Overtourism: what’s next?

In 2019, this journal asked whether overtourism was a genuinely new issue or merely a new label for a long-debated phenomenon, concluding that the phenomenon was old but the term was new and worthy of future study. Seven years on–and after a pandemic that first interrupted and then intensified tourist flows–this research letter revisits that question by asking what has changed. Through an updated exploratory review of the literature, it examines whether overtourism has consolidated into a more autonomous field of enquiry or remains a loosely bounded umbrella term, and it outlines priorities for the research agenda ahead.