Kapok | Liveable tourism

Eric Sautedé

When designing or even reviewing policy-making, the whole process is bound to start with a discussion of sort. Whether it is a subdued exchange of views or a heated debate over contentious points, hard facts will mitigate opinions and inform the overall spin of the conversation.

When the figures for visitors coming to Macao in 2018 were released earlier this year, it was thus only logical that some legislators wanted to discuss the matter further: almost 36 million visitors coming to a place whose total population is only 650,000 does qualify our SAR for the “overcrowded” category — we are talking about 100,000 daily visitors on average. This is also what is often referred to as “overtourism” these days. Mind you, this is not a new topic, and since Macao has breached the symbolic threshold of 30 million visitors in 2014, the idea of having daily quotas of tourists or restrictions regarding back and forth movements have been regularly aired.

Some very touristy “enclosed spaces”, such as islands or walled cities, have already taken drastic moves by substantially restricting sudden surges of visitors. Among the most well-known examples are Dubrovnik in Croatia and Santorini in Greece, and in both cases the cruise-ship stopovers were the main targets of these restrictions — what really distort everything being the massive arrival of day visitors.

Despite all the hype about Macao becoming a “world center of leisure and tourism” and the magic formula of “integrated resorts” for new casinos to develop, the average length of stay in Macao is still 1.3 days and it took years to go beyond 1.1!

What is indeed more troubling is that someone representing the food and beverage sector and by extension the hospitality industry, such as legislator Chan Chak Mo, would simply refuse to discuss the issue, and dismiss it on the ground that it is impossible to choose the tourists who visit our SAR. He thus concluded that residents “need to just get used to them.” This is not only irresponsible, but it goes against the latest reflections from the industry itself.

Macao participates in the activities of the World Travel and Tourism Council, and several events of the Council, which represents the Travel & Tourism private sector globally, have actually been held in our SAR. All the research produced by the Council and the global summit it organizes are of course largely concerned by the economic impact and the mega-trends in the growth of the tourism industry, but the overall perspective is lined-up with other concerns, long terms ones, and the Council has actually made the 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals its latest guiding principles.

In its remarkable 2017 study entitled “Coping with Success: Managing Overcrowding in Tourist Destinations”, the Council indicated that “an essential element of a sustainable tourism strategy [was] to put the local community first”. Someone has got his priorities wrong!

But before even thinking of defining a strategy — even one that would be backed by the latest tools of a smart city — the proper diagnosis has to be made.

The report recommends nine metrics grouped under five categories to understand the potential risks: the overall context (importance of tourism and arrivals growth), the alienation of local residents (tourism density — visitors per square kilometer — and intensity — visitors per resident), the degraded tourism experience, the overloaded infrastructure (arrival seasonality and attraction concentration), the damage to nature (air pollution) and the threats to culture and heritage (historic site prevalence).

Interestingly enough, Macao was part of the study and ended up in the most at risk categories in four metrics out of nine, with one (air pollution) not being documented — one can wonder why. And then comes the difficult part: the solutions! Five directions have been identified, with several instruments available: visitors have to be smoothed over time, spread across sites, prices have to be adjusted to balance supply and demand, accommodation supply needs to be regulated and then, if that’s not enough, access and activities can be restricted.

Ultimately, the city has to be liveable if it wishes to remain attractive.