This study evaluates the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourists’ length of stay and daily expenditures at a destination. The paper compares detailed microdata for visitors to a Northern Spanish region in the summer periods of 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2020 (after the pandemic outbreak). We estimate the pandemic-induced impacts on the length of stay and expenditures per person for several categories using regression adjustment, inverse probability weighting regression and propensity score matching. We find clear evidence of a drop in the length of stay of around 1.26 nights, representing a 23.8% decline. We also show that, although total expenditures per person and day have remained constant, there has been a change in the allocations for categories in the tourism budget.

Information and communication technologies play a critical role in tourism, providing benefits such as improvement in tourism experiences, co-creation of value, and promotion of the marketing of relationships and phygital experiences, where online and offline environments are combined. In recent years, tourism planning and management through smart destinations has aroused great academic interest by including the dimensions of governance, sustainability, accessibility, innovation, and technology. This work aims to analyse and to visualize the scientific production associated with technology in the context of smart destinations. For this, evaluative and relational bibliometric analysis techniques were applied to the bibliographic data of 395 articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science up to September 2021. The results indicate that there is considerable growth and that a number of authors, countries, and leading institutions contribute significantly to scientific knowledge. In addition, using two bibliometric software tools, VOSviewer and SciMAT, a co-citation network of authors was built to describe their intellectual structure, and a keyword co-occurrence analysis was performed to identify the main thematic areas. The motor themes that drive the research are the conceptualization of tourist destinations, innovation, and data, while experience is a crosscutting theme. Additionally, some limitations and applications of the research are discussed, as well as the practical implications for destination management.

Short-term residential vacation rentals (RVRs) have increased their popularity in recent years. Local governments have introduced different regulatory changes to control their supply growth. This paper evaluates a policy intervention in a Northern Spanish destination that has reduced the bureaucratic procedures to officially open a RVR since 2016. We compare the evolution of accommodation growth of RVRs with that of tourist apartments exploiting a panel data set of 78 municipalities between 2013 and 2019. Using difference-in-differences, we provide evidence that the easing of the administrative procedures increased the number of establishments and bed places in RVRs by 5 and 26 units, on average, per municipality.

The health risks associated with COVID-19 have increased tourists’ safety concerns when traveling. We analyze the linkages between tourists’ length of stay and their perceptions about health security in different public venues at the destination: the street, bars and cafes, restaurants, the chosen accommodation, the beach, and shops and stores. We use survey data collected from tourists to a nature-based region (Asturias) in Northern Spain in the summer of 2020 as our case study. Based on separate linear regressions, we examine how health security perceptions vary with the length of the stay across different public venues. In doing so, we control for a wide set of sociodemographic and trip-related characteristics. We find evidence of a consistent non-linear negative relationship between the length of the stay and the perceived health security in these public venues. We also document that hotel guests have lower health security perceptions, both at the hotels themselves and other public venues. This is the first work that explores how health security perceptions in different public domains deteriorate with the tourists’ length of stay.

El gran interés académico que ha despertado el paradigma smart ha hecho que la producción científica asociada a los destinos turísticos inteligentes se haya incrementado notablemente en los últimos años. El objetivo de este trabajo es estudiar su desarrollo y estructura mediante técnicas de análisis bibliométrico poniendo el foco en el destino, frente a investigaciones previas de corte más generalista. Este estudio se basa en 415 documentos indexados en Scopus hasta septiembre de 2020. En él, se analiza la evolución y la distribución geográfica del conocimiento sobre destinos inteligentes, además de las publicaciones, autores y documentos más influyentes. En concreto, se describe la estructura intelectual de esta literatura mediante una red de co-citación de autores construida con VOSviewer. Además, se ha realizado un análisis de co-ocurrencia de palabras clave para identificar los principales temas y tendencias, así como la existencia de brechas de conocimiento. Los mapas bibliométricos facilitan el análisis de la complejidad de la literatura sobre destinos inteligentes, ya que permiten visualizar las interrelaciones entre sus diversos elementos. Los resultados también apuntan los temas de interés más recientes y que merecen atención de cara a futuras investigaciones.