Over the Austral summer of 2022/2023 it is anticipated 100,000 tourists will visit Antarctica, largely via cruise ships and the gateway cities of Ushuaia and Punta Arenas. Relative to other destinations, 100,000 is small. But the growth in tourism numbers has been very large: in 2016-2017 there were 44,000 tourists; and by 2018-2019 and prior to COVID there were 55,000 (IAATO, 2020). In response to this, there have been many discussions at both Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings and amongst members of the International Association of Antarctic Tourism Operators (IAATO). New ship scheduling systems have been introduced along with passenger limits and guidelines for managing activities at over 50 sites by IAATO. Despite these measures, concern has been raised whether these can preserve the wilderness experience that tourists seek to experience (Roura 2019) and whether overtourism is occurring in the world’s most remote tourism destination.
Overtourism has received much attention in tourism literature, laudatory and critical, and has been raised in relation to Antarctica. Overtourism has been defined as “…the situation in which the impact of tourism…exceeds physical, ecological, social, economic, psychological and or political capacity thresholds (Peeters, p. 19), yet within academic literature, focus has been placed on spatial dimensions including urban destinations, impacts upon discrete geographical locations and local communities, and indicators related to visitation intensity and density. These are problematic for remote locations such as Antarctica, where visitation is low relative to other tourism destinations and there is no permanent on-continent ‘local community’. They also overlook temporal dimensions of tourism, such as its impact over time. This paper argues a rethink of overtourism is required, where the perspective of tourists, tour operators, guides, researchers and claimants under the treaty must be incorporated, along with gateway cities and the role tourism plays in promoting the values of Antarctica.