Resumen de Empirical essays on seasonality in tourism
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. Since this phenomenon affects most of the popular tourist destinations, it constitutes one of the most significant threats for the tourist industry’s growth and sustainability. The Strategic Tourism Plans of the most popular destinations include measures to track seasonality displayed prominently. Therefore, the seasonal nature of tourism has become a relevant issue for both, tourism managers and policy makers. These agents spend time, money and efforts trying to mitigate its effects. Nevertheless, it is still, paradoxically, one of the least understood aspects of this field (Jang 2004). Since the problem of seasonality is complex and its consequences are multiple, it seems necessary to address this issue in order to better understand this phenomenon.
The purpose of this thesis is to measure seasonality and identify its determinants using econometrics models (Difference and System GMM), as well as to explore the contribution of the origin of the tourists to seasonality through a decomposition inequality method proposed by Shorrocks (1982). A quantitative approach has been chosen after detecting that previous work in the field follow a theoretical approach and quantitative research is limited. It is in this spirit that the first study of this dissertation is to analyse the determinants of seasonality, a line of research for which there currently is little quantitative evidence. Most of the researchers have focused on modelling global tourism demand but just little research has used econometric methods for the monthly concentration of the demand. Among the results of this study, one is particularly significant. In particular, this result seems to suggest that the phases of the economic cycle, specifically crises, could have an effect on seasonality. This finding led us to question ourselves what is the effect of the crisis on the monthly concentration. The economic theory says that changes in consumer income may affect the demand (for example, a decreased income provides consumers with a lesser spending power). Nevertheless, depending on whether a product is considered normal or inferior, demand for it will decrease or increase. However, what is the effect of economic crises (huge decreases) on the monthly concentration? Examining this issue led us to introduce factors of an economic nature into our models. In addition, this also led us to ask ourselves if the markets of origin show different sensitivities to changes in these variables.
The core general research questions that guided this study can be stated as follows:
• How has evolved seasonality in the last period? • Which natural and non-natural factors can be used to explain seasonality in tourism? • Can economic crises influence on monthly concentration? • Do countries of origin show different sensitivities to changes in the determinants of seasonality? • Are there any significant changes market by market? • What is the degree of monthly concentration worldwide and the role of countries and regional groups? • Can these results be useful for guiding policies? The main features and contributions of this research are as follows: Firstly, following Butler’s definition (1994), summary indices have been used in order to measure monthly concentration. Specifically, we use mainly (but not only) the Coefficient of Variation (CV) that is still underutilized despite of its advantages. Nevertheless, as a robustness exercise, all our models have also been re-estimated using Gini index, the most common indicator used in the academic literature. Overall, there is no significant differences in the results.
Secondly, this dissertation focuses on measuring and analysing the determinants of seasonality, a line of research for which there is currently little quantitative evidence. In particular, this thesis examines the causes of monthly concentration at different levels (local, regional, and national) combining both territorial and economic factors.
Thirdly, the methodologies used for measuring and analysing seasonality, in most cases underutilized, such as dynamic panel data models that may be useful in future research. The use of panel data allows us to improve our econometric specifications and parameters estimations due, for example, to greater variability in the data and higher levels of freedom. In addition, it also allow to reduce multicollinearity and to control unobserved heterogeneity. Regarding estimation techniques, Difference GMM (Arellano and Bond, 1991) and System GMM (Roodman, 2006) have been used, among others.
The geographical scope of the analysis carried out in this thesis is Spain. The reason to choose Spain as the main case study is twofold. It is one of the most important tourism destinations in the world and it is one of the most seasonal countries of the European Union with the highest 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. This has not been done, as far as we know, given the little homogeneity between demand indicators and the scarcity of monthly data. In most of the chapters, the number of international tourists has been chosen as demand indicator for several reasons. First, international tourism is very important for the Spanish economy and this country plays a very important role in the world context. Second, some partial evidence shows that the international component accounts for the most part of the overall seasonality in Spain.
Some of the empirical results may be summarized as:
First, the results suggest that economic and climatic factors explain a significant part of seasonality. 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 (for example, seasonal price variation or market diversification). In addition, also address the specific problems associated with various markets. Therefore, given that, economic cycles in the European Union may be similar, these results would strengthen that market diversification may be positive in both terms, stabilizing demand and seasonality outcomes.
Last, the results show that the world is not uniform in terms of seasonality and principally affects to the Mediterranean area. Therefore, in this region combating seasonality would appear prominently in the tourism strategy.
