Impacts of short-term climate variability in the UK on demand for domestic and international tourism

Abstract

The sensitivity of UK tourism to climate variability (on intra-and inter-annual scales) was investigated using empirical statistical models. A set of climate indices (mean monthly and annual temperature, rainfall and sunshine) describes present day variability in climate, while tourism demand is described by a dataset comprising domestic (monthly numbers of tourist nights) and international (annual numbers of trips abroad) tourist flows. An understanding of climate sensitivity based on real data then provided a basis for the examination of potential effects of climate change on the economically important tourism sector. Outbound flows of tourists are more responsive to climate variability of the preceding year, whereas domestic tourism is more responsive to variability within the year of travel. For outward tourism, wetter-and duller-than-average conditions in the year previous to travel seem to encourage more trips abroad. Drier-and warmer-than-average conditions increase same-month domestic trips, but a change in the direction of the association in subsequent months is indicative of inelasticity in the system. The anomalously warm year of 1995 in the UK was used to represent the potential impact of climate change. The results suggest that the generally warmer and drier conditions of 1995 benefited the UK domestic tourist industry by an estimated £ 309 million, relative to mean climate. KEY WORDS: Tourism · Climate impacts · Regression analysisResale or republication not permitted without written consent of the publisher

Summer weather conditions and tourism flows in urban and rural destinations

“…Another common finding is that the impact of weather on summer tourism is likely to be different for domestic and foreign residents. While overnight stays of domestic tourists are likely to increase due to favorable weather conditions in the same season, overnight stays of foreign tourists are likely to be affected by weather conditions after a lag of up to one year or seasons (Smith, 1990;Giles & Perry, 1998;Agnew & Palutikof, 2006). In addition, domestic tourists are generally more sensitive to changes in weather conditions than foreign tourists (Falk, 2013).…”

Impacts of snow conditions on tourism demand in Austrian ski areas

“…In principal, our ski area specific model has the same form as the models used in Bigano et al (2005) and Agnew & Palutikof (2006), except that we worked on the local rather than on the national or provincial scale. Instead of putting the highly collinear weather indices into a single model, we used only one index at a time and repeated calculations for all indices.…”

“…Agnew & Palutikof (2006) applied time series regression models to look into the impacts of temperature, precipitation and sunshine in the UK on the demand for international and domestic tourism. Bigano et al (2005) used a similar approach for tourism demand in Italian regions, and expanded the regression models by using panel estimations.…”

Statistical relationships between the North Atlantic Oscillation and international tourism demand in the Balearic Islands, Spain

“…However, relatively little systematic research has been carried out on this topic because climate and weather are usually seen to be constant or as random factors out of the control of researchers and managers (Berrittella et al 2006). Relatively recently, a number of studies have analyzed the impact of climate and weather variables on tourism (Agnew & Viner 2001, Maddison 2001, Agnew & Palutikof 2006, Parrilla et al 2007. The most widely used variables were temperature, rainfall, wet days, cloud cover, humidity, sunshine, and wind speed.…”