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Climate change and summer mass tourism: the case of Spanish domestic tourism

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Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of climate change on destination choice decisions in a context of domestic coastal tourism in Spain. Destinations are characterized in terms of travel cost and coastal ‘attractors’, such as temperature and beach-related attributes. By means of a discrete choice model based on the random utility theory, these variables are used to explain the observed pattern of interprovincial domestic trips, showing trade-offs between temperature and attractiveness in the probability of a particular destination being chosen. The model is used to investigate the impact of two climate change scenarios on the allocation of domestic tourism within Spain. The findings show that while Spain’s northern colder provinces would benefit from rising temperatures, provinces in the south would experience a decrease in the frequency of trips.

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Notes

  1. Full survey results can be downloaded at http://www.iet.tourspain.es/es-ES/estadisticas/familitur/informesdinamicos/paginas/anual.aspx (accessed on December 5th 2011)

  2. The characteristics (e.g. length, costs, means of transport, accommodation, etc.) of trips taken to local destinations (in the same province) tend to be different from the characteristics of interprovincial trips (and also from international trips). For this reason, it is quite common to consider that local and interprovincial destinations show different levels of substitution and, hence, cannot be mixed in the same choice-set. Consequently, all trips taken to the same province were excluded from the dataset to guarantee a plausible choice set composed by real substitute interprovincial alternatives shared by all individuals.

  3. This data can be downloaded at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/. Accessed on December 5th 2011.

  4. The correlation matrix including all explanatory variables is available from the authors upon request.

  5. The use of micro data can lead to serious heteroskedasticity problems in models explaining tourism expenditure or the number of tourism trips taken by households. However, the potential for heteroskedasticity in the context of discrete choice models is low. Additionally, following Munizaga et al. (2000), the models of the logit family (as the one used in the application) are able to recover accurately all parameters of the utility function even when heteroskedasticity is present.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support from the “Challenging climate change effects on tourism demand. Empirical evidence and adaptation measures” (ECO2010-22143) project funded by the CICYT Program (Spanish Government) is gratefully acknowledged. Additionally, data provided by Álvaro Moreno (Universiteit Maastricht) on future climate scenarios is also acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre de Recerca Econòmica, Universitat de les Illes Balears, Carretera Valldemossa km. 7.5, 07122, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

    Angel Bujosa & Jaume Rosselló

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  1. Angel Bujosa
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  2. Jaume Rosselló
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Correspondence to Angel Bujosa.

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Bujosa, A., Rosselló, J. Climate change and summer mass tourism: the case of Spanish domestic tourism. Climatic Change 117, 363–375 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-012-0554-x

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