What Iceland and Puerto Rico Reveal About Divides in Overtourism

The travel industry has spent the better part of a decade talking about overtourism as if it were a universal condition with universal solutions. Reduce promotion. Disperse visitors geographically. Regulate short-term rentals. Shift from volume to yield. These are the prescriptions that show up in every conference keynote and every DMO strategic plan and every consulting deck about sustainable tourism, and they are not wrong exactly, but they are incomplete in a way that the industry has been remarkably unwilling to confront.

They are solutions designed for rich places.

Iceland can afford to pull back tourism promotion because Icelanders have fisheries and aluminum smelting and a GDP per capita north of $85,000 and a prime minister who can say ‘maybe we need to tone it down’ without triggering an economic crisis. The same cushion exists, in different forms, everywhere the sustainable tourism conversation has actually produced action: Barcelona regulating Airbnb