As Liverpool awaits the amazing impact of the world’s largest singing contest – Eurovision 2023 – other places are coming to terms with the impact of over-tourism and especially the tourists that arrive on cruise liners. Engage was so aware of the problem that in 2020 we started planning to raise awareness of this issue with those who run the DMO (Destination Marketing Organisation) Marketing Liverpool.
We made contact with cities around Europe who experienced tourism and travel difficulties and asked them about what they were doing to combat the worst effects of too much tourism and what plans they were putting into place to make their tourism offer more sustainable and acceptable to residents. We were introduced to Copenhagen and Porto amongst a number and eventually those two cities formed part of our 2021 Engage seminar series Destination Liverpool: Tourists versus Residents?
And following the success of the seminars we became a significant player on the world tourism scene as the first example in Europe of a city where the residents took the initiative to open a dialogue with their DMO in order to engage them in the design of a sustainable tourism offer. Engage attended and spoke at the prestigious City Destinations Alliance autumn conference Tourism in Transit in Tel Aviv during October 2022. And recently we were invited to speak at the Luxembourg Tourism Summit 2023 which takes place on May 16th:
People are very keen to hear how our conversations in Liverpool with tourism officers are going. Attending these events has been amazing for us as Engage has been exposed to some of the finest thinking and influencers in the tourism and travel business. We continue to be open to holding conversations with both Marketing Liverpool and Culture Liverpool. We would like to support a collaborative project where what is good for residents is good for tourists, where restorative tourism underpins what we do in Liverpool.
Here is the latest news item about on-going issues for residents and tourists in Barcelona:
- ‘A plague of locusts’ : Barcelona battles port authorities to curb cruise tourists. Guardian 09.04.23
We don’t want to be heading in this general direction!
Image courtesy of the Cruisemapper website