Monitoring tourism flows and destination management: empirical evidence for Portugal

We propose the use of a tool recently introduced by Gayer (2010), known as the "economic climate tracer", to analyze and monitor the cyclical evolution of tourism source markets to Portugal. Considering the period 1987-2015, we evaluate how tourism to Portugal has been affected by economic cycles. This tool is useful as it clearly illustrates the evolutionary patterns of different markets, and allows us to identify close relationships with economic fluctuations. We found that German tourism plays a leading role, since its movements are followed with delays by tourism flows from other countries, and exhibits higher resilience to shocks. Also, domestic and Spanish tourism have both displayed less irregular behaviors than tourism from other source markets. On the contrary, tourism from the Netherlands and the UK, have displayed irregular patterns, which demonstrates the urgency to diversify tourism source markets to reduce the country's vulnerability to external shocks and economic cycles.