Post-pandemic tourism in Asia: addressing overtourism through sustainable practices

Purpose This paper examines the overtourism dilemma by understanding the new trends in Asia’s tourism industry in the post-epidemic era. It aims to explore a more sustainable tourism development model that provides stakeholders with excellent cutting-edge tourism dynamics to develop effective marketing and management strategies. Design/methodology/approach This paper explores the overtourism dilemma and emerging tourism trends in Asia post-pandemic through a literature review based on secondary data. More specifically, a systematic literature review was employed by reviewing journals on overtourism and emerging tourism trends in the post-pandemic era in the Scopus scientific database over the past four years (2020–2024). Findings Policy trends, urban morphology, branding strategies and tourist norms significantly influence the sentiment of overtourism. Rather than restricting the number of tourists as a significant strategy, the overtourism debate suggests that stakeholders (local governments, destination managers, destination marketing agencies) can effectively address overtourism in post-pandemic Asia by creating alternative tourism products, optimising tourism flows, upgrading infrastructure to mitigate the impact of tourists, capacity-based visitor management and deploying technology embedded in a sustainable development framework. Practical implications This paper advocates for a multidimensional strategy based on a vision of high-quality, sustainable tourism development shared by various agency coalitions. Originality/value This paper critically overviews the overtourism dilemma against new trends in Asian tourism in the post-pandemic era. The emphasis is on the eventual need for discussions to shift towards more sustainable tourism development models to accommodate changing tourist behaviour under new norms. The paper proposes interventions that would benefit stakeholders.