Tourism Challenges in the Eastern Mediterranean: Overtourism, Geopolitical Conflicts and Sustainability

The region of the eastern Mediterranean continues to play a central role in the international tourism economy. Unlike any previous crisis, Covid-19 shut down international travel, shuttered businesses and brought about a near collapse of tourism economies in the region and beyond. By 2021, however, most of the tourism sectors of the eastern Mediterranean rebounded and the region attracted over 12% of global tourist arrivals. As a result, pandemic restrictions are no longer the major challenge for tourism in the eastern Mediterranean. Rather, the unleashing of pent-up demand as well as the resilience of diverse networks of tourism flows have highlighted a different set of pressing concerns across the region. In some cases, such as Greece, the rapid bounce back and the sustained demand intensity has strained the capacity of tourism infrastructure and driven up higher prices. This “overtourism” is leading to changes in the tourism experience, while making domestic access to tourism more difficult. It also highlights the drawbacks for all states, even when successful, of promoting tourism as an engine of economic growth. A growing number of locations have become subject to even more intense forms of tourism development, which are transforming the natural landscapes and built environments of the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, tourism’s expansive carbon footprint in an era of climate change contributes in the short term to excessive heat and wildfires, which impact tourism and pose a major longer-term challenge for economies and planners across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond.