A Study of Different Types of Air Pollutants on the Efficiency of China's Hotel Industry.

Xiaoying Guo,Wei Wei,Lei-Ya Wang,Yang Li

doi:10.3390/ijerph16224319

Abstract

This study focuses on visible and invisible air pollutants and their impacts on China’s hotel industry. Overall, visible air pollutants may block the sights and sceneries and worsen the quality of visitors’ sensory experiences, and invisible air pollutants are unlikely to result in the same perceptions and sensations. Hence, different types of air pollutants may have various impacts on the hotel industry’s operational performance. We employed a bootstrapped truncated regression model to investigate whether different types of air pollutants had distinctive impacts on the hotel industry. The dataset consisted of 31 provinces of China for the period 2012–2015. Empirical results indicate that visible air pollutants significantly decrease the operational efficiency of China’s hotel industry, while invisible air pollutants insignificantly affect the hotel industry.

Highlights

Air quality can influence the process of making travel decisions as well as shape the competitiveness of tourist destinations [1,2]
Is technically efficient under variable returns to scale (VRS), one can increase its productivity by improving the operating scale along the VRS frontier
As a continued decline in international travelers to China is possible if no efforts are taken to deal with the issue of its air pollution, it is becoming more vital for the tourism sector to take actions against air pollution

Summary

Introduction

Air quality can influence the process of making travel decisions as well as shape the competitiveness of tourist destinations [1,2]. Air pollution can be generally divided into two types: visible and invisible. Visible air pollutants, such as dust, obviously impacts the quality of tourism by blocking the view of sceneries and worsening the sensory experience, while invisible air pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, are unlikely to create such perceptions and sensations. There is no literature distinguishing the impacts between visible and invisible air pollutants on tourism. The objective of this study is to investigate whether different types of air pollutants have distinctive impacts on the performance of the hotel industry, helping to fill the gap in understanding the effects of environment quality on tourism

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion