Lawmaker calls for action to avoid ‘over-tourism’

Lawmaker Pereira Coutinho is concerned that residents of Macau are losing quality of life due to an excess of tourists visiting the region.

In a spoken enquiry delivered last week at the Legislative Assembly, Coutinho expressed concerns over Macau being on the verge of becoming another city suffering from “over-tourism,” a phenomenon that, according to the lawmaker, occurs when cities “accept without any control tourists who invade them as ‘plagues of locusts’, seduced by the spending of such visitors and forgetting the harmful consequences.”

Noting that his criticism was not directed at tourism in general, as a  supporter of the local economy, Pereira Coutinho urged the government to “adopt as early as possible more balanced solutions instead of just waiting to see when the city would reach a breaking point.”

The lawmaker argued that Macau is not far from reaching such a point, as with cities such as Barcelona, Mumbai, Amsterdam, Venice and Hanoi.

In Pereira Coutinho’s opinion, the government should pay attention and restrict access to the so-called “poor tourists” who come to visit Macau almost “for free” via tourism packages and who, after arriving in the region, “are guided to certain shops to be lured into shopping for particular items that are most of the time counterfeit or stolen items.”

The lawmaker says that the government has no policies for the sustainable development of tourism, contributing to the lack of ethics of some operators. In his opinion, these factors are also encouraging illegal accommodation and the dishonest sales of dubious products.