No abstract

Seasonality in the tourism sector has been a major concern for policy makers, managers and other stakeholders. Many studies have analysed seasonality from the point of view of the number of visitors. However, there appear to be no studies focusing on seasonality in prices and on how to smooth out seasonal patterns. This paper analyses how hotel characteristics affect seasonality in prices using brochure data on 1,776 hotels in 32 sun-and-beach destinations in 11 countries. The authors find that, after controlling for destinationspecific variables that may cause variations in prices through demand shifts (such as climatic conditions, exchange rates or marketing expenditures), more hotel services and higher star ratings are associated with fewer seasonal variations in hotel prices.

It is usually argued that tourism exerts negative economic impacts in host jurisdictions through the increase in prices linked to increasing demand for basic services and goods from tourists. This paper surveys 149 products in 45 tourism and non-tourism jurisdictions in Catalonia (which represent a total of 18,500 prices) in order to test empirically several hypotheses related to differences in price levels in tourism and non-tourism jurisdictions. The main results show that prices in tourism jurisdictions are not significantly higher than those in non-tourism ones. The analysis suggests that tourists are likely to pay higher prices than natives for some products.