World Heritage Site inscription and city tourism attractiveness on national holidays: new evidence with migration big data from China

Yanyan Gao, Mengyun Fang, Yongqing Nan and Wei Su

Current Issues in Tourism, 2023, vol. 26, issue 12, 1956-1973

Abstract: World Heritage Site (WHS) inscription has been considered as a certification of tourism quality since it is designated to properties with outstanding universal value. While it is hypothesised that the title can raise tourism attractiveness through signalling tourism quality, empirical evidence remains highly mixed. This paper tries to identify the causal effect by using unique daily city-pair tourist flow intensities from Tencent migration big data on two Chinese national holidays between 2015 and 2019 and constructing multi-dimensional fixed effects panel data models. We find that the WHS inscription does raise city tourism attractiveness. One WHS increases tourist inflow intensity by at least 6.7% up to around 10%. The tourism-enhancing effect is consistent under many robustness checks and displays some notable heterogeneity effects in terms of holiday types, days within each holiday and high-speed rail connections. These results suggest that WHS inscription could be a valid tourism quality signal used by tourism administrations to enhance city tourism attractiveness.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/13683500.2022.2073203

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