cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/19371857
I'm curious to learn about places around the globe that have a significant amount of underutilized tourism infrastructure. In many cases, I suspect that governments are propping up unsustainable tourism operators or investing in tourism with a "build it and they will come" mentality.
Here are a few examples that I'm aware of:
Qatar - The country has an oversupply of hotels relative to the number of visitors, and its tourism economy heavily relies on layover tours due to the strength of Qatar Airways' network.
Saudi Arabia - In an effort to diversify its economy away from oil, the country is pushing a massive tourism development agenda, despite having many factors that make it less appealing to visitors. Religious tourism seems to be a primary focus.
North Korea - For obvious reasons... For example, only a few floors of the Ryugyong Hotel are ever occupied.
Northern Japan (Aomori, Akita, Sendai) - These places are heavily fueled by domestic tourism, and are basically deserted for half of the year (despite attractions and so on still functioning).
To clarify, I'm not looking for hidden gems or places that are simply underrated travel destinations. Instead, I'm interested in learning about locations where there is a clear mismatch between the available tourism infrastructure and the actual number of visitors.
I want to find places where I might end up being the only visitor to a museum or one of few tourists on an airport bus. The fact that these museums and airport limo buses even exist is where the question stems from.
My hometown Brno used to be dead in season (June to September). There are lots of places geared to tourists but mainly for domestic weekend tourists and students. So in season students go home and other people go to some more exotic locations for longer periods of time.
Now it is somewhat better than that but still there are few tourists in season.
I'd think the domestic resorts of places like the UK. They were perfect for 1930s factory workers, but cheap air travel probably made them uncompetitive with places offering better weatger and atrractions.
Of course, I suspect a lot of the old hotels are repurposed/torn down now.
My guilty pleasure is watching those YouTube videos of people vacationing at absurdly cheap caravan parks, and the general vibe I get is that these places are pretty run down but are surprisingly adequate if all you're looking to do is get away from town. Low-cost European carriers have definitely done a number on a lot of domestic UK resorts though - they simply aren't competitive for the reasons you've stated.
I'm surprised I guess, BRQ airport has seasonal connections across Europe...
When you look at it in context:
City population: ~450 k people. Students: ~50 k only about 10-15% from Brno.
So this city loses about 1/8 of population in summer months.
Edit: bad math 1/8 not 1/5
I visited Brno out of season eight years ago, and while there were tourist attractions available, it was hard to get to some of them. The Punkva Caves only had buses twice a day, for example.
So instead we mostly stayed in and relaxed, which was a welcome break at that point in our trip and I remember Brno fondly because of it. And my wife was giddy with joy that she was able to find a copy of Infarkt in a comic shop.