Abstract
Worldwide tourism revenues have tripled in the last decade. Yet, there is a gap in our understanding of how distances shape peoples’ travel choices. To understand global tourism patterns we map the flow of tourists around the world onto a complex network and study the impact of two types of distances, geographical and through the World Airline Network, a major infrastructure for tourism. We find that although the World Airline Network serves as infrastructural support for the International Tourism Network, the flow of tourism does not correlate strongly with the extent of flight connections available worldwide. Instead, unidirectional flows appear locally forming communities that shed light on global travelling behaviour since there is only a 15% probability of finding bidirectional tourism between a pair of countries. We find that most tourists travel to neighbouring countries and mainly cover larger distances when there is a direct flight, irrespective of the time it takes. This may be a consequence of one-way cyclic tourism that we uncover by analysing the triangles that are formed by the network of flows in the International Tourism Network.
Highlights
Human evolution has always been marked by mobility, starting with the first Homo erectus who began to disperse from Africa soon after their emergence in a journey for survival [1, 2]
We study the effect of distances on tourism and how perception changes from small to large distances
Our results show that even though outbound tourism is mostly directed towards closer destinations than farther ones, adding long flights to the underlying infrastructure network poses a significant advantage in shaping perceived distances of travellers
Summary
Human evolution has always been marked by mobility, starting with the first Homo erectus who began to disperse from Africa soon after their emergence in a journey for survival [1, 2]. Movement of peoples has laid the foundations for exploration and growth: settlements came up, villages became towns, and towns turned into cities [3]. Human travel is primarily about business and tourism and relies on transportation networks which are either local, regional or global. Tourism revenues have increased from US$495 billion in 2000 to US $1340 billion in 2017, while international tourist arrivals have grown from 674 to 1322 million in this period and are expected to reach 1.8 billion by the year 2030, according to industry projections [4]. While geographically expanding tourism trends indicate the growth of cultural exploration with time [5], there is a gap in our understanding of how demand for tourism and supply through infrastructure systems like the World Airline Network (WAN) codevelop.
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