Saverio Bertolucci has built his research around the gap between what destinations build and how tourists actually behave. His argument, delivered with characteristic directness on the latest episode of the Balancing Tourism Podcast, is that the over tourism debate has become a distraction from a more useful question. There is, in his view, no such thing as over tourism. There is only badly managed capacity.

It is a contention designed to provoke, but Bertolucci has the research record to back it up. The Italian tourism graduate, who studied at Aalborg University in Copenhagen and now works in luxury rentals and sales in Barcelona, has built a body of work around destinations where the infrastructure has either run ahead of the demand, lagged behind it, or been built for the wrong purpose entirely.

The capacity question nobody is asking

The starting point of his argument is a question Ged Brown has been putting to destination chief executives and tourism ministers for years. What is the capacity for tourism in your destination? What is the maximum? Brown notes that almost no one ever has an answer. The DMOs set up to attract more visitors typically have no working figure for how many visitors the destination can actually carry.

Bertolucci sees the same blind spot, particularly across the Nordic countries he has studied. Tourism, he argues, tends to come second behind sectors like fisheries when capacity is being planned, with the result that destinations are repeatedly caught out by sudden inflows. The Faroe Islands, which now sees summer demand reach ninety to one hundred per cent of accommodation capacity while winter sits closer to thirty, is the textbook case.

When infrastructure is built for the wrong customer

The Faroese subsea tunnel network is one of the more ambitious transport projects in Europe, connecting a remote archipelago through a series of undersea links. Bertolucci’s research found that the most recent tunnels are underused, and the reason is straightforward. They were designed primarily to serve the fisheries industry, with no real consideration of how tourism might use them. Tolls on the newer tunnels are high enough that visitors often choose alternative routes, and even locals avoid them when they can.

The strategic lesson, he argues, is that infrastructure decisions made without integrating tourism from the outset tend to produce assets that fail commercially on both sides. The fisheries get their tunnels, but the wider community does not capture the dispersal benefits that a more accessible network could deliver. With second home demand growing and a clear appetite for travel beyond the Faroese capital, the missed opportunity is not abstract.

The fragility of off-peak connectivity

A similar pattern shows up in North Iceland, where Bertolucci and his colleagues studied the collapse of Niceair, the startup carrier that briefly opened up Akureyri to international traffic before going bankrupt within a year. The new terminal at the airport has capacity for around five hundred thousand passengers a year. It is currently running at less than half that, with foreign passengers accounting for only sixteen to seventeen per cent of throughput.

For Bertolucci, the case illustrates how exposed off-peak connectivity is when commercial risk falls almost entirely on a single carrier. A startup airline entering a thinly trafficked Nordic market is taking on conditions that would test any operator, and the absence of meaningful destination data or coordinated marketing makes the gamble harder still.

Brown adds a useful counterpoint from his own conversations with airline network planners, who increasingly want to deploy aircraft year round but need a credible commercial case to do so. Straight financial incentives from destinations can be read as an admission that the demand is not there. More creative arrangements, such as airlines waiving baggage fees for cyclists during the low season in destinations promoting cycling tourism, are starting to look like the more promising route.

Barcelona and the wrong fix

The conversation turns sharper when it reaches Barcelona, where Bertolucci has publicly defended the city against the anti-tourism narrative that has dominated coverage in recent years. He notes that recent local data show roughly thirty per cent of residents express opposition to tourism, while more than sixty per cent see it as a net positive. The picture, he argues, is more nuanced than the protest images suggest.

His sharper concern is commercial. The decision to abolish more than ten thousand short-term rental licences from 2028, combined with Catalonia’s new price controls on rental properties under one hundred and fifty square metres, will, in his view, damage the city’s capacity to absorb event-driven demand. Festivals such as Sonar, major football fixtures and trade fairs all rely on apartment stock to cope with peaks. Removing that stock, he suggests, hands the market to hotel chains and pushes owners towards the midterm luxury rental segment, where his own business operates.

Brown plays devil’s advocate, asking whether displaced demand might simply benefit destinations beyond Barcelona itself, including Girona and the wider Costa Brava. Bertolucci is sceptical. The price controls extend across roughly ninety per cent of the region, and the regulatory message is consistent enough that few owners are likely to switch into long-term lets at the prices on offer.

Extended capacity as the strategic frame

Underneath all of this sits the model Bertolucci will be presenting at the Tourism Seasonality Summit in Rimini next month. His extended capacity framework asks destinations and operators to think about capacity across five connected dimensions, covering visitor inflows, knowledge, facilities, infrastructure and longer-term development potential. The point is to give DMOs and commercial operators a working analytical basis for strategy, rather than the headline numbers most currently rely on.

The pitch to delegates is practical. Walk into the office on the Monday after Rimini with a clearer view of what the destination can actually carry and where the gaps sit.

The full conversation with Saverio Bertolucci is available now on the Balancing Tourism Podcast. To hear his keynote in person, register for the Tourism Seasonality Summit in Rimini – 17-18 May 2026.