I’ve been around the travel industry in some form my whole life. Both parents worked in it – they met through it, actually – and I found myself serendipitously drawn to it as well some 20-odd years ago, albeit via an alternative path in the media. I’d still call travel a family business.
But for all that exposure and experience, I found myself learning a new term recently, and a curious one at that: de-marketing.
In short, it’s a concerted effort by a business, product or destination to encourage travellers or customers not to buy it, or to visit. To leave it alone. Not to come. On the surface, it sounds like existential business suicide. But there is a reason to it.
What it essentially boils down to is overtourism – a term you’ve almost certainly heard, and if you’re an Australian traveller, probably contributed to.
Because we don’t just travel. We converge.
We follow the same routes, the same recommendations, the same algorithm-fed “must-sees”. And nowhere captures that more clearly than Bali. For decades, it’s been the go-to – affordable, accessible and familiar. But that familiarity has tipped into saturation. Traffic, waste, cultural strain – Bali’s challenges are no longer hidden behind the postcard.
And it’s not alone.
In Venice, the story has become almost symbolic. A city so overwhelmed by visitors that locals have steadily moved out, leaving behind a place that risks becoming more stage-set than lived-in community. Cruise ships, day-trippers, bottlenecks through narrow laneways – it’s not just busy, it’s unbalanced.
Over in Amsterdam, authorities tried a different tack by clearly and directly telling certain tourists to stay away altogether. Targeting partygoers with blunt messaging, the city attempted to reclaim control of its image.
But the campaign didn’t land the way intended. It became a joke, a meme, even a badge of honour for the very visitors it was meant to deter. In trying to push people away, Amsterdam arguably pulled more attention in.
And then there’s Maya Bay in Thailand. Perhaps the clearest example of just how far things can go.
Made famous by the hit film The Beach, Maya Bay became a bucket-list destination almost overnight. At its peak, thousands of visitors were arriving daily. Boats crowded the shoreline. Coral reefs were damaged. Marine life disappeared. Eventually, Thai authorities did something drastic: they closed it.
Not restricted access. Not a levy. A full shutdown. For years.
When it reopened, it did so under strict limits – caps on visitor numbers, no swimming in certain areas, controlled access points. It was, in effect, de-marketing through enforcement. And it worked. The ecosystem began to recover. Shark sightings returned. The experience changed – it was not as chaotic, not as overrun.
But it also proved something important: sometimes the only way to fix overtourism is to remove tourism entirely, at least for a while.
That’s the extreme end of the spectrum. Most destinations can’t, or won’t, go that far.
Because here’s the tension at the heart of all this: tourism is both the problem and the lifeblood.
Places like Bali depend on it. Entire economies are built around it. Pull back too hard, too fast, and you risk economic shock, with jobs disappearing and businesses closing. Communities suffer in a different way. That’s why de-marketing so often feels like walking a tightrope.
Soft approaches instead, through education campaigns, codes of conduct, encouraging better behaviour – are politically easier, but often ineffective on their own. Hard measures – caps, bans, higher costs, and in Bali’s case, dedicated police forces specifically targeting misbehaving tourists – reduce pressure but come with backlash.
We’ve seen both in play. Tourist taxes introduced in various destinations haven’t meaningfully reduced demand. If anything, they’ve simply funded repairs while visitor numbers continue to climb.
Because once someone has decided to go somewhere, a small added cost isn’t going to stop them.
What does seem to work is when destinations stop relying on messaging alone and start redesigning the system itself.
Tasmania’s Overland Track is a good example. Faced with environmental degradation and overcrowding, authorities introduced a permit system, capped numbers and charged fees, while still allowing locals to access the track. The result wasn’t a collapse in tourism, but a stabilisation of it. It’s a subtle but important distinction.
As I’ve learned, de-marketing done well isn’t about shutting people out. It’s about controlling flow. When people come, where they go, and how many can be there at once.
Technology is starting to help with this, nudging travellers toward less crowded alternatives in real time. But even the smartest systems can only go so far if behaviour doesn’t shift. And that’s where this gets a little uncomfortable.
Because for all the talk of overtourism, we rarely frame ourselves as part of it.
Australians, in particular, like to think we travel well. And often we do. But collectively, we still cluster. We still chase the same experiences. We still arrive at the same places, at the same times, expecting something unique.
And then we’re surprised when it doesn’t feel that way.
The irony is that the most sustainable travel choices are often the least appealing. Stay longer instead of squeezing in multiple destinations. Skip the headline attraction for somewhere nearby. Or, occasionally, don’t go at all.
That last one sits uneasily, especially for someone like me, who’s spent a lifetime orbiting this industry. Travel has shaped my worldview, my career, even my family story.
But it is clear that something has to give.
De-marketing might sound like a contradiction, but really, it’s a course correction. A recognition that unchecked growth isn’t sustainable – not for destinations, not for communities, and ultimately, not for travellers either.
Because if places like Maya Bay need to close to recover, if cities like Venice are losing their residents, and if even somewhere as resilient as Amsterdam is telling people to think twice, then the message is already out there.
The real question is whether we’re willing to hear it, and more importantly, act on it.