Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 7th of

August and for the last 24 hours has been an awful lot of talk about possible lottery systems to

avoid over tourism. This all came about because of some comments by Glenn Fogle, the chief executive of booking.com,

who said that the key to solving over tourism could be a, quote, a combination of higher cost and

lottery. He basically said, and this was in comments to the BBC's Wake Up to Money programme,

even though you may not be wealthy, you should still get a chance to visit some of those

beautiful and great places in the world. Now there are some wonderful parts of Europe which have

serious problems with too many visitors. For instance, the old town of Dubrovnik has a spectacular

location on the edge of the Adriatic. You've got churches and cottages lining the cobbled streets

and some heavenly stairways all wrapped in ancient walls. Trouble is, on any day in summer,

the whole place is overrun with tourists.

Some of them are just attracted by the sheer good looks of the place. Others, it's the Game of

Thrones connection, and many, well, they're simply dropped off for the day by cruise ships

and are following or adding to the crowd.

Would a lottery help?

Well, I've been looking at the possible issues that it would raise.

You could, of course, simply put up prices.

Venice already has a visitor livery on certain days.

Amsterdam are raising accommodation taxes.

And if you take Edinburgh, which at this time of year is

hosting the festival and the fringe, hotel rates should be enough to deter anywhere. But that, of course,

excludes less wealthy travellers from iconic locations and many people believe that's unfair.

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