Tourist arrivals and Covid-19: the case of Spain

Abstract

[eng] The recent impact of the Covid-pandemic outbreak on the world’s tourism industry repeatedly put into highlight the importance of tourism research, to obtain new knowledge and to get better understanding of the tourism’s flows, their nature, fluctuations, and volatility. In the literature many research paper studying trends and cycles in tourism demand, by using univariate time-series decomposition techniques. In the other hand only a few studies using multivariate frameworks. This study aimed to obtain better insight of inbound tourism flows from the main origin markets and examine their possible common trends to one main destination: Spain. Spain’s inbound tourism flows have been analysed by using a multivariate time-series trend-decomposition approach to find evidence for common trends between the demand of Spain originating in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Northern Countries, Italy, and Netherland. Alongside analysing the tourist arrivals and their short and long-term trends, evidence is found of strong long-term co-movement amongst the main origin markets.