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Sunday, August 10, 2025
Overtourism and local minima
I visited a tourist destination half an hours drive from my home this week. It was an interesting limestone cave featuring the "longest navigable underground river in Europe". You took a walk about 1 km through the cave seeing all sorts of limestone formations, and then a boat trip back to the entrance. The village in which the cave was situated didn't have anything else to see, but one could notice the tourist restaurants and shops built for tourist traffic. Only, despite this being on a sunny day in the middle of the local summer holidays, there were very few tourists around.
This summer there are a lot of stories about overtourism, with tourists complaining about long waits for attractions, and locals complaining about tourists ruining their cities. Dubious tour guide companies buy up tickets for attractions like the Eiffel tower or the Acropolis, and then basically operate like ticket scalpers, with the guide just handing you the ticket for a multiple of the price and no added tour guiding value. So, how come that some tourist attractions are overcrowded, and others stand empty?
Once you look at it, there are a lot of other areas in life, where you could ask the same question. Why is it impossible to find housing in some areas, while other houses stand empty? Why do some people get hundreds of offers on dating applications, while others get none? The answer to all of these questions has to do with the disappearance of local minima.
A local minimum is a point on a graph where the function's value is lower than at the surrounding points, but not necessarily the lowest value overall. If the graph is a surface of energy of a chemical system, the system is trying to reach the lowest point, but might well get stuck in a local minimum. The same is true for other sorts of optimization problems. For example in dating, everybody is looking for the perfect partner. But in earlier times, you simply couldn't get into contact with too many other people. Thus you ended up with a local minimum: Maybe it wasn't the perfect partner, but it was the best you could find among the people in your location that you were likely to meet. In tourism, when air travel was still relatively expensive, you ended up visiting places closer to home, even if they didn't have the most interesting tourist attractions in the world.
An increased mobility of people, and especially increased mobility of information globally, has changed that. That dating app shows you a lot more possible mates than you could ever have met at some local function. You can find a dream job in a big city without having to travel there first blindly. Your Instagram feed is showing you the best tourist attractions in the world, and low cost airlines bring you there at an affordable rate. The problem with all that optimization is that the local minima are now empty. The reasonably attractive mate you would have met at the church ball looks unattractive compared to the hottest people on that dating app, but might have been a better chance of finding love. The dream job in Silicon Valley isn't so dreamy anymore once you deduct the increased cost of living from your paycheck. And standing 4 hours in the queue in sweltering heat to see the Acropolis ends up being not a great holiday after all, even if it did get you that selfie you wanted for your Instagram.
For tourism these days, I am deliberately seeking out the moderately interesting tourist places. I can find such places closer by, and going somewhere where it isn't totally overcrowded is usually a lot nicer than going to the places everybody goes. For housing I moved out of the city, and ended up with a very nice house for the same price as my previous city apartment. Call me contrarian, but there is quality of life gains to be had when leaving the crowd.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:48 AM Permanent Link
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I very much doubt this has much to do with social media. As someone who's spent decades traveling around, home and abroad, visiting all kinds of smaller, less-publicised places that nevertheless had plenty worth seeing, many of which were included in promotional material put out by local and national tourist boards and local tourist offices as well as being noted on various local signs along the roadside in the area, I can say with certainty that most of them have always been seriously under-visited pretty much all the time. Meanwhile, on the same trips, whenever we did make the effort to visit a major tourist attraction in the same area, it would always be hugely over-crowded with long lines and high prices.
This has been my experience going all the way back to the early 1980s plus I've also been living in one of the most-touristed cities in the UK for the last thirty years and I can tell you from that perspective that the well-known sites there are always packed, while just a few miles away there are plenty of equally enjoyable and historically or culturally significant sites that hardly anyone bothers to go visit. Didn't need selfies and the instagram to make that the norm although I'm sure it hasn't made it any better.
This has been my experience going all the way back to the early 1980s plus I've also been living in one of the most-touristed cities in the UK for the last thirty years and I can tell you from that perspective that the well-known sites there are always packed, while just a few miles away there are plenty of equally enjoyable and historically or culturally significant sites that hardly anyone bothers to go visit. Didn't need selfies and the instagram to make that the norm although I'm sure it hasn't made it any better.
I think you have the right idea but chemistry or other things muddy the picture.
Generally I would not call it a minimum as you tie the subject to personal utility and then you wouldn't minimise it but rather maximise it.
It's also not that the local extremes are empty or vanish, as the issue doesn't lie with the extreme point itself but the extend of your search.
The extreme points still exist at the same utility as before. The difference is that you no longer stop your search in the local village but globalisation expanded your search radius and thus your ability to climb out of the valleys.
The tricky bit is that while your radius is expanded, so it everyone else's and in turn the competition for the same object. And supply and demand takes care of the rest.
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Generally I would not call it a minimum as you tie the subject to personal utility and then you wouldn't minimise it but rather maximise it.
It's also not that the local extremes are empty or vanish, as the issue doesn't lie with the extreme point itself but the extend of your search.
The extreme points still exist at the same utility as before. The difference is that you no longer stop your search in the local village but globalisation expanded your search radius and thus your ability to climb out of the valleys.
The tricky bit is that while your radius is expanded, so it everyone else's and in turn the competition for the same object. And supply and demand takes care of the rest.
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