WebinarOnline
The destination lifecycle revisited: Navigating overtourism and fostering sustainable growth in a post-pandemic world
Friday, 15 January 2027
Revisit destination lifecycle thinking through contemporary challenges including overtourism, uneven recovery and environmental limits, and consider how evidence, resident priorities and adaptive governance can shape more sustainable development paths.
About this event
The destination lifecycle remains a useful way to examine how places emerge, grow, mature and respond to changing demand. Yet contemporary destinations face conditions that complicate any orderly progression. This webinar revisits lifecycle thinking in relation to overtourism, uneven recovery, climate pressures and altered expectations following the global disruption of travel.
Participants will consider how growth can create employment, investment and cultural exchange while placing strain on housing, infrastructure, public space and ecosystems. Overtourism is not simply a matter of visitor numbers. Its causes and effects vary by season, neighbourhood, behaviour, governance capacity and the distribution of benefits. The session will therefore explore how evidence can distinguish temporary congestion from deeper structural imbalance.
The discussion will also examine renewal and decline. Destinations may attempt to diversify markets, extend seasons, redirect flows or reposition their identity, but such measures can transfer pressure rather than resolve it. Effective strategy requires attention to resident priorities, business adaptation and environmental limits. It also requires institutions that can revise decisions as conditions change instead of pursuing growth targets by habit.
By connecting lifecycle concepts with current management challenges, the webinar offers a framework for evaluating development choices over time. Attendees will consider indicators of pressure, acceptable change and community wellbeing alongside conventional measures of demand. The session asks what sustainable growth should mean where further volume is neither possible nor desirable. It aims to support strategies that are locally legitimate and capable of guiding destinations through uncertainty without promising a simple return to previous patterns.