Overtourism occurs when the number of tourists exceeds the carrying capacity of a destination, leading to negative impacts on the environment, culture, and quality of life for residents. By monitoring overtourism, destination managers can identify areas of concern and implement measures to mitigate the negative impacts of tourism while promoting smarter tourism practices.This can help ensure that tourism benefits both visitors and residents while preserving the natural and cultural resources that make these destinations so appealing. This chapter describes a low-cost approach to monitoring overtourism based on mo- bile devices’ wireless activity. For this purpose, a flexible architecture was designed for a smart tourism toolkit to be used by SMEs, in crowding management solutions, to build better tourism services, improve efficiency and sustainability, and reduce the overwhelming feeling of pressure in critical hotspots. The crowding sensors count the number of mobile devices, by detecting trace el- ements of wireless technologies, overcoming MAC address randomization. These sensors run detection programs for several technologies, and fingerprinting analysis results are only stored locally in an anonymized database, without infringing privacy rights. After that edge computing, sensors communicate the crowding information to a cloud server, by using a variety of uplink techniques to mitigate local connectivity limitations, something that has been often disregarded in alternative approaches. Field validation of sensors has been performed on Iscte’s campus before their planned use in other locations, such as the Pena Palace. Preliminary results show that these sensors can be deployed in a variety of use-case scenarios and provide a diversity of crowding spatiotemporal data and analysis in order to promote smart engineering techniques to be used for tourism overcrowding management.

This work was developed in the scope of the RESETTING project, funded by the COSME Programme (EISMEA) of the European Union under grant agreement No.101038190.

Overtourism,Smarttourismtoolkit,Crowdingsensor,Edgecomputing,Wi-Fi detection,Fingerprinting,MAC address randomization