Tourism Analysis

Session 1. Monday October, 15th.

In this session we started by discussing a bit of what are the basic concepts of economic analysis. The science of studying people choices with final aim of helping them to make better choices. We explore many relevant tourism issues and how they can be tackled by a robust use of economic models and techniques. Then, we reviewed a paper by Song et al (2012) in the journal Annals of Tourism Economics. After reading trough the paper and explain a little bit some of the basic concepts, we decided to come back the next day and chose a topic to focus our lectures on and try to write an essay.

The material employed in this session was:

- Song et al (2012). Research in Tourism Economics

- Chapter 1 in Tisdell (2013). Handbook of Tourism Economics

- Pretty Woman clip explaining how we can obtain consumer surplus and producer surplus based on market data ;)

- Brief powerpoint presentation on why study Tourism?, why in the Canary Islands? and why at a Uni level?

Session 2. Tuesday, October 16th

Hi guys. This is the summary of session 2. Today we have two new colleagues at the class... yahoo!!!!!. Welcome Carlos and Cristina!!. We get to know them a bit better and their goals in taking this course and this master. We reviewed a little bit how the economic model work in general and how it always boils down to a langrangian problem (maximization with restrictions). We discussed some empirical issues and treat them as examples to understand the philosophy of the approach and the tools we will need to address it. We talk about how to design a study that deals with: How to design the best hotel in Gran Canaria? What is the optimal size of the Tourism sector in Cartagena de Indias? How should I design experiences for specific segments?. We learned how to apply the economic model for these purposes.

We also chose some topics to study during the following sections. We did this by proposing a model in which maximize students' preferences and their professional goals, restricted to the literature review in Song et al (2012), in Tisdell (2013) and Dwyer (2011). We decided to start the next day with a conceptual analysis of the tourism demand. I am attaching to this summary some relevant lectures meant for non-economists to understand some basic concepts.

Session 3. Wednesday, October 17th

Why people travel to places?. Please read the papers that I am attaching (below this comment for tomorrow class). We will discuss them in detail.

Bon reading!!

 Session 4. Friday, October 18th

These are the papers wi will focus on tomorrow: