What is over-tourism?
The word “overtourism” appeared in 2016 and within years had settled into the political vocabulary of European cities. Three different problems in fact travel under that single name: crowding, which is always on a particular street at particular hours; pressure on housing costs, when flats move from long-term letting into short-term rental; and infrastructure overload, which is a question of investment rather than of visitor numbers. Each has a different cause and therefore a different solution.
This analysis from BTUAI goes through each of the major cases worldwide and answers one question: which measures worked, and which did not.
Venice. In 2024 became the first city in the world to charge day visitors an entry fee – €5 on peak days. Result: revenue rose from €2.43 million to €5.42 million in two years, but visitor numbers did not fall. Ca’ Foscari University found roughly 7,000 more people entering the city on charged days than on the same days a year earlier. Reason: €5 is invisible against total trip cost, and a fee is not a limit – whoever pays, enters.
Barcelona. In July 2024, protesters sprayed tourists with water pistols – the image that made this city the media face of over-tourism. Scale: the march drew roughly 3,000 people in a city of 1.66 million; a year later, just 600. In the city’s own survey, 9.8% of residents name tourism as the main problem (a falling share); 29.9% name housing (a rising share). Conclusion: the problem is not the tourist – it is the housing market.
Amsterdam. Known as the city that capped visitors at 20 million overnight stays a year. In 2026, during a court dispute, the city admitted the cap had never been legally enforceable – it was a political target, not a rule. In 2025 the city recorded 23.7 million overnight stays – above the cap. What did work was a different measure: cruise-ship calls cut from 190 a year to 100.
Mount Fuji. From the 2024 season, Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture introduced a daily cap of 4,000 climbers, compulsory booking, and a nighttime gate closure. Result: climbers fell from 200,000 to 178,000, rescue operations from 64 to 36, deaths from six to zero. The difference from Venice: this is a quantitative limit, not a price – the 4,001st person simply cannot climb – and the trail has a single gate, a real control point.
Bhutan. In 2022 raised its nightly visitor fee from $65 to $200. Result: arrivals fell to 26% of the 2019 level – the only case where a price unambiguously cut the flow. A year later the government halved the fee. Conclusion: a price high enough to work is also high enough to be politically unsustainable.
Short-term rentals (New York). After the 2023 ban, listings fell 83%. Rents did not fall: vacancy is at its lowest since 1968, and median Manhattan rent rose 6.4%. What did rise was hotel prices. Reason: short-term rentals were less than one percent of the city’s housing stock.
What works and what does not?
Every measure with a measured reduction in load contains a quantitative limit at a physical control point. Every pure price measure below roughly $100 has failed – this is not an opinion but the arithmetic of elasticity: the elasticity of an accommodation tax in Italy is −0.019, meaning that cutting visitor numbers by 20% would require raising the tax tenfold. A second conclusion follows: a tourist tax is not over-tourism policy. It is an instrument of municipal finance, and most cities say so openly.
What does this mean for Georgia?
Georgia has none of the instruments of over-tourism policy: no tax, no limit, no registration of short-term rentals. At the same time, nationally, visitor numbers have not returned even to the 2019 level. The problem is concentration: in 2025 Kazbegi municipality received roughly 592,000 visitors for 3,800 residents – 156 visitors per person, the range in which the historic centre of Venice sits.
This analysis was prepared by the academic team of the Business and Technology University (BTU) together with BTUAI and draws on publicly available industry reports and research. The full report, with charts, is attached as a separate file.
Citation: Business and Technology University (BTU) & BTUAI. (2026). Over-tourism — What We Actually Know. Tbilisi, Georgia.