A comparison of the holiday climate index:beach and the tourism climate index across coastal destinations in China

Abstract

Climatic resources are vitally important for tourism, driving major intra-and interregional travel flows for sun-sand-surf (3S) tourism around the world. The development of climate indices to measure the suitability of climate for major tourism market segments has evolved over three decades. This study provides the first application of the holiday climate index (HCI):Beach specification in the Asia-Pacific tourism region. The HCI is designed from international tourist climate preference studies and is compared with the tourism climate index (TCI), which is widely applied, but not based on tourist climate preferences. The index inter-comparison is conducted at 14 of the most popular beach resort destinations in China, which include four geographic regions of China with four different Köppen classifications. The results show key differences between the two indices in rating the climatic suitability of the selected beach destinations in China, with the TCI rating beach destinations in the north and south higher during the spring and fall seasons, which is not consistent with beach tourism visits. During the summer months, southern destinations have much higher HCI:Beach rating, reflecting the 3S tourists' desire for higher temperatures. The findings reinforce those from other tourism regions that indicate the TCI is not appropriate for assessing 3S tourism potential and that additional cross-cultural studies of tourist climate indices are needed to better inform market segment climate service development and to understand the potential impacts of future climate change. Keywords Holiday climate index (HCI). Tourism climate index (TCI). Beach tourism. Coastal. China

Assessing Present and Future Climate Conditions for Beach Tourism in Jardines del Rey (Cuba)

“…In the academic field of tourism climatology, the sun and beach segment of the tourism sector has been the subject of a large number of potentiality assessments due to its high dependence on weather conditions [22][23][24] and its leading role within the wide range of available tourism products worldwide. Many of the research papers that have assessed the potential of climates for sun and beach tourism have tried to measure or quantify it using climate tourism indexes such as the Tourism Climate Index [25][26][27][28][29], the Climate Index for Tourism [30], the Climate Tourism Information Scheme [31][32][33][34], the Beach Climate Index [35], the Beach Utility Index [36] and the Holiday Climate Index [37], among others. However, relatively few assessments have been made of the tourism potential of a particular climate using the weather types method, in spite of the fact that it is based on the true state of weather and more accurately reflects the nature of the atmospheric medium by rejecting both the exclusive use of one single climate element and the use of potentially misleading average values (instead using the daily figure, which is real and tangible for people) [23,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47].…”

The Coastal Tourism Climate Index (CTCI): Development, Validation, and Application for Chinese Coastal Cities

“…Most studies have focused their attention on coastal destinations in Europe, the Mediterranean, Australia, the United States, and Canada, while Chinese coastal destinations have been scarcely explored [42,43]. These indices are not suitable for the tourism assessment of Chinese coastal cities due to the lack consideration of air quality.…”

Tourism climatology: past, present, and future

“…The contributions in this special issue address such concerns and make valuable contributions moving forward. For example, in the first application of the Holiday Climate Index (HCI):Beach in the Asia-Pacific tourism region, the results from Yu et al (2020) underscore the inappropriate use of the TCI when assessing 3S (sun, sea, sand) tourism potential, with key rating differences found when assessing the climatic suitability of beach destinations across China. Matthews et al (2019) combined the use of expert knowledge, stated visitor preferences, and mathematical optimization to develop an index that captures the unique contextual realities of Great Lakes beach park tourism, which outperformed both the TCI and HCI:Beach.…”

“…First, there continues to be major regional gaps in climatology research, with studies highly concentrated in temperate, developed countries (i.e., Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand). While we have made progress (see Demiroglu et al 2020;Grigorieva 2020;Yu et al 2020 in this issue), major geographical gaps persist in Africa, Asia, and South America, with an urgent need to build collaborative partnerships and prioritize interdisciplinary research within these regions.…”