The truth about the cities with the world’s worst overtourism

If you were asked to nominate a few of the world’s most over-touristed cities, a few spots on the Mediterranean would likely top your list.

But what does “over-touristed” really mean? If you measure it by local protests and media noise, no wonder cities like Barcelona spring to mind. Yet they’re not, by a long shot, the world’s most visited cities, and you seldom hear many complaints from the ones that are.

Of the world’s top 10 most-visited cities in 2025, just one (Istanbul) is near the Mediterranean and only three (London and Paris are the others) are in Europe.

According to analytics company Euromonitor International, Bangkok was number one with 33.3 million arrivals, and Hong Kong, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and Mecca among the others.

But I know what you’re thinking. The number of arrivals has no relation to a city’s ability to absorb large numbers of tourists, right? Isn’t that what places such as Amsterdam and Venice complain about?

How does Orlando cope when Barcelona doesn’t, and how does Switzerland deal with the same relative numbers as Italy?

OK then. Agreed. Bangkok has 11.4 million residents, which means its resident-to-tourist ratio is only 1:3. Its 33.3 million visitors, spread across a year – which averages 91,232 a day, although tourism is of course seasonal – aren’t going to particularly bother anyone.

The resident-to-tourist ratio in Venice is 1:392 which, yes, seems alarming. But Venice gets far more media attention for its overtourism than places where the ratio is even greater.

Have you ever heard the Pope complain about overtourism? No. And yet Vatican City’s ratio is a staggering 1:7709. And you should feel concerned about, say, Gatlinburg in Tennessee, population 4000, annual visitors over 11.5 million because it’s the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That’s a 1:2875 ratio.

Gatlinburg, Venice and the Vatican are of course unusual in having negligible resident populations, so let’s consider major cities instead.

Paris sits at 1:22, Amsterdam at 1:29 and Dubrovnik at 1:32. But they’re all beaten by a place from which you don’t hear much grumbling about too many tourists: Orlando in Florida, famous for its major theme parks, at 1:36.

A third way to crunch the numbers is to look at tourism density. That takes in visitor nights or visitor numbers in relation to land area. A high value means tourists are squeezed in, with implications for overdevelopment and the environment.

In Europe, according to the European Commission, busy tourist countries such as Greece and Spain have only middling rankings (around 1000). Italy is higher (1500) but, despite the publicity it gets about supposed tourism woes, it’s only about as tourist-dense as Austria, Switzerland and Belgium.

And the winner, if that’s the right term? By a gigantic margin, nine times higher than nearest rival the Netherlands? That would be Malta, with 36,000 annual visitor nights per square kilometre in 2024. Wow.

Astonishing as that is, it pales in comparison with Macau, the Chinese administrative region just 118 square kilometres in size but with a record 40 million visitors in 2025. That’s a whopping 339,000 annual visitors (not quite the same as visitor nights) per square kilometre.

Admittedly Barcelona and Amsterdam rank in the top five here too, but “over-touristed” Prague comes in at number 25, Venice 30 and Dubrovnik 33. For comparison, Sydney is 37th and Melbourne 40th.

There’s no denying overtourism is a real and serious issue, with major social and environmental impacts, and I don’t mean to diminish the legitimate concerns of residents from Barcelona to Bali.

But overtourism isn’t all it seems. The problem (as in Italy, or any popular city) is partly a concentration of tourists in certain areas. But how does Orlando cope when Barcelona doesn’t, and how does Switzerland deal with the same relative numbers as Italy?

Some of the answers lie in better tourism infrastructure, tourism management and planning. Tourism behaviour and flows can be changed through the right government policies, such as restraints on private room rentals and hotel approvals or the removal of budget-airline subsidies.

The Vatican City, Gatlinburg, Orlando, Malta, Macau, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur are world champions. It pays to study the numbers and see things in a slightly different light.