Sharpshooter

The dearth of visitors to hotspots during lockdown has shown what a blight overtourism has become. What we need is quality over quantity

The term ‘overtourism’ is coming into regular use in the media. Concerns about the adverse impacts of uncontrolled massmarket tourism have been brewing for some time. Now, in the pandemic era, they are becoming mainstream. The photos of the horrendous piles of rubbish left behind on Bournemouth beach recently sparked a widespread sense of revulsion. Are we really going to allow this sort of thing to continue?

Those of us who live in national parks know that swarms of day trippers clustering at honeypot selfie locations can be a nuisance at best, or cause real environmental damage at worst.

The irony is that some of the people who display knee-jerk antipathy to hunting sports are themselves complicit in the sort of mass-market tourism that trashes the countryside and alienates local communities.

From Venice to the Isle of Skye, the locals have been revolting against overtourism. Opposition has been mounting for years, but the blissful peace that reigned during the lockdown has now given the movement added impetus. Tourism bodies and legislators are beginning to sit up and take notice. The temporary absence of visitors during lockdown may have been a financial headache but it also illustrated just how bad the blight of overtourism had become. Will locals be content to let things slide back to the way they were?

The financial yield per visitor gained from hunting tourism is massively higher than the unit yield for cycling, walking and photo-tourism. Reaping a worthwhile return from politically correct tourism requires a huge throughput of visitors because they pay so little. But shoe-horning them into sensitive habitats tends to degrade the qualities that attracted the tourists in the first place. So is that sustainable?

Studies conducted in South Africa have measured how hunting makes a key contribution to the local economy. It funds anti-poaching wardens and provides a real incentive for local people to conserve their wildlife. For game species, the lesson is simple: if it pays, it stays. And not only does sustainable hunting give a vastly better financial return per visitor, it fosters wildlife in its natural habitat. By contrast, a cluster of zebra-striped minibuses crowding around a pride of lions might as well be in an open-air zoo for all the difference it will make.

In the UK, fieldsports boost the economy of many of our more remote rural areas. And the spending they bring has the added bonus of peaking during the autumn and winter – the very times when other forms

“Sustainable hunting gives a vastly better return per visitor and fosters wildlife”

of tourism and visitor spending are at their lowest.

COVID-19 may be with us for some time. It could force a rethink about mass tourism. At the most basic level, hospitality venues will not be allowed to pack people in as they did before. Customers may have to fork out a bit more and adjust to a new normal of lower-density tourism. If official tourism bodies and access campaign groups start placing greater emphasis on quality rather than mere quantity, then that would be a welcome shift.