Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to improve the forecast of tourism inflows into Spain by use of Google – indices on internet searches measuring the relative popularity of keywords associated with travelling to Spain. Design/methodology/approach – Two models are estimated for each of the three countries with the largest tourist flows into Spain (Germany, UK and France): a conventional model, the best ARIMA model estimated by TRAMO (model 0) and a model augmented with the Google-index relating to searches made from each country (model 1). The overall performance of both models is compared. Findings – The improvement in forecasting provided by the short-term models that include the G-indicator is quite substantial up to 2012, reducing out of sample mean square errors by 42 per cent, although their performance worsens in the following years. Research limitations/implications – Deeper study and conceptualization of sources of error in Google trends and data quality is necessary. Originality/value – The paper illustrates that while this new tool can be a powerful instrument for policy makers as a valuable and timely complement for traditional statistics, further research and better access to data is needed to better understand how internet consumers’ search activities translate (or not) into actual economic outcomes.
The evolution of the gender pay gap has received a great deal of attention from academia and public opinion alike, yet our understanding of the differences in non-monetary working conditions is much scarcer. Through the use of the European Working Conditions Survey and six composite indicators of job quality, this research aims to expand our knowledge on the gender gaps in job attributes across the European Union over the period 2005–2015 in three ways: firstly, we explore gender differences in working conditions, revealing the distinct patterns identified by the dimensions of job quality and country; secondly, we find that, on average, women’s relative position deteriorates in terms of the physical environment and working time quality; a result that again reflects considerable heterogeneity across the countries in the sample. Lastly, we find clear evidence of a catch-up process in job quality in all the non-monetary dimensions of working conditions across the European Union.
The new website of the city of Porto (www.visitporto.travel), that started development in early 2010 and was activated in May 2011, functions as a tourism marketplace combined with an integrated information system for tourism. This is achieved by combining a series of tools and technologies that provide information and advice and support the acquisition of goods and services. Starting from the early stage of trip planning and remote access (telephone, SMS, email and web), proceeding to the arrival into the city and face to face interactions in e.g. tourist shops, combined with other means of self-information and acquisition of goods and services (e.g. PortoCard), supporting the visit all the way up to eventually leaving the city to visit other destinations, such as the vineyards of the Douro Valley, and coming back to Porto for the return journey, and finishing with the process of feedback and follow-up. This paper describes the rationale behind the creation of this website that intends to be a tourism gateway to the Metropolitan Area of Porto and Northern Portugal with special emphasis on the Douro Valley, and the experience behind the process of designing, implementing and rolling out the new portal, and adapting it to user feedback. Although the website is still under active development some parts of it are already considered to be a success. The most important result seems to be that the website is working as a rally point for the tourism ecosystem, fostering the development of synergies between the different players.
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