Weather myths: how attractive is good weather really for same-day visits to outdoor recreation destinations?

Abstract

ABSTRACT From a short-term (e.g. daily) perspective, visitor numbers to an outdoor recreation destination are strongly influenced by good or bad weather conditions. However, to date, a large body of literature has focused on tourists’ responses to climate change or weather conditions over a longer temporal scale, such as a year. Using data for Mount Rigi, a Swiss outdoor recreation destination, we specify a regression model to explain the variation in daily visitor numbers. Our findings confirm the strong weather and seasonal sensitivity that are often found in previous studies. However, we also found that the effect of the weather on daily visitors is not homogeneous but decreases with the number of previous sunny days within a given tourist season. Our finding is that, contrary to popular belief, the impact of weather on tourist service providers and destinations is less pronounced when viewed seasonally. We provide some possible explanations for these observations based on the destination’s characteristics, its visitor segment(s) and the theory of planned behaviour in tourism.