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- Title
Anti-season Tourism and Tourism Seasonality Mitigation: Current Research and Relevant Implications.
- Authors
FENG Xuegang; SUN Xiaodong; YU Qiuyang
- Abstract
Seasonality has long been regarded as one of the most typical features of the tourism industry. It usually refers to a temporal imbalance in the number of tourists, their expenditure, and bed nights for destinations. For investors, due to the instability of tourism revenues over seasons and under-or-over utilization of the same resources and facilities, tourism seasonality remains a challenge in forecasting returns on investment. Therefore, destinations with high seasonality may have difficulty in gaining access to capital because of high risk of investment. Many tourism destinations with obvious low-high switch problems are suffering from this phenomenon every year. For the tourism industry, seasonality is viewed as problematic but is little understood by not only the academic community but also the domains of policy making and management. Accordingly, great efforts should be made to mitigate the negative effects of seasonality through a variety of approaches such as winter tourism (e. g. skiing), cultural tourism, religion tourism, event tourism, conference and exhibition tourism, healthcare tourism, medical tourism, social tourism. These approaches are usually supported by both governments and relevant stakeholders through decreasing transportations costs for tourists, offering low-cost carriers among specific destinations, encouraging old people or disabled individuals to take travel during low seasons (e. g. Calypso program in Europe), etc. . In recent years, both researchers and practitioners are making great efforts to solve problems caused by seasonality. Although many academic efforts have been made to understand the definitions of seasonality in tourism, its measurements, causes, and impacts, there is very limited literature on mitigating tourism seasonality by using the tactic of Anti-season Tourism (AT). In this paper, Anti-season Tourism is defined as not only a tourism format or even tourism product, but a continuous and normal phenomenon that tourists are willing to take travel during off-peak season. For this goal, Anti-season tourism provides both opportunities and challenges for researchers and practitioners in mitigating the tourism imbalance between peak and off-peak seasons. The purpose of this paper is to present a concise review on tourism seasonality and anti-season tourism research. It mainly focuses on current research and relevant implications on issues of Anti-season Tourism and tourism seasonality mitigation. Since five main causes of seasonality in tourism demand, including climate/ weather, social customs/holidays, business customs, calendar effects and supply side constraints, have been identified by previous researchers, three core bodies of literature, including climate tourism, seasonality in tourism and anti-season tourism practices, are overviewed in this paper. In particular, the definition of anti-season tourism is discussed and some research studies about how to use anti-season tourism tools to smooth the impacts of seasonality in tourism are analyzed. Finally, some research directions and managerial implications for measurements of market potentials in different regions/ provinces and relevant strategies in developing Chinese anti-season tourism are presented. We hope this paper could attract more researchers and practitioners to provide efficient solutions in mitigating problems of tourism seasonality which have become very critical in China.
- Publication
Tourism Tribune / Lvyou Xuekan, 2014, Vol 29, Issue 1, p92
- ISSN
1002-5006
- Publication type
Academic Journal
- DOI
10.3969/j.issn.1002-5006.2014.01.010