Cooler, but Not More Crowded: Slovenia’s Potential to Harness Coolcation Through Sustainable Tourism Marketing Communication

Rising summer temperatures and recurrent heatwaves are changing European travel decisions and stimulating coolcation: travel motivated partly by the search for thermal comfort. This conceptual framework article examines how Slovenia could engage with this trend without transferring overtourism from heat-stressed coasts to Alpine lakes, valleys, forests and protected areas. A structured integrative review combines research on climate-sensitive tourism, overtourism, demarketing and behavioral communication with official Slovenian statistics and policy evidence. Longitudinal SURS releases show strong tourism growth from 2017 to 2025 and a rising absolute importance of mountain resorts, but they do not identify heat avoidance as the cause of travel. This synthesis therefore treats recent mountain-coast differences as exploratory signals rather than proof of a structural coolcation shift. It develops the five-stage COOL-SMC conceptual framework, which connects capacity intelligence, ecologically screened offer design, communication, local legitimacy and adaptive evaluation. The framework’s distinctive proposition is that promotional intensity should be governed by ecological, infrastructural and social readiness rather than optimized independently for reach or arrivals. COOL-SMC is not empirically validated; it specifies propositions, indicators and decision processes for expert assessment, field pilots and longitudinal testing in small, nature-rich destinations.