‘Group touring can offer a responsible way to ease overtourism’
Former MemberEarlier this summer, Barcelona put new measures in place to help the city manage its influx of tourists and – in particular – the perceived inconvenience or impact of larger group tours.
These new measures included maximum group sizes, one-way systems, planning routes in advance and the use of headsets to avoid loud projections or megaphones.
Barcelona has long been Spain’s foremost tourist city, and its glorious historic, cultural and sporting sights are a draw for travellers from all over the world.
As a company that has helped to open the eyes of international travellers to the beauty, heritage and vitality of Barcelona for more than 70 years, The Travel Corporation’s touring brands are as committed as any to helping preserve its treasures, and to maintaining the quality of the experience in the city for both visitors and residents.
As a business which transparently and regularly reports on our progress against our long-term sustainability strategy, we are proactively and robustly addressing our impact on the destinations that we visit.
So, we completely understand the motivation for putting these measures in place, and in fact have had many of them in place ourselves for years – for example the use of Vox headsets so that none of our local experts or tour directors need to talk at volume.
While group touring often seems to be positioned as the villain when it comes to overtourism, we feel strongly the touring model is more respectful than many other ways of visiting these beautiful cities.
For a start, our itineraries are always carefully planned – attractions know when to expect us and how many will be in the group, making it much easier for them manage their visitors on any given day.
Secondly, travelling by coach – in larger groups and in fuel-efficient coaches like ours – has a lower environmental impact than multiple individuals or smaller groups hiring cars or using taxis.
Tourists travelling with a group operator like our Trafalgar or Insight Vacations brands are also much more likely to get under the skin of a destination and interact with locals in a meaningful way that supports smaller, family-run businesses – such as Be My Guest dining experiences, in which guests eat in the home, or farm or vineyard of a local family, enjoying home-cooked, seasonally grown cuisine that is part of the heritage of the destination.
And 94% of Insight Vacations trips have a Make Travel Matter experience incorporated – often small local projects or social enterprises that travellers would find difficult to visit on their own, and that sorely missed us during the pandemic.
We are also conscious of going to destinations outside of the typical tourist trail. Of course, we visit the showstoppers like Barcelona and Madrid, because guests don’t want to miss them, but they also want to visit the family-run cider farm outside Oviedo or the hilltop town of Mijas just inland from the Costa del Sol.
Our love for travel should not come at the expense of the communities we visit, and choosing a responsible group tour can often be one of the most effective ways of experiencing, honouring and preserving those destinations for generations to come.
Gemma Myhill, is head of sustainability, partnerships and projects at TTC Tour Brands
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