Daniel Miravet Arnau (p), Isabel Paulino Valldepérez, Aaron Gutiérrez Palomero

Alexandra Cehan

Tourists’ mobility in space and time is influenced by multiple factors linked to destination characteristics, tourist socioeconomic and psychographic profile and organisation of the trip. The availability of time is considered from the classical to the contemporary authors as one of the most valuable resources that influence the movements and visits of tourists during their stay in urban destinations. Thus, before deciding to go to a location, and in face of multiple alternatives, tourists tend to decide how they will distribute their time budget by ranking the destination's attractions. The present contribution aims to appraise the influence of the length of stay on tourists’ decisions of what to visit, the degree of intensity of the visits throughout a day, as well as their spatial dispersion or concentration throughout the urban environment.
The present contribution aims to appraise the influence of the length of stay on tourists’ decisions of what to visit, the degree of intensity of the visits throughout a day, as well as their spatial dispersion or concentration throughout the urban environment. With this aim, data has been collected by means of a survey conducted during the summer of 2022 to tourists staying overnight in the city of Barcelona (N=1,947). The questionnaire was designed following the structure of a mobility survey, and therefore, tourists were asked about the visited places and attractions during the present and the prior day to the survey.
As a result, it is possible to analyse not only the importance of the length of stay but also to assess the choice of visits to attractions depending on the number of days that the tourist had already spent in the city. A first descriptive analysis by means of GIS techniques, as well as the subsequent use of discrete choice regression models unveil distinct patterns related to the most preferred places to visit within the city, the concentration of these visits with regard to time and space, and the degree of sensitivity of these decisions to the length of stay. The results of this paper provide valuable information for urban destination managers to design adequate policies at the local level that favour a balanced distribution of tourists and income throughout the city, to mitigate the negative impacts on residents’ daily lives and to favour a more equitable distribution of incomes.

Fahimeh Tavafi (p)

Daniel Miravet Arnau

How do independent cruise passengers move around the city? Evidence from a survey and a tracking experiment in Barcelona

Cruise ships can bring thousands of passengers to a city at once, and their movement patterns can impact local mobility dynamics. Understanding the mobility of cruise passengers is crucial for city planners in tourism cities in order to promote sustainable mobility and to guarantee the well-being of the host community. Currently there is a heating debate about the cost and benefit of cruise tourism, our study aims to understand how independent cruise passengers (i.e., those who visited the city on their own) move in time and space, what modes of transport they use, and how such mobility patterns vary according to their socioeconomic profile and visit characteristics. We focus on the city of Barcelona, considering it is one of the main destinations of cruise ships in Europe. To analyze mobility patterns of independent cruise passengers, we use a survey conducted after the visit to the city, and we complement these data with a GPS-based tracking experiment. Between July and October 2022, we collected 891 complete surveys, and we had GPS data for 792 participants. Based on initial findings from GPSes data, there is a very dense concentration of cruise passengers in La Rambla and around Sagrada Familia and nearly one third of visitors used hop on hop off buses for sightseeing. With preliminary analysis of questionnaires data it appears that independent cruise passengers mostly travel as families, including couples, and they first rely on public transportation to access the city. Most visitors spend between 4 to 6 hours exploring the city, and while they generally do not have specific plans for their visit, they tend to concentrate their time on 2-3 main tourist attractions. Walking is the preferred mode of transportation for city exploration. Among motorized means of transportation, subways seem to be the preferred option, especially to reach tourist points of interest that are farther from the port. With this study we aim to contribute to the understanding of the movement patterns and spatial utilization of this type of visitors, to inform future studies as well as local authorities. Additionally, this knowledge can assist in planning for the economic benefit of both local businesses and the government while guaranteeing local residents’ wellbeing.

Keywords: Tourism, mobility, cruise, walking, ....

Authors and affiliations

Fahimeh Tavafi
Xavier Delclòs-Alió
Aaron Gutiérrez

Alexandra Cehan (p), Bogdan-Constantin Ibanescu, Corneliu Iatu, Mihail Eva

Josep Ivars Baidal

During the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has determined a shift in strategic priorities in tourism, since this unprecedented context called for a brand-new assessment of destinations’ resilience and for a detailed comprehension of the manner in which stakeholders and governments responded to the disruptions. While the hardest stages of the pandemic are now, presumably, in the past, the interest for the long-term effects that COVID-19 had on the tourism sector is still substantial. This interest comes from the fact that it is necessary to explore and understand which measures were efficient and which ones were powerless during the pandemic, in order to help improve stakeholders’ strategies for potential future crises.
In this context, the current study proposed an approach centred on tourism stakeholders’ perspective on the pandemic. The main purpose was to analyse tourism stakeholders’ own responsive strategies, as well as their perception of the governments’ interventions. As such, the study is built around three main research questions: (1) Which were the tourism stakeholders’ crisis responses in various stages of the pandemic? (2) To what extent were the adopted strategies designed for long-term development? (3) How do stakeholders appreciate the utility and efficiency of government’s policies at local, regional and national level? In order to answer the above-mentioned questions, the study applied a structured questionnaire to key tourism stakeholders covering various sub-fields of the sector from all regions of Romania.
Further, the analysis relied on over 500 responses, combining descriptive statistics with more complex quantitative analysis. In order to identify the homogenous groups of stakeholders within our sample, we conducted a cluster (segmentation) analysis. Given the nature and size of the database, the hierarchical cluster method was considered the most appropriate, as it can handle ordinal and scale data. Besides being a powerful technique in the field of data analysis and machine learning, this method presents the advantages of providing data visualisation, scalability, flexibility and, most important, detailed comparison of subgroups.
The results revealed the existence of four distinct classes of stakeholders in terms of crisis management responses and impact of the shock, each class displaying specific behaviours during the pandemic. Moreover, while not part of the variables included in the hierarchical cluster analysis, the respondents within the same cluster displayed high similarities in terms of geographical features, which leads to the conclusion that tourism-related crisis management has an important spatial-dependent component which requires further analysis.

Josep Ivars Baidal (p), Ana Casado Díaz, Ana Pastor Alcaraz

Fahimeh Tavafi

This contribution focuses on the analysis of the smart tourism ecosystem concept as a governance model for tourist cities. At the theoretical level, the evolution from business to smart tourism ecosystems is studied in order to propose a smart tourism city ecosystem model from a governance perspective. The theoretical model is based on the factors that define tourism governance, smart city development and smart initiatives in a concrete urban environment. The STCE is formulated as a dynamic outcome of the urban and tourism governance within the city from the smart perspective.
The model is tested in the city of Barcelona through a content analysis of tourism and smart city plans, programs and initiatives on a local scale, together with a series of in-depth interviews with public and private stakeholders. This dual methodological approach allows, on the one hand, to characterize the Barcelona smart ecosystem and, on the other hand, to contrast the perceptions of its main stakeholders. Elements to be tested include shared goals, stakeholders map, public value creation, innovation capacity, knowledge sharing and enabling technologies.
The results reveal to what extent the smart ecosystem can favor a new tourism governance or, on the contrary, lacks the elements of cohesion and shared goals that make the practical application of this theoretical construct so difficult.