The significance of the shoulder season of hotel nights : evidence from Denmark in a nordic perspective : 50th Congress of the European Regional Science Association

During the past decades, the role of the shoulder season has gained increasing attention. It is obvious that an expansion of the length of the high season with the shoulder season will have a positive effect on labor demand and income in a given region. The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of the shoulder season in a time series framework. Departing from a discussion of the nature of types of seasonal variation, a test is set up in order to examine the impact of the shoulder season. The test examines the impact on the mean share of hotel nights in the shoulder season months in two different periods. The method is applied on a monthly data set on hotel nights ranging for 37 years by regions of Denmark and by nationalities of visitors. At the regional level, a much-diversified picture is found. In general, the shoulder season of October has increased significance. For rural counties such as Storstroem, Ribe and North Jutland positive effects are observed for other months as well. However, we find for many other rural areas no significant effect. With regard to nationalities of tourists visiting Denmark, the shoulder season has a different interpretation. For nationalities close to Denmark we observe a quite similar pattern to the one observed by regions in Denmark. For oversea tourists like from the US or Japan the pattern is different and also much dependent on the price level and exchange rate fluctuations. In order to examine the validity of this approach an a comparison is made with data for Norway. Here a completely different picture is revealed highlighting the significance of Winter tourism relative to Denmark. Theme: Regional development