Exploring Overtourism Implications through the ‘Lens’ of Local Community – Case Study Santorini Island, Greece

Tourism, although a key driving force for the flourishing of local/regional and national economies, is also a source of distinct negative repercussions, e.g. intense use of scarce resources and environmental deterioration, social marginalization, degradation of the quality of life of host communities, to name but a few. These repercussions seem to be further deteriorating under overtourism conditions, noticed in a number of highly-rated tourist destinations around the globe. Identification of host community’s perceptions as to the tourism footprint/burden is essential in contemporary policy research, seeking to: realize local perspectives, values and expectations as to the acceptable type/level of tourism development of their land; and highlight potential policy directions for future action that ensure sustainability and resilience objectives. Grounded in overtourism im-pacts’ assessment in a highly-rated insular destination, i.e., Santorini Island, Greece, this work aims at gathering community’s perceptions as to the drawbacks of the current tourism trajectory by use of a questionnaire survey. Results demonstrate that although respondents realize the crucial role of tourism in the island’s economic profile, they also recognize the rapidly escalating enlargement of the sector as a non-sustainable one in the long run, with severe repercussions in both environmental terms and quality of commu-nity’s everyday life.