In Europe, the summer holiday season typically sees many tourists flocking to the islands and beaches, but the worsening heatwave may change this trend in the future. — AFP
Could the peak tourist season shift to a different time of year? This is one solution increasingly being bandied about by professionals in the European tourism industry as a means of reckoning with the reality of global warming.
With climate change’s hotter temperatures, July could be a less popular time to go on holiday on the continent, while April could become the prime vacation period of the year.
In Europe, summer holidays are equivalent to heading southwards to a destination by the sea. A quick look at recent data showing French tourists’ most popular destinations for the July 15 long weekend hew to this equation with Spain’s Barcelona and Malaga and Marseille and Nice in France topping the list from vacation rental platform Holidu.
But with the effects of climate change being felt along the Mediterranean and its many resort destinations, that could very well change, as the extreme heat of recent weeks, as well as the fires that ravaged the islands of Rhodes in Greece and Sicily in Italy, have left their mark on people’s minds.
While previously, sun and sea were essentials for many a summer vacation, the heatwaves have made these aspects less attractive in the eyes of tourists.
And with this new state of affairs, Europe’s traditional star tourism spots are likely to lose some of their appeal.
According to a study by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the southern coastal regions of Europe could see their tourist numbers fall by almost 10% in the summer if temperatures rose by 3°C or 4°C. Northern European coastal regions, on the other hand, are expected to see demand increase by around 5%.
Such a reshuffling of European vacation destinations would also result in a new patterns for the most attractive times to visit spots on the southern or northern coasts. April would become a more popular time for travel, with an 8.89% increase in tourist numbers, while July would see the steepest decline, down by 5.72%.
According to the European Travel Commission, this scenario is already a reality, as the number of travellers planning to spend vacations in Greece, Spain or Portugal between June and November this year fell by 4%, although their study linked the decrease to concerns about financial costs.
Something that may have seemed improbable just a short time ago, shifting the tourist season, if not extending it over a longer period of the year, is increasingly becoming viewed as a concrete solution to address some of the issues affecting the sector.
“We need to get away from the logic of ultra-seasonal tourism. The more tourism professionals can offer a multitude of activities and services in a four-season tourism, rather than one concentrated on July and August, the less dependent they will be on cyclical phenomena such as the weather,” outlined Didier Arino, head of the Protourisme advisory group and analyst of tourism market trends.
Ideas about shifting vacation periods previously emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, as lawmakers and professionals alike looked to solutions about enabling consumers to travel in lower-risk conditions and thereby boosting business to hotel and food service operators.
Such solutions would not only favour optimal weather conditions for tourists on their vacations, it is also being promoted as a way of relieving congestion in destinations plagued by over- tourism.
Indeed an increasing number of attractions are looking to various approaches for limiting the numbers of tourists on their sites with fees, quotas, time-slot systems and other measures being introduced. – AFP Relaxnews
