Tourism De-Metropolisation but Not De-Concentration: COVID-19 and World Destinations

Abstract

The current COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant decline in human mobility during the past three years. This may lead to reconfiguring future tourism flows and resulting transformations in the geographic patterns of economic activities and transportation needs. This study empirically addresses the changes in tourism mobility caused by the pandemic. It focuses on the yet unexplored effects of the destination type on tourism volume change. To investigate this, 1426 metropolitan, urban/resort and dispersed destinations were delimited based on Airbnb offers. Airbnb reviews were used as the proxy for the changes in tourist visits in 2019–2022. Linear mixed-effects models were employed to verify two hypotheses on the differences between the effects of the pandemic on three kinds of tourism destinations. The results confirm the tourism de-metropolisation hypothesis: metropolitan destinations have experienced between −12.4% and −7.5% additional decreases in tourism visits compared to secondary cities and resorts. The second de-concentration hypothesis that urban/resort destinations are more affected than dispersed tourism destinations is not supported. The results also confirm that stricter restrictions and destination dependence on international tourism have negatively affected their visitation. The study sheds light on post-pandemic scenarios on tourism mobility transformations in various geographic locations.