Complex and chaotic tourism systems: towards a quantitative approach

Abstract

Tourism systems have been considered more and more in the light of complexity and chaos theories. Most of the work done in this area has highlighted the reasons and the issues for this approach. A steadily growing strand of the recent literature uses it to overcome the problems of a reductionist and mechanicistic view considered unable to provide a full understanding of the structural and dynamic characteristics of tourism systems and specifically of tourism destinations. This paper continues this approach and provides a series of quantitative methods to assess the dynamics of nonlinear complex tourism systems. Design/methodology/Approach: The time series used in the paper contains data collected from a sample of 23 large (four star) hotels located in Milan, Italy. For each structure daily data of occupancy, average room rate and RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room) were recorded for the period 2006-2009. The daily distributions of these observations are highly skewed, therefore the median of the daily values were considered. This results in three series of 1461 points per type (occupancy, room rate and RevPAR). Findings: The data confirm the complex nature of the destination system and its tendency towards a chaotic state. Additionally, high stability and long memory effects are detected. The outcomes and the implications of this analysis are examined. Research implications: A comparison of the values obtained leads to the conclusion that the series under study has a detectable level of nonlinearity, even if it does not reach the pure chaoticity of the Lorenz attractor. A first conclusion is that, as qualitatively assessed in many similar studies, the tourism destination is a complex system with a tendency to become chaotic. Originality/value: The picture obtained with the analyses conducted can be summarized by saying that the system under study exhibits an unequivocal complex nature. It tends towards a chaotic stage but does so at a slow pace. The stability of the system is quite high: it might be able to resist well transient shocks, but once led into one direction, its long memory characteristics tend to keep it on the resulting path.

A Chaos Theory Perspective of Destination Crisis and Sustainable Tourism Development in Islands: The Case of Cyprus

“…'Bifurcation' is closely related to the 'edge of chaos' and refers to the situation where the system overwhelms a critical point of the space phase and moves in a new phase (Baggio and Sainaghi, 2011). Through bifurcation, the values of a system's parameters can experience significant unexpected change.…”

“…Hence, 'selforganisation' is the consequence of bifurcation where order re-emerges out of a random and chaotic phase (Sellnow et al, 2002). Baggio and Sainaghi (2011) argue that through 'selforganisation' the system becomes more 'suitable' to deal with external or internal obstacles because of more optimised available resources. Paraskevas (2006) adds that 'self-organisation' is actually the spontaneous reallocation of energy that occurs in response to the perceptions of each system's components (agents) rather than through some principal controlling mechanism.…”

Analysis of Balance Scorecards Model Performance and Perspective Strategy Synergized by SEM

“…Reference approach: (Baggio et al, 2011;Bhattacharya et al, 2014;Huang, 2009;Wu et al, 2009;Kaplan & Norton, 1992;Malina et al, 2001;Martinsons et al, 1999;Mehrdad et al, 2013;Tseng, 2010;Naranjo et al, 2009;Nikzadet et al, 2011;Ratnasingam, 2014;and Sabah et al, 2012).…”

“…This effective decision included combining four perspective steps of BSC that focused on a system with different behaviors. (Kaplan & Norton, 1996b) created the BSC method with the concept of causality so that researchers having BSC mindset can be synergized with SEM, using large enough data to support it (Baggio and Sainaghi, 2011). The previous research has suggested that customers and financial performance are causally related to each other (Nielsen, et al, 2012).…”

Standardization and classification of events in tourism based on a systems approach

“…Literature review reveals that system theory is applied to various elds of science: in cybernetics (Kljajić, 1994), mathematics, biology (Maturana and Varela, 1998) and also in tourism (Jere Lazanski, 2009); particularly in connection with tourism systems (Leiper, 1990;Baggio and Sainaghi, 2011;Baggio, 2013); tourist destination (Vodeb, 2010); a system of sustainable development (McDonald, 2009;Stubelj and Bohanec, 2010;Nguyen et al, 2011;Camus et al, 2012), as an approach to innovation (Mulej, 1994;Mulej and Ženko, 2002); or otherwise like a systemic perspective to the management ideas (Fatur and Likar, 2009;Ropret et al, 2014) and so on.…”