Europe travel: Why undertourism is the real problem on the busy holiday continent

Most dictionaries don’t even accept that “undertourism” is a word, although I promise you it’s a thing.

But we hear a lot about overtourism — luxury cruising the latest travel-industry sasquatch and a noisy, foul-smelling monster leaving giant carbon footprints wherever it goes.

And sure, there are port cities in Europe with more day-trippers than residents, where plagues of tourists snapping selfies while queuing outside snack bars for the same Instagrammable panini only lead to longer lines, higher prices and the locals unable to secure a decent sandwich.

Cruise companies tend to respond to criticism with preposterous greenwashing and meaningless claims such as that 100 per cent of the sea comes from natural sources like rain, or 100 per cent of a ship’s developing-nations crew are recyclable.

But there are more plausible defences for leaving home to look at things — some European port cities are crying out for tourists, and desperately thankful when they arrive.

I know this because I was recently thanked twice, and this hadn’t happened to me overseas since 2011, when a South Korean former soldier got down on his knees to express his gratitude for Australia’s support in the Korean War (which was over before I was born).

I was sailing down the Danube on board the river-cruise ship AmaMagna when we docked at the Bulgarian port of Vidin — to find nobody there.

The streets were empty. The medieval fortress, abandoned in the 18th century, has been painstakingly restored and apparently abandoned again. It was open as a museum, but there were no visitors.

Vidin boasts of its “Triangle of Tolerance” — an imposing Orthodox church; a late 18th-century mosque; a wonderfully rebuilt 19th-century synagogue. There were no other tourists at any of the sites, and the mosque was closed anyway.

The local stray dogs followed us all around the town given there was nothing else for them to do (proving that even the canine community suffers from the effects of undertourism). Thousands of working-age people, I was told, have left Vidin because there is simply no work to do.

Before we left Bulgaria, we were treated to an energetic folklore show, whose compere thanked us for bearing witness to the harshness of life in Bulgaria (which she blamed on the former Communist government; while others, quite seriously, blamed the former Ottoman Empire).

AmaMagna’s next port of call was Golubac in Serbia, where a breathtakingly dramatic castle town glares down upon the river. Golubac Fortress is a world-class medieval attraction, and I can’t believe I had never heard of it. Apparently, Golubac Fortress attracts about 1.5 million visitors per year, and it’s the prime tourist destination in Serbia.

Our guide around Golubac never stopped thanking us. His name was Nicholas, which meant he was known as “Johnny” which is, apparently, the Serbian nickname for anyone called Nicholas (though Johnny couldn’t explain why).

Johnny told us that he’d grown up in a small town where he couldn’t finish his education because there was no high school. But tourism around the restored fortress (which reopened in 2019) had brought 900 extra beds to a town of only 1000 people. There are now two hotels, 14 restaurants, seven “supermarkets” and a cluster of coffee shops. The town’s new prosperity has meant that Johnny’s two-year-old son will be able to live at home when he studies in the new high school.

In the past, the only work the guide could have found was in farming. But he left home to study geography and tourism at university in Belgrade, and was able to return to the place that he loved and get a job at the fortress because of tourists.

“So, thank you,” said Johnny.

From Serbia AmaMagna cruised to Croatia and the tragic town of Vukovar, which was at the frontline of the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. Terrible things happened in Vukovar, and the timeline of the horror is deftly animated in the municipal museum and elsewhere.

Vukovar suffers from a more sinister kind of emptiness to Vidin: about 1740 of its citizens are still missing from the war. Almost everyone has a relative who has disappeared, presumed murdered.

It’s important that tourists visit sites such as Vukovar, not just to support the cafes and the kebab shops, but to keep alive the memory of the dead.

Travel to “traumascapes” such as Vukovar is sometimes called “dark tourism”.

“Dark tourism exposes the area’s difficult heritage, highlighting the growing tensions between what is remembered and what is deliberately forgotten,” says Dr Philip Stone, the director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Lancashire in the UK.

“Sites such as the Ovcara Massacre Memorial — commemorating the victims of the Vukovar massacre — embody these charged politics of remembrance. In this context, placemaking, tourism and the legacy of atrocity become closely intertwined in post‑conflict landscapes.”

So that’s three different reasons to accept that undertourism is a thing. And to encourage you to overcome it by travelling.