Zeitschrift für Tourismusforschung und Gastgewerbe

Impacts of Cyclic Patterns of Climate on Fluctuations in Tourism Demand: Evidence from Aruba

Marck Oduber and Jorge Ridderstaat

Impacts of Cyclic Patterns of Climate on Fluctuations in Tourism Demand: Evidence from Aruba

This study estimates the influence of long cyclical climate patterns of pull and push climate elements (rainfall, temperature, wind) on cyclical fluctuations in tourism demand from the United States, the Netherlands and Venezuela on a small island state. Two important atmospheric variabilities, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), were also included. Wavelet analysis was used because meteorological and economical time-series are typically noisy, complex and strongly non-stationary. Results show that both pull and push cyclical climate factors had an influence on tourism demand from the USA, the Netherlands and Venezuela. Furthermore, ENSO and NAO had also an influence on tourism demand from the USA and the Netherlands. The finding of a statistical relationship between atmospheric variabilities and tourism suggests that that they should be taken into account when developing tourism demand models, in order to create simpler econometric models.