Digital Platforms and the Demand for International Tourism Services
Tourism is an important source of foreign exchange and employment across developing economies. A scant literature has explored the relationship between tourism and the advent of the internet. This paper contributes to the tourism-trade literature a...
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2020
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/724941581621885483/Digital-Platforms-and-the-Demand-for-International-Tourism-Services http://hdl.handle.net/10986/33352 |
| Summary: | Tourism is an important source of
foreign exchange and employment across developing economies.
A scant literature has explored the relationship between
tourism and the advent of the internet. This paper
contributes to the tourism-trade literature and studies the
empirical relationship between international tourism and the
adoption of digital technologies that facilitate search
about tourism opportunities across countries. It links
foreign visits with the spread of the use of the internet in
sending countries and the level of development of
business-to-consumer digital tools in host countries. The
paper estimates a well-specified gravity model of tourist
arrivals between country pairs with panel data. The results
indicate that frictions affecting bilateral tourism flows
have been attenuated by the advent of digital tools. The
absolute value of the effects of bilateral geographic
distance, language differences, and border-contiguity seem
to be reduced by the use of the internet by potential
tourists and the business sector in host countries. The
results are robust to alternative proxies for internet use
for tourism search proxied by data from Google trends. The
paper also presents simulations of the potential impacts of
advances in the adoption of digital tools over time, linking
the adoption process to mechanisms of technology adoption
that are commonplace in the literature. |
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