How Does Self-regulation and Dispersion of Tourist Flows to Overcrowded Destinations Evolve When eco-responsible Behavior is Growing?

To prevent tourist overcrowding, local decision-makers are seeking to distribute visitors more evenly around popular sites. Thanks to the development of smart tourism and new Web 2.0 technologies enabling real-time monitoring of visitor numbers, a growing number of eco-responsible tourists, conscious of the environmental impact of mass tourism, are exploring other nearby sites and avoiding the usual tourist crowds. We propose to quantitatively represent these promising behaviors by integrating them into a formal self-regulating flow model based on system dynamics. This simulation model enabled us to observe and understand how traffic between a central site and a neighboring secondary attraction evolved as these new behaviors progressed. On the basis of a realistic data set, a counter-intuitive simulation finding is that, assuming a gradual increase in the number of ecologically responsible tourists, the number of satisfied visitors decreases up to a certain proportion, then gradually increases and stabilizes.