Empirical essays on seasonality in tourism

Identificador:  TDX:2768

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2768

Autors:  Turrión Prats, Judith

Resum:
The main aim of this thesis is to analyse seasonality in tourism, a current topic of particular concern for the destination marketers and planners and the academic literature too. This phenomenon is one of the most problematic issues mainly in large scale and well-established destinations, because in these destinations it constitute a major threat to continuous economic development, sustainable growth, tourist loyalty, and brand management. This thesis focuses on the analysis, measurement and causes of seasonality using econometrics models (Difference and System GMM) as well as a decomposition inequality methods proposed by Shorrocks (1982). The geographical scope of the analysis carried out is basically about Spain. This is chosen as the main case study because it is one of the most important tourism destinations in the world. Moreover, Spain is one of the most seasonal countries in the European Union with high demand. In addition, we analyse also the case of Catalonia (the most important Spanish region with respect to arrivals of non-residents) and in last chapter, we perform an analysis of seasonality worldwide, given de absence of data. Some of the empirical results may be summarized as: first, the results suggest that economic and climatic factors explain a significant part of monthly concentration. In addition, the evidence shows that tourists from diverse markets have different sensitivities to changes in the determinants of seasonality. These findings would suggest the suitability of specific management and marketing strategies for markets, given the absence of general homogeneities. Second, the evidence suggests that destinations such as Spain and Catalonia should take into account the cyclical situation of the economies in order to design specific policies and marketing mix strategies. Last, the results show that the world is not uniform in terms of seasonality and the problems are strongly found in the European Mediterranean area.