GEOGRAPHICAL AND STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE GLOBAL TOURISM NETWORK DUE TO COVID-19

George Tsoulias () and Dimitrios Tsiotas
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George Tsoulias: Department of Regional and Economic Development, School of Applied Economics and Social Sciences, Agricultural University of Athens, Amfissa, Greece

Theoretical and Empirical Researches in Urban Management, 2024, vol. 19, issue 2, 28-54

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the tourism economy, causing a severe global shock and effects on tourism mobility unevenly geographically distributed across regions. This paper detects changes in the global tourism flows network (GTN) in the period 2018-2020 due to COVID-19 and explains the GTN dynamics from a network science perspective. The analysis reveals the effect of underlying economic geography, as the pandemic introduced a new social distancing friction that induced centrifugal forces to the tourism network. The network’s topological pattern was described by small-world network characteristics before the pandemic outbreak, while during the pandemic there was a statistically significant reshape into more lattice-like characteristics accompanied by peripheral markets expansion of local hierarchy. The findings also demonstrate a reduction in the number of tourism flows and spatial connectivity, a simplification of the macroeconomic travel behavior, and a resilient performance of the main tourism hubs shaping and a distinctive core-periphery network structure. Overall, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the response of tourism mobility to the pandemic.

Keywords: network analysis; tourism mobility; tourism flows; network structure; global tourism; tourism geography. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rom:terumm:v:19:y:2024:i:2:p:28-54

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