Tourist Intensity in the World, 1995–2015: Two Measurement Proposals

Carles Manera,Elisabeth Valle

doi:10.3390/su10124546

Abstract

The work emphasizes the importance of measuring the tourist intensity of the economies that are oriented to tourism activity, with the aim of avoiding subjective arguments and being more related to perception than with the empirical contrast of the data. A tourist intensity index is proposed, which is made up of four essential variables: GDP, tourist spending, population, and the number of tourists. However, at the same time, it is complemented by a measure of tourist density, which helps to better understand the proposed index. This allows for the classification of countries according to the resulting index, and to calibrate their position in the set of tourist economies. This can be very useful for the application of economic policies aimed at correcting externalities that are generated in the advanced development of mass tourism.

Highlights

A concept that has been disseminated insistently in recent times is that of saturation and/or intensity in the leading mass tourism economies, after the great boom in tourism economy as of 1950 [1]
The Tourism Intensity Index (TII) adopts demographic and economic variables obtained from the World Tourism Organisation (WTO) for all countries
The main aim of this research was to design an index to calculate tourism intensity, a key concept for any tourism destination, as it can affect the wellbeing of both residents and the tourists themselves

Summary

Introduction

A concept that has been disseminated insistently in recent times is that of saturation and/or intensity in the leading mass tourism economies, after the great boom in tourism economy as of 1950 [1]. Despite the importance of tourism on an international scale, there is no single consensus regarding how to measure tourism intensity. This is understood, by some authors, as the number of overnight stays per resident [2,3,4]; while others adduce the number of tourist arrivals and overnight stays [5,6]. In both cases, the models are basically related to the life cycle of the tourism product [7], in its different stages of development. The definition of tourism intensity is different: it may be the relationships of tourists with respect to the permanent population; or the number of annual tourists divided by the km of territory; sometimes, it is even calculated as overnight stays per 1000 inhabitants, or number of arrivals per 100 inhabitants [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]

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