated time’ currently offered by the gallery for museum entry is almost impossible to implement.

Solution: With a dedicated exhibit room and ticketing system just for the Mona Lisa, the gallery will be able to set and allocate time slots for each visitor. They’ll know how long it should take to move through the exhibit, see the painting, and leave. With greater predictability in an environment that’s easier to control, limiting the length of queues into the exhibit will be a lot easier.

Will it work? While crowd management should improve, don’t expect to get hours to look at the Mona Lisa. The maths that we explored in Part I still applies: there are only so many hours in a day in which you can see a painting the size of a large microwave.

The Experience the Mona Lisa Deserves

Problem: The Mona Lisa Experience at the Louvre generally consists of queueing for two hours, then getting just two minutes to look at a painting that’s 6 meters away and protected by glass (given Extinction Rebellion’s preferred use of soup, that’s not a bad thing). Bottom line: it’s all together unpleasant.

Solution: We can be sure of one thing - the experience will be massively improved with this new exhibit. Personally, I’d love to see augmented reality to explore Da Vinci’s mastery in technique and the type of immersive experiences that’s made the Ateliers des Lumieres so popular.

Will it work? Almost anything would be better than the current experience. If the Louvre can rediscover the spirit of IM Pei - blending tradition with modernity, then I think the Mona Lisa could get a visitor experience worthy of Da Vinci.

A New Side Entrance

Problem: The iconic glass pyramid at the center of the Louvre, despite being an esthetic masterpiece, has become something of a problem for the Louvre. In the summer months, queues outside the gallery can last over an hour.

Solution: The proposal imagines a new entrance on the Perrault Colonnade facade, to improve the efficiency of entry and exit. The plan is to build on the original grandeur of Claude Perrault’s original design, while integrating modern solutions to visitor flow.

Will it work? The glass pyramid at the Louvre is a masterpiece of modern architectural design, so it’s going to be difficult to divert people to a new entry on looks like alone. So if the Louvre are going to be take the pressure off current main entrance, it would make sense for the design to have dedicated access points, whether that’s for tour groups, or for entry to the new Mona Lisa exhibit.

Interior Motives

The renovation isn’t limited to improving the visitor experience. There’s an economic incentive at play too.

In 2023, the Louvre set a visitor cap of 30,000 people a day, which (at full capacity) amounts to 9.3 million visitors a year. That same year, the number of visitors to the gallery reached 8.9 million, and by 2024, they surpassed 9.1m. This means that the Louvre is already operating at - or close to - maximum capacity.

Why is this a problem? Because of ‘opportunity cost’. According to a report by Deloitte and Google, tourists arrivals are set to hit 2.4 billion by 2040, an increase of almost 1 billion from today. If the Louvre keep the caps in place, the gallery would essentially miss out on all future growth in travel and tourism for the next 15 years, losing billions of dollars in potential earned ticket sales.

However, if the gallery can improve crowd management, then it can remove the caps, as illustrated below:

This is what the Louvre’s Management are banking on, literally. The proposed renovations are set to cost between €700m and €800m (~US$ 800m) and, according to Macron, the majority of the costs will be covered by ‘the museum’s own resources, ticket sales, patronage and the museum’s €400 million licensing agreement with the Louvre Abu Dhabi’.

The renovation isn’t so much an expense, as an investment. One that will increase revenues, improve visitor experience and the reputation and standing of the Louvre.

Is ‘La Nouvelle Renaissance’ Ambitious Enough?

I might be alone in thinking this, particularly amidst growing economic concerns around a recession and high costs of living, but I’m slightly concerned that the proposal isn’t ambitious enough. I have two reasons for this:

1. Over the next 25 years, the travel and tourism industry will double what it achieved in the last cenutry. The number of passenger arrivals will increase from 5 billion to 10 billion by 2050 and the total number of tourists could increase from 400 million to over 1 billion.

2. By making the experience less stressful, more streamlined, and more enjoyable, demand to visit the museum surges. This is what’s known as the Jevon’s Paradox: improvements to efficiency in resource use leads to higher overall consumption. If the state of queues and crowds at the Louvre has been acting as a deterrent over the last 10 years, then fixing it will result in a ‘rebounding effect’, whereby latent demand drives visitor numbers up quickly. There’s a fantastic explanation of this on Australia’s brilliant comedy, Utopia:

Visitor forecasting, data modeling and - in particular - a deep understanding of any latent demand in behavioral preferences around the Louvre is critical to the success of this renovation. It cannot afford to imperfectly anticipate visitor attendance in 2025.

Final Thoughts.

There’s a lot to like in the proposed renovation at the Louvre: compartmentalizing the Mona Lisa in its own dedicated space to manage bucket-listers, easing visitor flow in and out of the gallery, and improving the visitor experience are all great ideas.

The last major renovation at the Louvre - the one that gave us the iconic glass pyramid - was a celebration of the museum itself. This proposal feels different: it’s practical. Driven not by beauty, but by necessity. For the first time, the museum is acknowledging that to maintain its position as one of the truly great art galleries in the world, it has to confront the reality that there is such a thing as ‘too many tourists’.

As practical as this proposal is, there are challenges ahead. The extraordinary growth in tourism anticipated in the years ahead are going to test the limits of what’s possible through renovation alone. It’s going to test every visitor model and visitor flow they have, and require extraordinary planning.

There are a lot of eyes on the Louvre right now. It has to get it right.

Want to find out just how bad overtourism is going to get in the years to come? Then subscribe below, it’s the topic of our next article. You can also check out our video on how the Mona Lisa became the most disappointing attraction in the world on TheTravelGraph’s YouTube channel here.

Debunking the Myths

There are two arguments leveled at the Mona Lisa. The first is that the painting is smaller than expected. Given that Vermeer’s ‘Girl with Pearl Earring’ and Botticelli’s ‘Portrait of a Young Man’ are similarly sized (and people don’t complain about their size), I think we can rule out the dimensions of the Mona Lisa being the source of disappointment.

The second argument is that the Mona Lisa is ‘overrated’. This one is harder to dismiss, because defining and quantifying ‘expectation’ is famously difficult. With that said, it’s fair to assume that most visitors are not disappointed by Da Vinci’s technique, his use of sfumato or chiaroscuro. In fact, I don’t think it has anything to do with the painting, or with art whatsoever.

The Louvre has a Maths Problem

I think the cause of disappointment has more to do with economics. Or more precisely, the role economics has played in changing how we experience the Mona Lisa.

The Louvre is open for a total 9,560,000 seconds a year. Every year, about 9 million people visit the gallery and according to the museum, 4 in 5 of them are there to see the Mona Lisa. So all we have to is divide the time available by the demand to see the Mona Lisa and it gives each person 1.39 seconds to look at Mona Lisa.

Unless you are Beyoncé, you aren’t seeing the Mona Lisa on your own. And because giving each person 1.39 seconds is physically impossible, the Louvre are forced to move 100 people in and out of the Salle des Etats every 2 minutes, every day of the year. Which is why we experience the portrait like this:

The painting isn’t the problem. The experience is. You queue for hours, often in sweltering heat, to get two minutes with ‘La Jaconde’, before being barked at to move along as the next 100 people shuffle in. It feels more like airport security than an art gallery.

The Breaking Point

Frustration at the experience has been getting worse for years. Reviews of the gallery are 20% lower in June and July 2024 when compared to the same period in 2017. According to a sentiment survey by Equator, most reviews cite queues, crowds, and a lack of time to appreciate the picture as the main reason for their one or two star rating.

And it isn’t just the visitor experience that is suffering. In 2019, staff walked out in protest of overcrowding and working conditions. Later that year, the New York Times suggested taking down the picture entirely. By January 2025, it had become so bad that the Director of the Gallery, Laurence des Cars, described it as being at ‘saturation point’.

‘La Nouvelle Rénaissance’ of the Louvre

On January 28, 2025, Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, announced that the gallery was set to undergo a major renovation. The Mona Lisa was set to get a dedicated exhibit, there would be a new entrance on the side of the Seine and new facilities added to once again establish the Louvre as the world’s greatest art gallery. So the question is, why does the Louvre think architecture and a structural overhaul is going to save the Mona Lisa?

This wasn’t the gallery’s first attempt to limit the impact of crowds. Back in 2023, the Louvre set a visitor cap of 30,000 per day. And just last year, in early 2024, they announced a price hike of 30% for entry, ahead of the Paris Olympics.

The problem is that neither of these proposals worked. The visitor cap, for example, wasn’t low enough to have any significant impact on queues (it increased viewing time by about 45 seconds). As for the price increase, it amounted to just €5 (US$5). Given that two in three people are visiting the gallery coming from abroad, the increase was never going to be an effective deterrent (it’s more likely that the price increase was just an opportunity to maximize revenue from ticket sales)

The Louvre’s Legacy Issues

To understand why the Louvre is turning to renovation, we need to go back to the last major overhaul of the gallery, imaginatively entitled ‘Le Grand Louvre’, almost 30 years ago. Led by renown architect IM Pei, this project was seen as an opportunity to expand exhibition space, boost museum capacity, and make a statement about France as a country that ‘respects traditions, yet embraces modernity’.

The major feature Pei added was the now-iconic glass pyramid at the centre of the gallery. This was to be the main entrance, into which a new subterranean level granted visitors access to all wings of the gallery. It also converted the government offices in the Richlieu wing into exhibition space, adding 22,000 sqm to the Louvre’s already extraordinary footprint.

On the surface, it appeared that Pei’s work had fulfilled the brief. However, it wasn’t long after the renovation was complete, however, that the short-comings of the design became apparent. Wade Saunders, writing in Art in America, in 1993, notes:

“The ever increasing attendance seems to have been imperfectly anticipated. Regarded esthetically, most of Pei’s decisions appear inspired…but impractical. There can be a long wait to enter and some jostling to exit…these problems will get worse with attendance.”

Wade Saunders was right. The problems did get worse with attendance. By the mid 2000s, queues had become a frequent occurrence at the entrance of the gallery. The Mona Lisa had to be moved, twice, to accommodate the volume of visitors. And as complaints mounted, so did the negative attention the gallery was receiving.

We All Want to See the Same Things

Architecture wasn’t the only problem. The layout of the exhibits were also causing problems. In 2014, in a study of where people went and how long they stayed in the gallery, MIT found that most people wanted to see the same exhibits, along the same routes, at the same time.

A DATA VISUALIZATION OF VISITOR FLOW IN THE LOUVRE, USING THE MIT SENSELAB STUDY, EQUATOR

What is so extraordinary about MIT’s findings is the implication that visitor motivations have little bearing on behavior. Whether it’s fear of missing out (FOMO), an appreciation of artistic genius, or a tick on a bucket-list; we end up gravitating towards the same attractions.

By placing the Mona Lisa, the Wedding at Cana, St. John the Baptist, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace (among others) together in the Denon Wing, the Louvre had inadvertently created a gravitational force: the opportunity to see ‘most of the best works in just a couple of hours’.

As a result, Despite there being over 77,000 sqm of exhibit space, with over 35,000 exhibits on display, most tourists end up crowding around the same 20 works, in one small section of the gallery.

The Mona Lisa: a Cautionary Tale

It’s hard not to reference Icarus in the story of the Mona Lisa. The Louvre’s unchecked ambition, imperfect planning, and a reluctance to acknowledge the destructive force of overtourism have resulted in one of the greatest portraits ever made falling from grace. If Da Vinci and the Louvre aren’t immune from the impacts of overtourism, how confident are we that other galleries, attractions, destinations and travel brands will be?

It also shows how a ‘one-size-fits-all solutions’ to overtourism don’t work. Raising prices and limiting the number of tourists are default solutions for many in the travel industry, but they shouldn’t be. Art should be universal and democratic, open to as many people as possible. By limiting supply and increasing prices, we’d be transforming the gallery into a Birken Bag or a Rolex: something exclusive and only available to the rich.

For these reasons, I think the Louvre and its Director, Laurence des Cars, should be commended for this announcement. Renovation is a practical solution, one that addresses the fundamental problem of the gallery: that it was never designed to hold 9 million people.

The question now is, what does the Louvre have to do to make it work? We’ll answer that next week in Part II. Or, if you can’t wait, we’ve made a video about it all here.

Back in 2019, a Nepali mountaineer named Nimsdai Purja turned to take a photo having just summited Everest, the world’s highest peak. And it got quite a lot of attention.

What’s shocking about this photo isn’t the threat of 700 meter drops, 80 km/h winds, or the risk of avalanches. It’s the altitude.

At 8,000 meters, your body is getting about a third of the oxygen it gets at sea level. Your brain swells which can cause hypoxia, and your lungs can fill with oxygen causing an edema. Your decision-making is impaired.

Not surprisingly, at this altitude, you’re in what mountaineers call the Death Zone. Because once you’re in it, you’re actually slowly dying.

So having to stand in a queue in the Death Zone—where every second matters to your chances of survival—is bonkers.

Before 2010, the idea that more than 150 people could summit Everest in a single day was unthinkable. Since then it's happened 13 times, 5 of them in the last 5 years.

So how did we even get to a point where we are queueing in one of the harshest, most dangerous and least accessible environments in the world?

In this video, we explain how the queues in the death zone on Everest are part of a broader phenomenon that’s going to change where, when and how we travel in the years to come:

Key Takeaways:

• Every destination has fixed, immovable limits. Mt Everest encapsulates this perfectly: the dangers of the mountain, the limited space available and the small ‘weather window’ (around 15 days per year) means that it simply can’t accommodate more people despite the demand.

• Before 2010, there had never been a group of more than 150 people successfully summiting Everest in a single day. Since that time, it’s happened 13 times. Essentially, the amount of people climbing Everest has reached a point where it is beginning to test the limits of the mountain.

• The phenomenon of our love of travel testing the physical limits of a place is not unique to Everest. In fact, there are examples of it all over the world, and it’s becoming so common that it has a name: overtourism.

• Right now, less than 5% of the world’s population can afford to take a vacation. That’s about 400 million people. But over the next 25 years, in a single generation, that number is set to double, to 800 million people.

• Far from being at peak tourism, this is just the start for the travel and tourism industry. And what governments and industry decide to do next will likely shape the future of where, when and how we travel.

We love data visualisation so much we created this printable infographic

This visualisation shows the dramatic rise in single-day summits on Mt. Everest from 1980-2024 driven by the peak’s commercialisation, highlighting overtourism’s impact on even the remotest destinations.

You can download the poster for free in letter, A4, A3 and A2 size:

Download for free

Links, sources and further reading

New York Times: On Everest, Traffic Isn’t Just Inconvenient. It Can Be Deadly.

Smithsonian Magazine: More Than 200 Dead Bodies Have Been Left Behind on Mount Everest, and Many Mark the Path to the Summit

The Himalayan Database

"Both Tenzing and I thought that once we'd climbed the mountain, it was unlikely anyone would ever make another attempt. We couldn't have been more wrong.” Sir Edmund Hilary

Subscribe now