Source page: McKinsey & Company
Commentary
Ready or not, here come the tourists
Travel | Sustainability
June 21, 2024 – Summer has arrived in the Northern hemisphere. All this week, our daily charts will focus on travel and tourism. We’ll explore shifting travel preferences, new business models, luxury travel, disruptions affecting the industry, and more.
Tourism can bring big economic benefits to destinations, but it can also cause negative effects, such as overcrowding, environmental damage, and threats to local culture. Senior partner Matteo Pacca and colleagues present a framework for assessing tourism preparedness across six dimensions. This framework can help destinations identify and mitigate areas where tourism puts their cities at risk.

To read the article, see “Destination readiness: Preparing for the tourist flows of tomorrow,” May 29, 2024.
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Visual form
Multi-panel image sequence.
Layout / body structure
The page starts with a six-axis radar guide and then shows four destination radar charts beneath it. The reading order is the top guide first and then the four destination panels from left to right.
What is being compared
It compares tourism-concentration risk across destinations and across six dimensions: threats to culture and heritage, dependence of the local economy on tourism, density in concentration, visitor experience, overloaded infrastructure, and environmental impact.
Measurement system
The score is a quintile metric, with the legend mapping darker shading to higher risk and lighter shading to lower risk. Each spoke on the radar charts corresponds to one of the six risk dimensions.
Visible structure inside the graphic
A reference radar at the top names the six spokes and shows the quintile legend. Four separate destination radars below it trace the profile for Dubrovnik, Mumbai, Amsterdam, and Singapore, with each destination filling different wedges of the six-part wheel.
Main takeaway from the visual
The chart shows that tourism pressure is multi-dimensional and destination-specific, with some cities carrying broad risk across multiple spokes while others concentrate their risk in a smaller subset of factors.
Key standout values or extremes
Dubrovnik and Amsterdam fill several outer-ring wedges, signaling higher concentrated-tourism risk across multiple dimensions, while the other destinations show more mixed shapes with some axes pulling inward and others extending out.
Controls / sequence, when applicable
This is a static chart image with no in-chart controls to operate.
Companion media, when applicable
There is no separate companion audio or video; the chart image is the full visual on this page.