Andras Donat Kovács (p), Jeno Zsolt Farkas

Sabine Sedlacek

COVID-19 pandemic dramatically hit the tourism sector and has brought about huge changes. This phenomenon opens up new opportunities in national parks. In this work, we examine domestic recreational opportunities, sectoral partnership and the paradigm shift of tourism in Hungarian national parks. Based on interviews, document review, and analysis of tourism-related data, our research proves that tourism could play an essential role in the environmental conscious social dimension, but this possibility has not yet been exploited. Our empirical results demonstrate that sectoral partnership is inadequate, and there is no effective policy coordination between spatial development, nature conservation and travel industry. There is a lack of multiday tourism programs, and the currently available tourism infrastructure is insufficient. Initiatives such as the national park product trademark exist but are not well managed, so they do not have a meaningful impact. The results point out that cross-sector collaboration must be strengthened after the epidemic to provide a basis for policy coordination and joint planning.

Maria Giovanna Brandano (p), Andrea Ascani, Alessandra Faggian

Andras Donat Kovács

The recent pandemic crisis caused by the diffusion of COVID-19 hit all economic sectors and in particular tourism. On one hand, there is large consensus about the fact that this is among the hardest hit sectors; on the other hand, the resilience of international tourism and the capacity of tourism to rebound from crisis has also recognized. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on tourism flows in Italy, by looking in particular at regional monthly data on both national and international tourism demand. Second, to understand if and to what extent some destinations took advantage of this crisis. Preliminary results suggest that the domestic component of the demand first positively reacted to the shock during the month of August. Moreover, tourists’ behaviors start to change, and future scenarios could see more flows in mountain destinations, art and cultural villages in inner areas, rather than in sea-side destinations and big cities.

Gioele Figus (p), Grant Allan, Kein Connolly, Aditya Mauriya

Maria Giovanna Brandano

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to unprecedented disruption for the tourism industry. Economic consequences are not confined to the tourism-facing sectors, as changes in tourism spending propagate through the whole economy. However, the scale of the system-wide consequences of reduced tourism spending can be hard to quantify. Although the Scottish economy was severely impacted by the reduction in tourism activities during the pandemic, especially in the early stages, a number of behavioural and policy responses have contributed to limit what could have been otherwise a disaster. In this paper, we calculate the direct reductions in spending across different tourism categories in Scotland including domestic, inbound and international tourism during 2021 using detailed information about tourism spending by origin, including domestic and international, type, day trips and over-night, month and local area of destination. We then use a combination of input-output (IO) and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models to quantify their system-wide economic impacts. We measure impacts related to both inherent resilience, that is the ability of a system to respond to economic shocks under normal circumstances, and adaptive resilience, that is the ability of an economic system to put in place responses that require extra effort. These can be either behavioural, such as changes in spending preferences, or policy driven such as the job retention scheme policy that protected the income of workers in at risk-categories. By comparing results from a series of scenarios we illustrate how different types of resilience have incrementally contributed to mitigate the economic impact of changes in tourism demand due to COVID-19 in Scotland and discuss policy implications of different recovery strategies.

Sabine Sedlacek (p), Christian Weismayer, Daniel Dan, Bernd Schuh

Gioele Figus

The phenomenon of overtourism has gained interest in the research community, however, without clarifying the perspective of the involved stakeholders in more detail. Regions being exposed to environmental and socioeconomic degradation that originates from tourism, host a broad variety of institutional stakeholders. Not all of the stakeholder groups are involved in tourism but they are either positively or negatively affected by tourism activities. AAs such, they have an interest in providing a more sustainable tourism development which would be more compatible with the overall socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Therefore, the question of initiating effective collaborative processes comes into discussion where all relevant institutional stakeholders need to be included and activated in order to initiate regional sustainability processes which would lead to a better compatibility of tourism activities in the regional environment. Due to complex institutional dynamics, collaboration is often less efficient and effective than postulated.
The paper presents empirical evidence from six selected regions in Slovenia, Italy and Ireland where a participatory process-oriented framework was applied, and experts and stakeholders cooperatively analyze the development of specific tourism destination. The applied methodology follows a step-by-step approach for assessing the destination’s carrying capacity and it takes into account tourism intensity and concentration in territorial terms, across time, and through highly heterogeneous destinations. Accordingly, it analyzes tourism flows into (international) and within (domestic) destinations and identifies the consequences in terms of causal loops that indicate user conflicts and the opportunity costs connected to them in economic, social, and environmental terms (regional sustainability).
Especially now, during the current times of discontinuity, lessons learned from the past plus forecasts help decision makers to rethink their systemic structure and integrate these findings into a prospective path of sustainable value creation from a holistic point of view. The methodology is based on a transdisciplinary approach where researchers from various disciplines work closely together with regional stakeholders. An interactive visualization tool offers insights into the development of single destinations, as well as comparative destinations. This allows benchmarking creation based on statistical indicators which are published by official institutions to grasp and interlink the territorial context with the inflow of tourists. This process further includes the analysis of touristic hotspots processing social media data (i.e. Instagram and Twitter),other big data sources (i.e. OpenStreetMap and GoogleTrends), and the identification of interdependencies with the socioeconomic and environmental systems.