I guess it’s the combination of cheap flights and instagram but if you want to enjoy yourself then forget about Kyoto and Venice etc and look into some less popular and less well known places instead.
And do the rest of us a favor and don’t location tag if you do discover something great.
When you see that amazing picture, what you don't see is the crowd of 100 people behind the photographer waiting for their turn to get the same picture.
Not only is it a bad experience for tourists, but it makes the locals resentful of what should be a valuable revenue stream.
It's not clear how to fix it. Most people who travel have limited vacation time and are making a logical decision to head for known interesting landmarks. There's no travel guide for how to find that one great off-the-beaten-path spot that you'll remember for the rest of your life while still making it back to your job on Monday.
https://besthike.com/2018/08/23/hiking-the-troll-tongue-norw...
That's pretty much what the Rick Steves books specialize in.
As noted elsewhere, the cost of Intercontinental travel is dropping and the primary tourist destinations are overwhelmed, even in off seasons.
We then hopped a RyanAir flight to Bari because that's where my wife's family emigrated from. Thought we'd rent a car, spend 4-5 hours hopping around Bari and then move on to Naples. We ended up spending 4 nights and completely loved the city and the whole of Puglia. It ended up being the best part of the trip.
Maybe it was just expectations were reversed, but we truly loved Bari, and could have just skipped Venice and Naples and spent more time there. Not that Venice and Naples were disappointing, but they didn't stand out at the end of the trip.
Italy as a whole was wonderful. Can't wait to go back.
There are certainly places that are less busy but I wouldn't outright discourage anyone from traveling to the popular places. It's not that difficult to avoid the crowds and there are tons of things worth seeing.
I went in May when schools were getting out and I could tell the difference by the end of the week. Make appointments to the popular places to avoid the lines.
So if you're interested in that sort of unique experience I recommend looking up some nonprofits in need of volunteers.
There are obviously benefits to the people who go, but there is also potential of harm to the communities visited -- more so than just the usual tourism -- in the name of doing good. Skilled/educational trips like medical missions that provide relief and sustainable/appropriate skills transmission to providers in the local community tend to be the most positive/neutral, but efforts like helping to rebuild schools, etc. with volunteers who have no specific expertise tend to be problematic.
(issues include depriving livelihood from local builders, badly rebuilt buildings owing to lack of skill that have to be rebuilt, creating a culture of dependency, damage caused to the dignity of providers in local communities, the constant impermanency of relationships can especially affect children in the local community, etc.).
Many thoughtful missions organizations are aware of these issues and try to plan missions trips that mitigate such harm. There's a book called "When Helping Hurts" [1] that guides a lot of the new thinking in this space. Again good intentions are laudable, and we should not be dissuaded from doing good in the world, but acting with discernment and wisdom ensures that actual good, and not harm, is done in the visited communities.
My strategy was to figure out what Dutch people visited in their own country and mimic that. That went quite well.