Heritage tourism destinations (HTDs) in rural places host not only tourists and tourism service facilities but also negative consequences such as urbanization and overtourism-based spatial transformation on the social, economic, and physical landscape. This paper aims to investigate the ontological groundings of a rehashed overtourism phenomenon by employing an integrative reviewing method of related literature with a focus on rural HTDs and reveal the landscape change by extracting the spatial transformation from satellite images and historical orthophotos of Olympos/Turkey by using semi-automatic classification analysis in QGIS. The findings implicate that the indicators of overtourism can be grounded on the latest levels of the Creative Destruction Model, the Vicious Circle, and the Tourismification approaches, however, still there is a need for reconceptualization of the phenomenon. Moreover, the findings showed that the modus operandi of overtourism-based spatial expansion of tourism service units in protected areas follows a path through the gaps between the two inverse philosophies of protection and use which is critical for stage changes in the evolution process of HTD.

The Cyclades Islands are significant to Greece’s economy, and their role has grown dramatically during the two crisis periods of the Greek Financial Crisis in 2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in 2020. The crises shaped the Cyclades Islands’ tourist and water resource management due to water crisis events that took place between 2012 and 2024. The heavy dependence and emphasis on tourism revenues and less focus on water quality regulations made the situation more complex. Taking Mykonos and Santorini Islands (Greece) as a case study, this research’s main aim is to analyze hospitality stakeholders’ perceptions concerning water quality problems and reveal the ways of operation (modus operandi) that trigger shifting between stages in the lifespan of tourism destinations. Data are gathered through face-to-face interviews with hospitality stakeholders. The results show that the hospitality stakeholders believe that water quality issues exist in connection with short-term water resource management and tourism activity on the islands. Secondly, water quality issues and water shortages have begun to have a detrimental influence and negative cumulative impact on water availability and quality on the islands. These findings shed light on the critical points of the stage changes in the lifecycle and modus operandi of destination evolution.