A new European regional tourism typology based on hotel location patterns and geographical criteria

Abstract

The development of tourism typologies allows the identification of various dimensions of this important sector and can be used in tourism planning and management. In this study we developed a novel and systematic classification of European Union (EU) regions according to the predominant location of hotels, distinguishing among four distinct geographical areas: coastal zones, mountain and natural areas, cities and rural areas. For this purpose, we use Geographical Information Systems to integrate regional boundaries and the geographical zoning with a detailed dataset of hotel location and capacity. We then classified the EU regions into five typologies with the assistance of a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Further exploration of the results shows very distinct tourism profiles across the identified typologies in terms of tourism intensity, seasonality and other traits.