Seasonality of tourism

Abstract

Seasonality is a central problem for the sustainability of tourism in mass destinations. Among the main challenges for academic research are aspects related to its measurement and decomposition. This article proposes a novel way to decompose seasonality by multiplicative factors. Specifically, as an illustrative example, we decompose the seasonal concentration of tourism revenues into three components: revenue per tourist per day, average length of stay and tourist numbers. In addition, the methodology has been applied to Spain as a whole, where the results obtained indicate the predominant and increasing weight of tourist numbers in the recently heightened seasonality. These results suggest some concerns about the seasonality pattern and its impacts.