People-Flows: A Proposed Tourist Destination Management Paradigm

Overtourism has, in the past years, grown to become a global issue, turning popular tourist destinations into unsustainable places of congestion, creating visitor dissatisfaction, and forever changing the daily life of nearby residents. Action needs to be taken in order to contain this ever-increasing problem, with technological solutions that will try to simulate and adapt to the complexity of each separate case. This work proposes a holistic approach to destination management, introducing an innovative flow management system, that can use historic data together with real-time reservation and traffic congestion data, in order to produce forecasts and recommendations that will help attraction administrators (museums, sights, monuments, etc.) and policymakers in decision-making. The proposed system is part of an integrated approach, featuring end-user applications for visitors and tourism professionals.