Bali’s overtourism a cautionary tale for developing Asia

Barcelona residents marched against tourists in July after similar protests in Venice earlier in 2024.

Recently, residents of Santorini in Greece were in uproar after a Facebook post reportedly asked them to stay home and make room for the thousands of tourists expected to arrive during the peak holiday season.

These are symptoms of overtourism: a situation where visits exceed a destination’s capacity, making residents angry and tourists miserable. Local governments have proposed tourism levies or entry fees to make visits more expensive and thereby limit how many people show up.

Some tourism researchers have encouraged people to holiday in rural areas or poorer countries instead, to give a boost to their economies. However, overtourism exists in the developing world too. Here’s what it looks like.

Travel on a tourist-swamped island

Bali is a major tourist destination in the Indonesian archipelago that accounts for nearly half of international arrivals in the country.

Air travel is the most reliable way to get there, although a big source of carbon emissions, which inflame a climate crisis that is expected to disproportionately harm poorer countries like Indonesia. Roughly 15 million visitors arrived in 2023 – close to their level in 2019, before the pandemic.

Bali’s tourism-dependent economy (providing 61% of regional GDP in 2019) was more or less frozen by Covid-19. Yet, for tourists who spent lockdown in cities, the pandemic also left Bali, and particularly the island’s rural parts, with a renewed luster. Penglipuran, a traditional Balinese village in the central highlands, was attracting thousands of visitors every day in July.

Encouraging people to visit poorer areas can disadvantage residents but in a different