Statistical Effect of Temperature on Tourism Seasonality in Romania.

Abstract

Climate change is a reality which is observed not only by scientists but also by the population. In our study, we want to make a preliminary research on whether this change is reflected on tourism seasonality in Romania. Therefore, we took tourist flow and temperature data for the 35 most important touristic locations and calculated a seasonality indicator which afterward was correlated with different summarized values derived from temperature data at monthly scale. We observed that seasonality is highly related to temperature values, especially to the average of daily mean values and often this correlation value exceeds 0.8 (threshold value is 0.195). The high correlation values don't follow any pattern in spatial distribution. We identified that the top three places where the temperature has an increasing correlation with seasonality in the past years is Târgu-Mureș, Cluj-Napoca and Râmnicu Vâlcea. Although temperature is not the only factor influencing seasonality it seems to be a highly important one, as only for three places the Pearson correlation coefficient stands below 0.5.