Weather has been shown to affect consumption patterns by altering people’s moods. This paper examines the impact of atmospheric conditions on destination expenditure considering cruise passengers’ onshore expenditure as the case study. We exploit quasi-random variation in a set of hourly real-time weather indicators in a port of call, through the Tourism Climate Index (TCI) and the Physiologically Equivalent Temperature (PET), to draw inference about their effect on destination expenditure. Therefore, we capture the specific atmospheric conditions encountered by tourists, alleviating the usual aggregation bias in related studies. In particular, information about mean and maximum air temperature, wind speed, rainfall, sunshine duration and mean and minimum relative humidity is considered. We estimate a heteroskedastic Tobit model with an inverse hyperbolic sine transformation of the dependent variable that deals with problems of non-normality and extreme values. Controlling for several sociodemographic characteristics and cruise size, we find consistent evidence that pleasant weather (either using TCI or PET indexes) increases onshore expenditure. Our findings have important implications for destination management.

The application of the Signalling Theory to the case of the tourism standards of quality are established. An empirical research study on the performance of a wide range of hotels that have evolved from not possessing certification to being accredited by some form of quality standard (regional, national or international) during a period of seven years. The results provide evidence on the usefulness of quality certifications as signals to the market to achieve increases in sales, gains in market share, increased occupancy and average room price, and therefore an improvement in profitability per room and overall profit for the hotels.

Information and communication technologies play a critical role in tourism, providing benefits such as improvement in tourism experiences, co-creation of value, and promotion of the marketing of relationships and phygital experiences, where online and offline environments are combined. In recent years, tourism planning and management through smart destinations has aroused great academic interest by including the dimensions of governance, sustainability, accessibility, innovation, and technology. This work aims to analyse and to visualize the scientific production associated with technology in the context of smart destinations. For this, evaluative and relational bibliometric analysis techniques were applied to the bibliographic data of 395 articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science up to September 2021. The results indicate that there is considerable growth and that a number of authors, countries, and leading institutions contribute significantly to scientific knowledge. In addition, using two bibliometric software tools, VOSviewer and SciMAT, a co-citation network of authors was built to describe their intellectual structure, and a keyword co-occurrence analysis was performed to identify the main thematic areas. The motor themes that drive the research are the conceptualization of tourist destinations, innovation, and data, while experience is a crosscutting theme. Additionally, some limitations and applications of the research are discussed, as well as the practical implications for destination management.

This study analyses the impacts of environmental amenities associated with agricultural and silvicultural land use on the price of rural tourism accommodation in Asturias (Spain). A hedonic price model that relates the price of rural accommodation to environmental amenities as well as equipment, services offered, and the locational characteristics of the accommodation is estimated. The rural accommodations in the study are the self-catering cottages, the intrinsic features of which promote the development of rural tourism sustainability. Geographic information systems (GIS) data are used to measure the location and the proximity to amenities of these self-catering cottages. The main results indicate that agricultural land use has an important impact on the price of accommodation in self-catering cottages. Specifically, a high percentage of grassland in the municipality where the self-catering cottage is sited has a positive effect on rental prices, while a high percentage of arable crops has the opposite effect. The analysis is interesting for decision-making in the context of environmental policies, land use conflict resolution, and rural tourism sustainability.