Assessing Seasonality

Every city in Europe experiences a certain degree of demand seasonality, an undesirable aspect of tourism, which prevents a destination from the optimal use of its facilities and resources. Empty hotels during the off-peak season are only the most evident effect: seasonality impacts on all aspects of supply-side behaviour in tourism, including marketing, pricing, cash-flow, labour market and attraction of investment capital. A set of actions that smoothen out the demand pattern, ranging from the set up of the event calendar to differentiating the market mix, can be put into action by tourism managers. Evidently, these interventions require a deep insight into the phenomenon - to recognize suitable and efficient actions and to correctly prioritize them within the overall tourism policy.

Fig. 1 –Assessing seasonality in TourMIS.

In its aim of supporting the decision-making and planning process of tourism managers, TourMIS provides a tool to perform analyses of seasonality. The function is available at the www.tourmis.info web site and can be reached by clicking on the “Nights & arrivals” link in the “City tourism in Europe” menu and selecting the “monthly data”. A click on the “Assessing seasonality” link gives access to the drop down menu where the destination of interest can be selected; next, the type of time series (arrivals or overnights), the source market and the year of reference can further be specified. This option is important to obtain target oriented results. Investigating the aggregate flow of visitors to a destination over one year is more appropriate if we want to make a suggestion for inclusion of events in the calendar, while an analysis of the overnight distribution for a specific market is more meaningful if a decision about a marketing campaign must be made.

The outcome of the query is presented in a tabular form (see fig. 1) where both the figures (absolute and relative value) and the seasonal indicator (the “Gini coefficient”) for the specified destination are visualized next to the figures recorded by all the other European cities . The Gini coefficient promptly reveals to which extent the destination is affected by seasonality (amplitude of seasonality). A value approaching 0 corresponds to a fairly distributed series, and a value approaching 1 relates to a highly concentrated distribution. As illustrated in figure 2, Zurich’s low value of the Gini coefficient (0.087) reflects an almost equally distributed series of arrivals. Accordingly, Dubrovnik’s high value (0.511) mirrors a demand concentrated in a few months.

The table above simplifies the comparison with other European cities. The left column returns the value of the Gini coefficient (amplitude of seasonality) in ascending order. The right column ranks cities according to the similarity with the evaluation for the specified destination. In the example, Barcelona is assessed as a low seasonality destination (3rd in the right column), while Amsterdam, Hamburg and Berlin can be identified as the cities recording the closest values.

Fig. 2 – Arrivals distribution and value of the Gini coefficient for Zurich and Dubrovnik (left) in comparison to extreme cases of arrivals distribution (right) for values of the Gini coefficient equals to 0 and 1.

To conclude, this synthetic seasonal indicator allows performing a number of worthwhile analyses, such as

• the assessment of seasonality amplitude of the demand for a destination,
• the assessment of seasonality amplitude of the demand for a destination from specific geographical markets,
• monitoring the course of seasonality amplitude over time, and
• benchmarking the seasonality amplitude with other cities in Europe.

The new TourMIS feature encourages managers to perform longitudinal and cross-destination analysis of seasonality, whose time horizon goes beyond the beginning of the next season.

Contact
Valeria Croce (MA), MODUL University Vienna
Department of Tourism and Hospitality Management
Am Kahlenberg 1, 1190 Wien, Austria
valeria.croce@modul.ac.at | www.modul.ac.at/croce