Dhruv Akshay Pandit

Dhruv Akshay Pandit

PhD Candidate in Information Management, researching the impacts of weather variability and shocks on the Portuguese socioeconomy.

The impacts of weather anomalies on international tourism demand

Authors: Dhruv Akshay Pandit, Miguel de Castro Neto, Paulo M.M Rodrigues et al.

Status: To be presented at Econometric Models of Climate Change (ECMM-X) 2026, Denmark.

Abstract

International tourism demand is sensitive to short-run weather, yet the high-frequency margin remains less studied than the long-run climate-change literature, a gap that matters for tourism-dependent economies. Using a monthly panel of overnight stays for 51 origin countries and five Portuguese NUTS~II regions over 2007-2019, we estimate fixed-effects panel models exploiting within-pair variation in realised destination weather, controlling for relative prices and persistent demand dynamics. Weather acts primarily through lagged volatility rather than contemporaneous average anomalies. A one-unit increase in intra-month temperature variability is associated with a cumulative decline of approximately 5.7\% in overnight stays over a seven-month window; compound temperature-precipitation volatility delivers a further cumulative decline of approximately 2.1\%. Average anomalies, relative origin-destination weather, and origin-country anomalies provide weaker and less systematic evidence. The findings indicate that short-run tourism demand responds to the instability of destination weather rather than to average deviations, with implications for tourism forecasting and climate-risk management in tourism-dependent economies.

JEL Codes

  • Z30
  • Z50
  • Q54
  • C23