Why Low Season Travel Matters

By Ged Brown, Founder & CEO, Low Season Traveller

Travel has always been fun. When I first started out in the travel industry as a travel agent, my manager told me that we were responsible for looking after people’s dreams. He reminded me that other than a house or a car, tourism or ‘holidays’ account for the single largest purchase anyone makes in any given year.

Our holidays and vacations are what we live for. They represent our time to escape the ‘everyday’ and open our eyes to new experiences.

The United Nations World Tourism Organisation or UNWTO, have a wonderful graphic which shows why tourism is more than a merely frivolous pursuit. It matters greatly…to a great many people around the world.

Why Tourism Matters

UNWTO Tourism Barometer

Most in the travel industry focus on the hard measurable impacts of tourism: the fact that it accounts for 1 in 10 jobs worldwide, is worth $1.6 trillion in exports, accounts for 10% of the world’s GDP and 7% of the world’s exports.

Personally, I have always been more interested in the so-called ‘softer’ impacts of tourism. It helps small local economies which are reliant on tourism, it helps to protect and preserve our cultural heritage, it helps to protect our nature and wildlife and it helps engender peace and harmony in the world.

Put simply, the more we travel, the more we understand the world around us and our place in that world. Travel is quite literally, the best education.

However, tourism, like so much of our planet, is fragile. We have witnessed a constant and consistent growth of tourists around the world over the past 50 years. There have been the rare years where tourism has not grown as significantly as other years (2004 tsunami, 2008/9 global financial crisis and more recently the global pandemic), however, our collective desire to discover the world around us means that the demand for travel generally only increases.

As thankfully, more of the world’s population reach middle income status, more people have the ability to travel. And this is broadly a positive thing. However, as tourism numbers increase, there is an increasingly urgent need for appropriate checks and balances to be in place to effectively manage tourism.

Overtourism: The Acropolis, Athens, 2019

Over-tourism is a misnomer for tourism mismanagement. It only occurs during certain peak times of the year and it has a significant negative impact on the lives of local host communities whilst simultaneously providing a poorer experience for the visitors too. Quite literally, no one wins.

Left unchecked, we witness the onset of over-tourism which we have started to see already in places like Barcelona, Venice, Iceland, Thailand and more.

According to the predictions by the UNWTO, there will be 1.8 billion international tourists by 2030. That’s an additional 400 million more than we saw in 2019, and most industry experts believe this figure to be a significant under-estimate, even after the impacts of COVID-19 on tourism. An additional 400 million tourists on top of what we saw in 2019, will make a massive impact on the lives of millions around the world and it will make for some poorer quality tourism too.

By travelling during the low season (or non-peak) months in each destination you visit, you will be travelling at a time when the local community actually need the economic impact of your tourism. The welcome will be a little warmer. You’ll stay in hotels which are being under-utilised during the low season months – and we all know that making better use of the resources which already exist is a more sustainable option. You won’t have to queue for attractions, or jostle with the masses for that photo, or struggle to get a reservation in that lovely restaurant. And yes, you’ll pay sometimes less than 50% of what you would usually have to spend during the peak season months. And on top of all this, you will gain a more unique experience which most travellers will not have had. Everyone benefits when you travel during the low season months.

Low season travel matters. We live in an age where we understand very clearly that our choices can have a lasting impact on the world around us, its communities, its wildlife and its nature. By travelling during the low seasons, we get to have the most awesome and unique experiences, safe in the knowledge that our tourism is bringing a net benefit to the local communities we visit. And let’s face facts, who really enjoys crowds anyway?