Pre-Crisis Determinants of Tourism Resilience

In this study, I provide a location choice model incorporating five pre-crisis
determinants for tourists' destination choice to study the impact of these determinants
on the resilience of tourism. The determinants are the kind of destination (rural vs.
urban), the pre-crisis origin country specific attractiveness of the destination, the
infrastructure size, the density, and the local culture. I estimate the effect of these
determinants on the recovery of hotel overnight stays during the COVID-19
pandemic in Switzerland. I find that urban areas had an up to 75% percent lower
recovery level. Half of this difference is due to their pre-crisis specific attractiveness
for international tourists. This implies that a miss-match between long-run local
touristic capital and domestic demand preferences prevents destinations from
substituting the missing international tourists with domestic tourists. While
infrastructure size affects the resilience ambiguously, density weakens the resilience
in cities. Culture does not play a role if there are no local COVID-19 policies.