Modeling the International Tourism Demand as a Complex Network: The Case of the Global Inbound Tourism Market

Abstract

Tourism is a complex socioeconomic phenomenon that has been diachronically studied through the prism of different disciplines and by using diverse methods and models. Despite its composite nature, tourism has not adequately been examined by researchers from the disciplines studying complexity, such as physics, mathematics, complexity theory, and the modern network science. This paper innovates to be amongst a couple of works that describe the system of the international tourism demand using the network paradigm and modeling it as a complex network (the GITN) in order to provide insights about the network structure and functionality in terms of the interactions existing between its source and destination markets. The analysis is applied using measures and methods of complex network analysis (CNA) and the results are compared with a previous work studying three versions based on different top-market configuration per country of the GITN, where differences are recorded. Overall, the analysis illustrates the existence of hierarchies and of spatial constraints in the structure of GITN and it provides some interesting insights to the governments and to tourism policy makers about the global dynamics of the tourism phenomenon.