Seasonal concentration of tourism on the Andalusian coastline

Abstract

The entire Andalusian coastline must deal with the effects of seasonality. Both local and regional administrations as well as tourism business owners are currently confronting this problem by implementing remedial measures to reduce seasonal concentration with the relentless pursuit of new formulas for product diversification. This can be corroborated by the recent observed coordination between the public administration and the private sector to address this problem. Yet, for coordination to work efficiently, it needs to have both the knowledge as well as the right tools to measure seasonality. The methodology used in this work is proposed as a control and monitoring measure which tourism managers may use in destinations with a high seasonal concentration. Specifically, it has been applied in the Andalusian coastline, characterised by its high seasonality in the summer months, with the main purpose of quantitatively checking whether certain tourist segments can help reduce tourism seasonality. The additive decomposition of the Gini index provides information about the contribution of each tourist segment to the total seasonal concentration. Furthermore, by obtaining the measures of the relative marginal effects (RME) it is possible to identify to what extent a particular tourist segment can contribute in the reduction of seasonal concentration on the Andalusian coastline. The results of this work can contribute to a deeper understanding of seasonality on the Andalusian coastline. It will also provide tourism managers with additional information about what type of tourists they should direct their catchment policies, as long as their purpose is to reduce the seasonality in a tourist destination.