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Between 1995 and 2019, international tourist arrivals worldwide rose from roughly 525 million to nearly 1.5 billion, an expansion frequently cited as the clearest evidence of globalisation's reach into everyday leisure. Cheaper air travel, the spread of low-cost carriers, simplified visa arrangements, and the growth of online booking platforms all lowered the practical barriers to crossing borders. For many national economies, particularly smaller island states and countries with limited industrial bases, tourism receipts came to represent a substantial share of GDP and a primary source of foreign currency and employment. Coastal resorts, historic city centres, and even remote natural reserves were reshaped, sometimes within a single generation, by the infrastructure built to accommodate visitors: airports, hotel chains, and transport links. Proponents of this growth argue that it fosters cross-cultural understanding, funds the preservation of heritage sites through entrance fees, and distributes wealth to regions that otherwise have few exportable resources. Critics, however, point to a set of recurring costs that expansion has brought with it. Overcrowding at popular destinations has degraded the very attractions tourists come to see, from coral reefs damaged by snorkelling traffic to historic quarters where housing has been converted entirely to short-term rentals, displacing long-term residents. Water and energy demand in tourist-dependent regions frequently spikes far beyond what local infrastructure was designed to handle, particularly during peak seasons. Some destinations have responded by capping daily visitor numbers, introducing tourist taxes, or restricting new hotel construction, arguing that unmanaged growth threatens the long-term viability of the industry itself. The tension between tourism as an engine of shared prosperity and tourism as a source of strain on local communities and ecosystems remains unresolved, and policy responses vary widely depending on a destination's reliance on visitor income versus its capacity to absorb visitor numbers sustainably.