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Recent trends in international tourist climate preferences: a revised picture for climatic change scenarios

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Abstract

This paper investigates how the role of climate in tourist destination choice has changed over the last 15 years. To this end, a demand model for international tourism is estimated, including the main classic determinants but allowing a time-varying climatic sensitivity of tourists. Moreover, a complete database considering international tourism movement between 178 countries for the period 1995 to 2010 is used. Results show how turning point temperatures in origin and destination countries have changed over the period of analysis, evidencing a loss of competitiveness for traditional warm destinations. Additionally, using data for the projected growth of Gross Domestic Product per capita and climatic conditions within A2, B1 and B2 scenarios, an updated vision of their expected impact on international tourism flows is assessed, evaluating how climate change would imply a greater loss of attractiveness for traditional warm destinations around the world but would increase attractiveness for high latitude countries.

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Notes

  1. See Gössling and Hall (2006) and the reply by Bigano et al. (2006a) for a more detailed discussion. Furthermore, Scott et al. (2012) present a more detailed discussion regarding the suitability of aggregated models for the evaluation of climate change impacts on tourism demand.

  2. Cloud coverage was initially considered, but it turned out to be non-significant when temperature and precipitation were considered, so it was dropped from the final model

  3. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/cty/scen/TYN_CY_3_0_var-table.htm(accessed 20 October 2012)

  4. It is true that it seems to be implausible for tourists from origin countries with a large coastline to travel more; however as expected, the impact of the magnitude of the coastline in the destination country is larger than the magnitude in the origin one. Moreover, this result indicates that a large coastline per se does not imply more tourism, but rather that good weather is also required. Hence, warm countries with long coastlines are the most preferred tourist destinations.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Richard S.J. Tol (Sussex University, UK) for helpful comments, and suggestions about data sources provided by Fabio Eboli (Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, Italy). Financial support from the CICYT Program (Spanish Government) through grants ECO2010-22143 and ECO2011-23189, and the VI Framework Program through the CIRCE project (003933-2) is gratefully acknowledged. Finally, we want to thank UN-WTO for kindly providing us with tourism data.

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  1. Departament d’Economia Aplicada, Carretera Valldemossa km. 7.5, 07122, Palma de Mallorca, Spain

    Jaume Rosselló & Maria Santana-Gallego

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  1. Jaume Rosselló
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  2. Maria Santana-Gallego
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Correspondence to Jaume Rosselló.

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Rosselló, J., Santana-Gallego, M. Recent trends in international tourist climate preferences: a revised picture for climatic change scenarios. Climatic Change 124, 119–132 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1086-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-014-1086-3

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