It is not all about temperature. Regionally modified climatic indices: the case of the Caribbean

ABSTRACT

This letter questions the supremacy of temperature in the development of tourism climate indices, using the Caribbean as an example. A new methodology is proposed to evaluate a regional climate index based on the seasonal correlation with tourist arrivals and to investigate the weight of the different climate variables that make up the index. Results show that the new climate index fits the seasonal behaviour of tourism demand more accurately by reducing the weight of temperature in the makeup of the index and increasing that of precipitation, wind and cloud cover.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism climate index
• climatic change
• Caribbean
• simulated meteorological data
• ERA5

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) for supporting the project PID2019-106738GB-I00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For consistency and to allow for a comparison of our index with the TCI and the HCI:Beach, the following restrictions were included:

• 0<w_j<10 for each j to ensure that the weights, according to the TCI or other similar indices, take values from 0 to 10.

• $\sum _j\mathrm{wj}$ = 10 to ensure that the sum of the weights of the climate variables is equal to 10, according to the TCI or other similar indices

2 This indicator measures the total contribution of travel and tourism to the GDP (% of total economy) for the period 2019 and it is easily accessible on the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) website.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Agencia Estatal de Investigacion [grant number PID2019-106738GBI00/MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033].