Bali has taken out the top spot in a list of destinations to avoid over claims its natural beauty has been eroded by tourism.
Fodors Magazines put the idyllic Indonesian island on its 2025 ‘No List’ along with 15 other destinations including Barcelona, Venice Koh, Samui, and Mount Everest.
The travel site’s annual list highlights tourist destinations deemed ‘suffering from untenable popularity’.
The editors said the natural environment and tourism industry are intertwined in the tropical enclave and that the sheer number of visitors threatens to degrade both.
‘Rapid, unchecked development spurred by over-tourism is encroaching on Bali’s natural habitats, eroding its environmental and cultural heritage, and creating a “plastic apocalypse”,’ Fodors noted.
‘Once-pristine beaches like Kuta and Seminyak are now buried under piles of trash, with local waste management systems struggling to keep up.’
The Central Bureau of Statistics for Bali Province has noted some 3.5million foreigners had already visited the island in the first seven months of 2024.
The magazine said strong tourist numbers post-pandemic intensified the ‘strain on the island’.
Local media suggested the central south of the island suffered the most, with a high concentration of resorts, traffic, development, and waste and water management issues plaguing the area.
Bali Tourism Board’s chairman, Ida Bagus Agung Partha Adnyana said the issue wasn’t the total number of visitors.
‘The problem is not the number of tourism overall, but the concentration of tourism in certain areas, especially in South Bali,’ he told the Bali Sun.
‘This causes other areas in Bali that are actually rich in culture and natural beauty not to get the same attention, either from tourists or from tourism managers.
‘Bali does not deserve to be considered a destination to avoid in 2025 because the problem faced is more about the concentration of tourism in South Bali, not overtourism as a whole.’
The deputy chairman of the Indonesia Hotels Association (PHRI), I Gusti Ngurah Rai Suryawijaya said Bali must re-evaluate itself.
‘This is a warning for Bali itself, which is that Bali must rise from having to be tired of preserving its natural culture and environment itself,’ he said.
The magazine clarified certain destinations hadn’t earned their spot for being underwhelming.
Instead they were selected for facing a swathe of existential risks posed by international tourism.
‘These locations are popular for good reason – they are stunning, intriguing, and culturally significant,’ this list clarifies.
‘However, some of these highly coveted tourist spots are collapsing under the burden of their own prominence.’
Among the other destinations deemed to have been negatively impacted by tourism are Agrigento in Sicily, the British Virgin Islands, Kerala in India, Kyoto and Tokyo in Japan, and Oaxaca in Mexico.