Opening of hotels and ski facilities: Impact on mobility, spending, and Covid‐19 outcomes

Abstract

This paper investigates how reopening hotels and ski facilities in Poland impacted tourism spending, mobility, and COVID-19 outcomes. We used administrative data from a government program that subsidizes travel to show that the policy increased the consumption of tourism services in ski resorts. By leveraging geolocation data from Facebook, we showed that ski resorts experienced a significant influx of tourists, increasing the number of local users by up to 50%. Furthermore, we confirmed an increase in the probability of meetings between pairs of users from distanced locations and users from tourist and non-tourist areas. As the policy impacted travel and gatherings, we then analyzed its effect on the diffusion of COVID-19. We found that counties with ski facilities experienced more infections after the reopening.Moreover, counties strongly connected to the ski resorts during the reopening had more subsequent cases than weakly connected counties.

Which social media platforms facilitate monitoring the opioid crisis?

“…However, it is important to note that these tags can be used for purposes other than reporting the exact location from where the post was made (56). Facebook additionally has a Data for Good program (57) which includes province-level GPS data from a subset of consenting users; researchers have leveraged this data to study phenomena related to the COVID-19 pandemic (58,59). State et al used provided user and company locations to track migration patterns using LinkedIn (60)].…”