Tourism Resilience Patterns in Southern Europe

Abstract

This article studies the patterns of tourism resilience, understood as the capacity to recover tourism demand, which has characterized Spain, Greece, Italy, and Portugal after the impact of the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. A shift-share analysis will allow us to decompose the growth of nonresident tourist arrivals to hotels and similar establishments originating from markets outside these four countries in 2009–2016. The technique used allows us to classify the markets according to the competitive advantage or specialization demonstrated by each country. The results reveal some similarity in resilience patterns in tourism between Portugal and Spain, whereas Italy and Greece maintain their own singularities. In this context, some ideas are suggested for the design of a tourism policy that makes the most of the potential of each country.