AP uses global reach, vivid on-the-ground reporting to illustrate challenges of ‘overtourism’ on the world

By Laurie Kellman, Helena Alves and Ana Brigida

London-based Trends + Culture international reporter Laurie Kellman, who has covered the ins and outs of international travel in the past, had been watching anti-tourism developments around the world all summer. She understood that the protests were splashy but realized that most were not really about the tourists; they were about being unprepared for a record-breaking number of visitors. Working closely with the Europe team, she set out to answer a pressing but often unasked question: What does it mean to be visited? 

They found that the tourist surge of 2024 has raised issues of water management, traffic, housing prices and economic class. Sintra, Portugal, made an apt setting for its history of providing respite for aristocrats for centuries. Now the village center is a “traffic jam in paradise,” where its residents worry about getting groceries and emergency care.

Help from other bureaus — including a feed from Japan, where tourism at Mount Fuji had gotten so intense that authorities erected a screen to block the view in one location — added texture and balance to the piece. Strong, vivid photos and video from Sintra brought the locale to life.

This represented an example of seeing something percolating and jumping on it using the AP’s broad resources. It also – as Kellman often does — was a story that took audience into account beforehand, understanding that this story would cross genres, departments and areas of interest. Robust communication with Business News and Europe contributed to the smooth execution.

Text, photo and video formats all worked together on the ground to ensure a joined-up story that would work for digital audiences and customers.

The story garnered a whopping nearly 150,000 page views and retained a 100 engagement score for more than 36 hours — a major accomplishment for a long-form text story. It was the subject of a push alert and was named the One Must-Read for the week. By the weekend, five days after it moved during a very busy news week, it was still doing pageview business in the thousands.

Two major competitors both produced stories within 48 hours of this one moving giving their takes on overtourism.

For showing the world what it is like to be visited, Laurie Kellman, Helena Alves and Ana Brigida earn this week’s Best of the Week — Second Winner. 

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