Testing convergence of tourism markets: evidence from seasonal unit roots test

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the convergence hypothesis of tourism markets in seasonal unit roots framework by taking account of seasonal behaviours of tourist arrivals’ differential series. We use the seasonal unit roots test for monthly data and we handle the case of Turkey’s 20 major markets for the examination of the validity of tourism convergence hypothesis. The data belong to the seasonally unadjusted tourist arrivals’ differential series and cover the period from January 1996 to December 2014. Tourism markets are found to be converging in the long run and in the months of January, March, April, May, July, September, and October. On the other hand, the present tourism market strategies for encouraging visitor arrivals are not so effective in the months of February, June, August, and November. So, the current marketing policies should be rehandled and strategies such as cheaper holiday packages should be revised to increase the number of convergent tourism markets for these months. These results should be taken into consideration by policy makers in planning the tourism market strategies to provide for a sustained growth in tourism industry because the tourism industry is one of the prominent catalysts for economic growth in developing countries.