ABSTRACT
The tourism industry has developed rapidly in recent decades. This boom has led to overtourism in some tourist areas of Spain. The COVID-19, on the other hand, has paralysed the sector and must be reactivated without reproducing past errors. Overtourism remains open to subjective interpretations due to the paucity of precise measurements. This emanates from the fact that overtourism lacks a realistic set of indicators to quantitatively measure its negative impact. The main objective of this paper is to provide a set of indicators that allow reviewing and redirecting decision-making at the business and political levels. An integrated MCDM approach has been applied namely the CRITIC method for calculating the weights of the indicators, and the VIKOR method for assessing the alternatives. The case study of Spain provides useful insights, and the obtained results demonstrated that the economic indicators hinder sustainable development and contribute to worsening the tourist attitude. Copyright © 2022 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
ABSTRACT
The unexpected outbreak of COVID-19 has placed the tourism sector in an unfavourable position. It has altered the reality of destinations worldwide, changing the paradigm of tourism and showing an unusual scenario within the tourism sector, the undertourism. This paper confirms how this global pandemic has put the Spanish tourism sector at a halt, making it essential to establish public–private response strategies that reactivate it and, in turn, avoid overtourism in the post-COVID-19 scenario. This is done to emphasise the necessity of embracing an adapted systematic approach that entails a realistic set of factors to quantitatively measure the impact of overtourism on the local community. In this sense, a fuzzy modified hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach is proposed, combining the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) model, the multi-attribute ideal–real comparative analysis (MAIRCA) model, and the sensitivity analysis. The modified F-AHP model is used to identify the criteria importance. For the final ranking of the considered alternative municipalities, the modified F-MAIRCA is applied. To validate the applicability of the proposed approach, we designated the province of Malaga (Costa del Sol) as an empirical study. The findings show that the municipality of Nerja was the most affected by overtourism in the pre-pandemic scenario, and today it is found in undertourism. This calls for transformative decisions of fully engaged tourism policymakers and practitioners to thrive in the post-COVID-19 tourism scenarios in terms of sustainability. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.