söndag, februari 18, 2007

What if everyone wanted to go to Bora Bora?

 Just coming back from our honeymoon on the wonderful island of Bora Bora, a place you should visit if you ever have the option, makes you think: What if everyone wanted to visit all places worth visiting?
Consider: There are some 6.5 billion people in the world today. Let us just assume that the number was frozen for 25 years, to allow a bit of thinking around the numbers. And there are 644 cultural, 164 natural, and 24 mixed properties on the Unesco list of world heritage sites. If everyone gets to go to three places every year (assuming three vacation occasions, which is what we have in Japan), then you get 75 occasions to visit these sites. This means that you can visit approximately one percent of the sites. Which means that every year there will be one percent of six-and-a-half-billion people visiting each site, which is sixty million people. Assuming that vacations can be spread out over the year, and that every vacation is one day, that still means in the environ of one million people will visit every site every day (just rounding the numbers a bit to make the math convenient).
There are about 5000 people living in Bora Bora. The island has approximately an equal number of hotel beds. There is no way one million people could go there. That is true for most other places (gorillas would die from stress if one million people came close enough to see them).
So even making the pretty big assumption that everyone could take three vacations a year, and afford to go anywhere they wanted, there is no way that this could work. What does this mean for the tourism industry in the future? Does it mean Bora Bora is a fantastic investment opportunity, since it will become more and more attractive, or does it mean that we will have to see a thousand more Disneylands, as more and more Chinese and Indians can afford to travel?

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