Balancing Tourism

About Balancing Tourism

Balancing Tourism explores how to align the needs of the environment, local communities, travelers and economic goals in the face of tourism’s challenges. Featuring industry leaders and pioneers, the podcast examines strategies like low-season travel, niche markets and innovative solutions to create balanced, sustainable tourism. Discover how destinations can manage visitor flows, foster collaboration and benefit all stakeholders. Whether you're a tourism professional or passionate about responsible travel, join us to rethink tourism for a more equitable, sustainable future.

Publisher

Low Season Traveller

Category

society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Nov 2024

Latest episode

8 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

25 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   8 Jul 2026

   Seasonality is a Workforce Issue

   Carmen Bold has had dozens of career conversations with tourism professionals over the past few months, every one of them either looking for a new role or weighing up their next move. She asked all of them the same question: why now? Not a single person said money. What came back instead was feeling undervalued, being close to burnout, and working somewhere whose values no longer matched their own. That's the thread running through this episode, and it took Ged somewhere he wasn't expecting. Carmen has spent twenty-five years in tourism and events across Australia and New Zealand, from frontline reservations to destination management, and she now hosts the Tourism Matters podcast with a focus on careers and workforce. In this conversation she and Ged get into why most tourism jobs are filled through networks long before they reach a job board, why the human side of travel may be more resistant to AI than we tend to assume, and what destinations and businesses can actually do to hold on to seasonal workers rather than starting from scratch every year. For years Ged has treated seasonality as a marketing problem. Carmen reframes it as a workforce strategy, and once you see it that way it's hard to look at it any other way again. Keep the season going, and you keep your people. She also shares the retention maths that should make every seasonal employer sit up. A worker who returns the following year effectively halves your recruitment. Links: Carmen Bold on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmen-bold/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmen-bold/) Carmen's website: https://www.carmenbold.com (https://www.carmenbold.com) The Tourism Matters podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/4pt5D3JR4SWTlyL8UYDxdv?si=d48201d4fe204319): The State of Tourism Seasonality Report, out now (https://lowseasontraveller.com/state-of-tourism-seasonality/2026)

2. 

   1 May 2026

   Quality Isn't Yield

   When Leslie Vella joined what's now the Malta Tourism Authority in 1982, his business card had a Telex address and a Telegram address on it. Faxes were still science fiction. Malta had half a million tourists a year, 80% of them British, almost all of them arriving in summer. 43 years later, Leslie is Chief Officer of Strategic Development and Deputy CEO of the Malta Tourism Authority, the architect of Malta's national tourism strategy, and the person responsible for the airline conversations that turned a summer-only island into one of the most diversified year-round destinations in the Mediterranean. In this episode, Ged sits down with Leslie to talk about how Malta actually pulled it off. The conversation moves through the early 1980s collapse that forced Malta to diversify, the siege mentality of being an island nation with no mainland to fall back on, and the practical mechanics of getting airlines to fly year-round rather than seasonal. Leslie also shares his animal analogy for what real seasonal repositioning requires, and explains why Malta now positions itself as an island with a city in summer, and a city on an island in winter. There's a frank section on the gap between high-yield tourists and quality tourists, with Leslie making the case that they're not the same thing. He talks about the work of the Malta Tourism Observatory, the 37 sustainability indicators it tracks, and how satellite data is being used to measure the impact of climate on tourism, not just the other way round. The conversation closes with a preview of where Malta's 2035 tourism strategy is heading, and what carrying capacity actually looks like in practice when 14,000 people show up at the Blue Lagoon on a single day. Leslie joins the Rebalancing Demand panel at the Tourism Seasonality Summit in Rimini on 17 May 2026. Links Tourism Seasonality Summit (https://seasonalitysummit.com) Visit Malta (https://www.visitmalta.com/en/) Malta Tourism Authority (https://mta.com.mt) Malta Tourism Observatory (https://www.mtobservatory.org) Murmuration (https://murmuration-sas.com)

3. 

   29 Apr 2026

   Defending Barcelona

   What if the problem with tourism isn't that there are too many tourists, but that almost nobody is measuring capacity properly? In this episode, Ged is joined by Saverio Bertolucci, an Italian tourism researcher whose work has taken him from the subsea tunnels of the Faroe Islands to a half-empty terminal in North Iceland, and now to Barcelona, where he lives, works, and has been pushing back hard against the city's anti-tourism narrative. Saverio walks through what went wrong with the Faroese tunnel network — built for the fisheries, priced out of reach for tourists, and avoided even by locals. He explains why a startup airline trying to open up North Iceland collapsed inside a year, and what that says about the fragility of off-peak connectivity. And he introduces the concept at the heart of his upcoming keynote at the Tourism Seasonality Summit in Rimini: extended capacity, a way of thinking about destination planning that goes well beyond visitor numbers and into infrastructure, facilities, knowledge and strategic intent. The conversation gets sharper when it turns to Barcelona. Saverio defends the city against the over tourism narrative, takes issue with the abolition of more than ten thousand short-term rental licences, and argues that the new rules will hurt the local economy more than they help it. Ged pushes back, and the result is a properly nuanced exchange about who actually benefits when destinations clamp down on visitor accommodation. Whether you run a DMO, work in aviation, manage a hotel, or just care about where this industry is heading, this is a conversation worth your time. Links Tourism Seasonality Summit (https://seasonalitysummit.com), Low Season Traveller (https://lowseasontraveller.com), Saverio Bertolucci on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/saverio-francesco-bertolucci-7ba315185/)

Who has been a guest on Balancing Tourism

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Professor Harold Goodwin
• Peter Glade
• Majid Khan
• Sascha Feuerherd
• Michael Moriarty

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

243

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Podcast Authority Score: 45 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

62

Social presence

0

YouTube

72

Engagement

0

Contact Balancing Tourism

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.