Research Examines Whether Banff Has Reached Overtourism

Overtourism has become a buzzword in destinations around the world over the past several years. But does it actually apply to Banff? That's the question Chris Cullinane set out to answer in his master's thesis, Overtourism in Banff National Park: Environmental, Social and Economic Aspects. 

Cullinane's connection to the Bow Valley predates the research. Before starting his master's degree in geography at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, the Irish student spent three years living in Canada, the last of them working as a guest activities co-ordinator at the Chateau Lake Louise. It was there, organizing outdoor programming for hotel guests, that he began wondering how the sheer volume of visitors could be reconciled with a national park's conservation mandate and decided, before he'd even started his degree, that overtourism in Banff would be his thesis topic.

What began as a seemingly straightforward question grew more complicated the deeper he went.

"When I started to study it on the surface, it was a straightforward issue. But the more I dug into it, the more factors at play I realized there were," Cullinane said.

Those factors, he added, are often in direct conflict with one another, making some issues feel nearly impossible to resolve.

That tension showed up clearly in his findings. Survey respondents were overwhelmingly willing to call what's happening in Banff overtourism, while the five experts he interviewed were far more hesitant to use the term. Residents also favoured strong, direct measures such as a visitor or vehicle cap, while experts leaned toward incremental changes to make existing tourism volumes easier to manage.

"At the start, I was thinking a visitor cap or vehicle limits seemed like it could be an obvious solution," Cullinane said. "But from talking to these experts, who know a lot more than I do, none of them thought that was a feasible idea, even though a lot of residents did. None of them were willing to outright describe it as overtourism, whereas the vast majority of respondents did agree that overtourism was taking place."

The five stakeholders interviewed were master interpretive guide Mike Vincent; Banff Mayor Corrie DiManno; Chloe Hahn, conservation co-ordinator for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society; Sarah Elmeligi, NDP MLA for Banff-Kananaskis; and Christie Pashby, director of public affairs for Banff and Lake Louise Tourism. Cullinane said he regretted being unable to secure an interview with Parks Canada or with an Indigenous representative, calling both perspectives ones the study could have benefited from.

Of 345 survey respondents, more than 85 percent of whom lived in the Bow Valley, 304, 87.8 percent, agreed that Banff experiences overtourism, while only 11 percent felt their opinions were adequately considered in decision-making. A cap on park visitors was the most highly ranked proposed solution.

Cullinane acknowledged survey respondents tend to skew negative, since people are more inclined to fill out a survey when something bothers them than when things are going well.

"People like to complain more than people would like to say, 'I'm so happy, nothing's wrong,'" he said.

Still, he said the gap between residents and decision-makers is real. Every stakeholder he interviewed considered a cap unfeasible, instead favouring measures that discourage vehicle traffic, a conclusion Cullinane came to share as his research progressed.

"A lot of the issues around overcrowding come down to overcrowding of vehicles, traffic and congestion," he said. "One person takes up a whole lot less room than one car."

Cullinane pointed to Doxey's Irritation Index, a decades-old tourism model tracking resident attitudes from euphoria through apathy, annoyance and, eventually, antagonism. Though basic, he said the model still holds up, and he places Banff somewhere between annoyance and antagonism.

"We're definitely seeing the antagonism stage in Banff at the moment," he said, "people are going to eventually get sick and tired of tourists and their antics down to this stage where even like the smallest thing might be annoying like someone lingering a little too long on the footpath when you're trying to get to work or the grocery store.”

For much clearer examples of what the antagonism stage looks like he points to examples in Barcelona, Dubrovnik and a recent demonstration in Palma Mallorca where demonstrators against tourism clashed with police. While Banff is nowhere near these levels of antagonism, it is also a very unique situation in the relatively recent phenomenon of overtourism.

“Overtourism in Banff is going to look a whole lot different to overtourism in Paris, which is going to look a whole lot different to overtourism in… the Maldives,” said Cullinane.

The unique challenges that Banff faces with overtourism were a major focus of his thesis, with factors like environmental protection, large areas of the park being completely wild, and the fact that the town itself was founded with tourism, making an easy comparison to other places experiencing overtourism more difficult.

"That's all the high-profile cases that you hear about: Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Venice, these sorts of places. And not to say that there are no environmental consequences in these locations, but compared to that in a national park, it's kind of apples and oranges," Cullinane said.

Cullinane said most well-known examples of overtourism occur in urban areas, where the impacts are largely social, such as crowding, housing pressures and resident frustration. In Banff National Park, he argued, environmental impacts play a much larger role, with even relatively small numbers of visitors becoming problematic if they enter sensitive wildlife habitat or ecologically fragile areas.

He described overtourism in Banff as highly "spatio-temporal," meaning it is concentrated in specific places at specific times, such as popular attractions during summer weekends and holidays.

"You can go out into the backcountry and hike for 10 days and you might not see another single person if you're lucky," Cullinane said. "It's really only these few concentrated spots that you're going to see a lot of people."

One point that seemed like a simple piece of the fix for Banff was that it should be exempted from the Canada Strong Pass, the federal program offering free summer entry to national parks. Cullinane said it does little to attract already-committed international visitors but directly incentivizes day trips from Calgary.

Cullinane said he didn't expect the topic to be this layered when he began.

"It is super complicated," he said. "I don't have the answer to say straightforwardly whether overtourism is taking place in Banff or not. I don't think any individual or organization does." He added that while this was just a master's thesis, there's enough material in the topic for a full PhD.

In many ways, those competing perspectives are already playing out in Banff National Park. Parks Canada's recent consultation on the future of visitor management at Lake Louise found broad support for reducing congestion and protecting wildlife, but much less agreement on how to do it. While many residents backed stronger restrictions, including limits on personal vehicles, others worried about losing access themselves. As Cullinane's research suggests, the challenge is no longer simply deciding whether tourism should be managed, but balancing conservation, local quality of life and public access in a place that was built around all three.