Chapter 16: When the Tourists Flew Out: A Study on Residents’ Perception of Tourism Before and Since the COVID-19 Pandemic

In 1978, the Malaysian poet Cecil Rajendra wrote a poem slamming tourism with the title “When the Tourists Flew In”. In 2020, since the advent of the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent cessation of most travel, shared public space between hosts and guests has turned into empty space — the tourists flew out. Today, tourist destinations are first and foremost local residents’ proverbial backyards. If destination marketing and management organizations are addressing a new target group, it is no longer the long-haul Asian explorer but the people who live in their destination. Before the COVID-19–induced lockdown, researchers, media, and tourism actors debated a phenomenon known as “overtourism” or “imbalanced tourism", resulting from a hypermobile society that has loved some destinations, such as European cites, to death (Ioannides and Gyimóthy, 2020; Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020). In May 2020, an article in The Guardian titled “We’ve reclaimed our city but inherited a ghost town” (Burgen, 2020) reported about non-tourism in Barcelona. Residents see, smell, and hear their city completely differently (ibid.) when they walk through its empty streets, which used to be the prime example of the loathed mass tourism in European urban destinations. The present research draws inspiration from this article to analyze how the disruption of the travel industry and the current phenomenon of “tourism over” has influenced the perception of tourism among residents of trendy urban destinations in Europe…