The Conceptual Grounding of Overtourism and Overtourism-Driven Change: Olympos Case

Abstract

Heritage tourism destinations (HTDs) in rural places host not only tourists and tourism service facilities but also negative consequences such as urbanization and overtourism-based spatial transformation on the social, economic, and physical landscape. This paper aims to investigate the ontological groundings of a rehashed overtourism phenomenon by employing an integrative reviewing method of related literature with a focus on rural HTDs and reveal the landscape change by extracting the spatial transformation from satellite images and historical orthophotos of Olympos/Turkey by using semi-automatic classification analysis in QGIS. The findings implicate that the indicators of overtourism can be grounded on the latest levels of the Creative Destruction Model, the Vicious Circle, and the Tourismification approaches, however, still there is a need for reconceptualization of the phenomenon. Moreover, the findings showed that the modus operandi of overtourism-based spatial expansion of tourism service units in protected areas follows a path through the gaps between the two inverse philosophies of protection and use which is critical for stage changes in the evolution process of HTD.