What is the cause of overtourism? The cause is the government’s mismanagement, not the people.

Crowded beach. high rent. A tourist destination filled with people from wall to wall.

Randy Durband, CEO of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, said travelers shouldn’t be blamed for overtourism.

Rather, it’s a “lack of management,” he told “Squawk Box Asia” on Monday.

“I have been in the travel and tourism sector for 40 years and have worked on committees and industry associations in Europe, North America and Asia,” he said. “Governments around the world have traditionally not seen themselves as having a stewardship role.”

Destination marketing organizations “need to change the ‘M’ in DMO from marketing to management,” Durband told CNBC before the interview.

He added that this change has begun, but is still in its early stages.

“This is a great awakening that needs to happen and that governments need to understand. Tourism is an area that needs to be managed,” he said. “There are ways to manipulate, control, and add capacity to address the problem.”

He gave several examples of places where this is already being done successfully.

“We can see that protected areas and national parks are well managed,” he said. “But there is a lot of work to be done to raise awareness of what needs to be done at a government level.”

But that’s not the case in China, he says.

“The Chinese are masters at adding capacity and managing flows,” Durband says. He cited the Leshan Giant Buddha as an example.

“Everyone comes to see the Buddha, but the city government built a huge tourist attraction next to the statue to disperse the visitors,” he said. He told us about this area, which includes caves.

He said Chinese authorities have also created a control center with video screens to track visitors at various locations. “They know about the narrow staircase used to access the Buddha before it gets dangerously full,” he told CNBC Travel after the interview.

“Many iconic cultural sites around the world, where overcrowding is a problem, need additional, ideally preliminary, visiting points to be arranged in such a way that visitors are forced to linger. I think it will benefit “at the main attraction,” he said.

But all popular sites need technology to “monitor the flow of visitors,” he said.

He said the “flow” of tourists had changed in the small French village of Saint Guillem-le-Désère after someone in the town died of a heart attack and an ambulance was unable to rescue him due to traffic jams. .

Durband said residents can enter the village by car, but visitors are advised to park in designated areas outside the village on weekends and during the summer and travel to the village by bicycle, on foot or by electric shuttle bus. It is said that there is

He said the strategy also works in cities like Barcelona, ​​which receives about 17 million visitors a year. Demonstrators marched on July 6 to demand a reduction in the number of tourists visiting Barcelona.

But a city spokesperson told CNBC Travel last week that the city is focused on “flow.”

A spokesperson for Barcelona City Council said: “The measure of success for Barcelona tourism cannot focus on the amount of tourists, but rather on managing the flow of people so as not to exceed social and environmental limits.” We will focus on it.”

Darband said managing the flow of tourists would be particularly difficult in Barcelona. Unlike other large cities, tourists tend to congregate in the same areas that residents prefer, which increases friction between the two groups, he said.

“Everyone wants to be in the same small area of ​​the old city, so dispersing is going to require a pretty substantial strategy to make that happen,” he says.

Still, he said it was “absolutely” possible.

“Demand is not going to go away,” he said, citing the 8 billion people currently living on the planet and the growing middle class in the Asia-Pacific region. “Therefore, we need to increase capacity and dramatically improve our management approach to distributing visitors.”